Minimalist 'Fiddler on the Roof' eschews traditional staging and loses too much of its charm

For the Drury Lane Theatre’s production of the iconic musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” director Elizabeth Margolius dispenses with a whole lot of the traditional staging that has defined the Tony-winning classic since its 1964 Broadway premiere.

For starters, there’s no fiddler.

The totemic figure symbolizing millennia of Jewish tradition and culture that creates the very foundation of the musical (book by Joseph Stein, music by Jerry Brock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick) isn’t the only departure “Fiddler” takes.

Margolius announces in her director’s notes that “Fiddler” is a “memory play.” She applies the concept with a heavy hand in everything from blocking to set design to choreography to copious amounts of stage mist.

The biggest problem is that the concept renders Anatevka — the tight-knit rural Russian village where “Fiddler” unfolds in 1905 — a place where the connections between characters can feel as flimsy and fleeting as a dream you can barely remember upon waking.

Where this “Fiddler” succeeds, it’s on the strength of an ensemble that brings symphonic glory to Brock’s marvelous score, which includes such cultural touchstones as “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” and “Sunrise, Sunset.” The production sounds glorious under music director Christopher Sargent, who helms the wonderful eight-piece orchestra.

The plot follows Tevye the dairyman (Mark David Kaplan), his wife Golde (Janna Cardia) and his spirited daughters. The eldest, Tzeitel (Emma Rosenthal), is in love with local tailor Motel (Michael Kurowski), a major conundrum as village matchmaker Yente (Janet Ulrich Brooks) has arranged for Tzeitel to wed well-off town butcher Lazar Wolf (Joel Gelman).

Daughter Hodel (Yael Eden Chanukov), meanwhile, falls in love with an outsider, the scholar/anti-Czarist activist Perchik (Zach Sorrow). And finally there is Chava (Abby Goldberg), who does the unthinkable by forging a relationship with Fyedka (Grant Killian), a Christian officer in a Czarist military that routinely carries out violent pogroms intended to terrorize Russia’s Jews and drive them from their homes.

Brett Beiner

As Tevye, Kaplan delivers an epic performance that’s shattering, funny, heart-wrenching and vocally magnificent, instilling meaning and intent into each word and every note. He’s a Tevye for the ages, but he can’t erase the problems baked into the show’s direction. Kaplan and the ensemble are good enough to counterbalance myriad directorial missteps. He makes it impossible not to empathize with Tevye’s joy and his anguish — the latter as deep and wide as the river Jordan, the former an ebullient reason for hope.

In scene after scene, characters talk around/or past each other, sometimes from opposite ends of the stage. It’s a choice that feeds the “memory play” concept, but often severs interpersonal connections among the villagers. When characters interact at a remove as they often do here, Anatevka loses the bustling intimacy that should define it and becomes a place of odd isolation.

A complete lack of props also leaves actors to pantomime (often not with great clarity) when, for example, lending a book, showing off a new sewing machine or smashing a glass underfoot.

The issues with Rommy Sandhu’s often scrunched-up choreography are glaring. There are no bottles in the iconic, celebratory bottle dance that turns Tzeitel’s wedding from a ceremony of hushed reverence to raucous party showstopper. Instead, the dancers use chairs in an underwhelming bit of business that evokes nothing so much as a tired rehearsal for “Cell Block Tango” from “Chicago.” In other numbers, Sandhu repeatedly has the actors moving at sloth speed, sometimes literally going in circles, sometimes trudging stolidly in slo-mo. It’s akin to watching sleepwalkers.

Margolius also uses projection design (by Mike Tutaj) to the show’s detriment. She’s axed Chava’s second act dance solo in “Chavaleh,” opting instead to have Golderg shuffle at a zombie pace across the stage while gigantic projections of her face hover above.

In “Tevye’s Dream,” the scarifying ghost of Fruma-Sarah (Dara Cameron) gets a tooth-peeling solo, with an assist from Grandma Tzeitel (Susan Hofflander). But Margolius has the women perched far upstage, their backs to the audience. We see them mostly as massive, pixilated heads on the towering projection screens flanking the stage. It’s nightmarish all right, but not in a way that serves the production.

“Fiddler” remains a show of emotional extremes and extreme timeliness. Drury Lane’s cast captures that, somewhat, despite a whole lot of unnecessary obstacles.