“Home, I’m Darling”: Hey Mama Welcome to the ‘50s, oh oh oh oh oh ohby Randi / September 6, 2018
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about “The Humans”, which is at London’s Hampstead Theatre until October 13.
As summer plays close and the new season slowly gets into gear, London’s drama scene got a much needed infusion of American greatness with the Broadway transfer of “The Humans”. Stephen Karam’s 2015 work about an ordinary American family and the hardships they face individually and together comes to London’s Hampstead Theatre with its Broadway cast intact, along with my favorite Broadway director-that-I-once-saw-give-one-of-the-best-acting-performances-ever-in-The-Normal-Heart-but-that’s-neither-here-nor-there, Joe Mantello, still at the helm. Winner of the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play, “The Humans” seems like the basic story of a typical family at first, but its brilliance lies in nuance and individual interpretation that will have you contemplating it endlessly.
As summer plays close and the new season slowly gets into gear, London’s drama scene got a much needed infusion of American greatness with the Broadway transfer of “The Humans”. Stephen Karam’s 2015 work about an ordinary American family and the hardships they face individually and together comes to London’s Hampstead Theatre with its Broadway cast intact, along with my favorite Broadway director-that-I-once-saw-give-one-of-the-best-acting-performances-ever-in-The-Normal-Heart-but-that’s-neither-here-nor-there, Joe Mantello, still at the helm. Winner of the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play, “The Humans” seems like the basic story of a typical family at first, but its brilliance lies in nuance and individual interpretation that will have you contemplating it endlessly.
If you are in London and might be seeing it before it closes next month, bookmark this page and read it post-show because there’s gonna be hella spoilers coming.
The play tells the story of the Blake family, from Scranton, Pa., coming together to celebrate Thanksgiving amid a snowstorm at their daughter Brigid’s new Chinatown NYC hovel. You have the father Erik (Reed Birney, who we had just seen days before in his episodes of ‘The Americans’, which we’ve now finished and can’t stop talking about so hit me up if you want in on our support group), the mother Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell, always a goddamn pleasure), the grandmother Momo (Lauren Klein, who does so much with so little), the adult daughters Aimee (Cassie Beck, so perfectly capturing every nice but kind of depressed girl I know) and Brigid (Sarah Steele, so perfectly capturing every self-involved and jappy as hell non-jew I’ve ever known), and Brigid’s boyfriend Richard (Arian Moayad, trying to keep the peace between a family he’s just meeting and sooo nailing that awkward ass-kissing that you have to do while trying to keep conversation smooth).
Brigid and Richard have just moved into this dumpy basement apartment which yes has two levels which is great in a city like New York, but it also has no windows except the one with bars over it that opens onto the smoky alleyway so already it is my nightmare apartment. To make me even more anxious about their living situation, their upstairs neighbor is straight out of those “funny” Upstairs Neighbors videos that imagine them as actively trying to make as much noise as possible, doing things like rolling bowling balls around and moving furniture in the middle of the night. IT’S TRUE WHY ARE THEY ALL SO FORKING LOUD. And they all stomp. Anyway, every once in a while Brigid and Richard’s new neighbor will create some crazy loud BANG. They’re okay with it, trying to make the best of the situation, but Erik is shaken to his core with every sporadic bang or crash from upstairs.
As we meet the family, we quickly learn all their shortcomings and issues through effective and efficient dialogue. Brigid, self-involved as she is, has forgotten to tell her parents about the two-story situation, which, given that Momo is in a wheelchair (and suffering from late-stage dementia), is quite the oversight. God she was S0 many people I know. Aimee, meanwhile, is falling apart at the seams, having just gotten dumped by her long-term partner and dealing with really horrible ulcerative colitis. Her ‘win-sided phin call’, as Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland would call it, to her ex-girlfriend is heart-breaking, as is the reaction of her father, secretly within earshot, who couldn’t do anything to help his daughter. Letting intimate moments like this breathe is what makes this play’s version of this family so special.
Although Jayne Houdyshell is the epitome of warmth, the girls tend to be harder on their mother than they are on their father, who they dote on. They love everything about Erik, but they constantly make fun of Deirdre, from her ridiculous emails to her charity work to her dedication to religion. It seems a little harmless and a little unfair at the same time, although it provides for a lot of great comedy that rings so true to everyone’s family. Like how Deirdre sends Aimee every single tragic LGBT news story simply because she is a lesbian, and so Brigid tells her mom, “You don’t have to text her every time a lesbian kills herself!” They also make fun of her forwarded emails, the kind with 12 different kinds of font used, which we all know so well. Deirdre gives it back though, like telling off the depressed Aimee, when she brings up her interest in superfoods, “If you’re so miserable why are you trying to live forever?” Loves it. The way they paint these characters with such an accurate, familiar brush is genius, letting us immediately identify with so many aspects so that we are invested in their problems.
And the problems become apparent. There are the obvious sort like Brigid’s subpar home, Aimee’s mental and physical health, Momo’s dementia. Then there’s the fact that both daughters are failing professionally, through no real fault of their own, in a harsh specific economy and a hard general world. Like every struggling middle class family, the parents are having trouble at work too, with Deirdre getting passed over for promotions simply due to her age (and probably gender), while Erik’s failings are the only ones attached to actual responsibility. When the demons haunting him come out to the family, it’s shocking, since we’ve seen him as the stalwart, upstanding member of this clan that the girls idolize. That he alone is responsible for hurting his family and their future the way he has changes the easygoing dynamic and leaves everyone unsure of how to proceed in their usual way.
And, as the night progresses, Erik’s reaction to the noise gets more extreme, as does his seeming skittishness about everything, from lights going out to pans falling off tables. This is where the play is not just a family drama but is also kind of a thriller. Erik’s terror at things going bump in the night, and the unexplained reasons for them, make it seem like at any moment an alien predator will pop out and attack, and often had me holding my breath. And it’s why a lot of people think that he dies at the end, when he goes through the hallway that resembles a tunnel of the only visible light. But while I’m not going to tell anyone their interpretation of plays is wrong, I didn’t think he died. I think that his terror and his reactions to the supernatural-seeming elements were there to show that none of that is as scary as facing your own problems, the messes you’ve created in reality. The scary neighbor who freaked him out was just doing laundry, proving that the things that can terrify you in the dark are nothing compared to dealing with your reality when things you’ve done wrong come to light. What he did and what he has to contend with now are much scarier that whatever could have caused those bangs or crashes in the apartment, and that’s the realization that elevates this work from a typical but great family drama to a provocative, intriguing masterpiece.
INFORMATION
“The Humans” is playing at London’s Hampstead Theatre until October 13. It is a 90 minute one act.
STAGE DOOR
The Hampstead’s stage door situation is more like a ‘everyone convene in the lobby!’ situation. The cast is very friendly although I was too embarrassed to talk to everyone or ask for pictures because I’m a weirdo.
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Broadway’s “Fun Home”: Setting A Very High & Necessary Bar For The Future Of Musical Theatre
My Playbill signed by Alison Bechdel herself, who was in my audience. Or, I was in her audience.
“Fun Home” is the kind of musical theatre that makes you grateful for the art form. Rarely are we treated to any art or entertainment that doesn’t cater to the lowest common denominator in our society or at least dumb itself down to appeal to the ignint masses. “Fun Home”, in contrast, treats its audience like intelligent, thinking people, and we are gifted the most heart-aching, mature, and deep show in years.
People think “Broadway Musical” should mean something diverting, with fun and dancing and repetitive, catchy songs about trivial happy things. And some shows are and should be like that. But modern shows need to challenge the genre and the audience in new ways to keep it growing and improving. New scores should develop emotions in ways words can’t; that’s kind of the point of having music in a play or like in the world, to express what words can’t. “Next to Normal” did all this and was revolutionary and boundary-pushing, but that was 6 or so years ago; nothing since has been up to the challenge.
Until now. “Fun Home” picks up that gauntlet thrown by “Next to Normal” and runs farther than ever. I think “Fun Home” will catch on and become more popular, and will continue to break barriers in this kind of storytelling. It seems like a really unlikely musical, given its subject matter, but it geniusly uses music to deepen its storytelling rather than embellish. The result is far more important and remarkable than anyone would have predicted.
“Fun Home” is based on the graphic novel of the same name by Alison Bechdel. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard of the Bechdel Test for movies: when two female characters are in a scene together and talk about something other than a man, it passes. (Movies rarely pass this test.) So Bechdel is professionally a very noteworthy modern voice. Her personal story, on the other hand, is the basis for the novel and the show; Tony winner Lisa Kron wrote the show’s book based tightly on its source material. It chronicles Alison’s upbringing in a small country town of Pennsylvania, from when she’s a little kid discovering herself and her sexuality; to when she’s a college student accepting who she is while learning more about her disciplined and particular father; to the modern-day adult looking back on her relationship with her father. Bruce Bechdel, a very rigid and exacting man, hid his own homosexuality his entire life. The story is told from grown-up Alison’s perspective as she looks back on her childhood and tries to come to grips with her father’s suicide (not a spoiler, real person, point of show). So, yeah, not the most expected story for a Broadway musical, but it works so well that you’ll be questioning your assumptions about everything, not just musical theatre.
Grown-up Alison (played by a superb Beth Malone (Tony nominee)) takes us on a tour through her memories of her younger years, as she tries to accurately recall the memories to draw, as her comics were what helped her deal with her complicated relationship with her father. As she revisits her childhood museum-like home, the funeral home her family ran (hence the title, what they referred to it as, the ‘fun home’), and different moments with her family, we watch with her as she witnesses her childhood memories being lived by the younger versions of herself (Sydney Lucas as Young Alison, an absolute legend in the making, and Emily Skeggs as Middle Alison (both Tony nominees)). She laughs along with us as she sees her little self and her little brothers stage a hilarious musical commercial for the fun home. Watching little kids pop out of caskets and dance on them is shocking and hilarious and the happiest time of the heavy show. She smiles along with us at the most poignant moments in her life, like when her younger self, always yearning for contact with her father, goes ‘flying’, balancing on Bruce’s feet as he lies down with his legs up, a happy memory of the best of their relationship that remains untarnished. Just thinking about that moment makes me cry.
Young Alison’s relationship with her father is the crux of this story, and it’s a wonder. You clearly see that they have a bond but one that is easily strained, especially when she pushes his rigid lines and rules. She doesn’t want to wear barrettes or dresses, but he can’t allow the blurring of gender boundaries, an obvious result of his hidden side and the shame he feels at not being what he feels he’s supposed to be. Their beautiful house is decorated perfectly with antiques and museum-worthy furniture that he dictates be positioned exactly as he says. He controls fastidiously anything he can because he can’t control himself or his urges as he believes he should. And you see all this so well in the subtle and poignant portrayal of Bruce by Michael Cerveris, the great. His Tony win was completely deserved; his portrayal is beautiful and crushing and I was rooting for him even though he’s a past winner (I am usually socialist in my awards decisions but not for him). His nuanced Bruce makes you feel terrible for his tragic persona even when his inability to control his urges leads him to make terrible decisions, like leaving his little kids alone in a NYC apartment so he can go cruising, or having flings with his underage high school students. It’s this loving but lacking relationship with his young daughter that makes it so hard to watch as it strains further, as she grows and becomes more self aware as a college student. Middle Alison accepts and embraces her personality and her sexuality as a young lesbian, and with this evolution her relationship with her father weakens, because he can never accept himself as his daughter has learned to do. Her coming out is barely acknowledged by her family, not out of disrespect or denial but because it would shatter the very fragile world her parents strived to keep balanced. And yes, her mother (Judy Kuhn) was aware and struggled her whole life to keep quiet and pretend that everything was fine.
Bruce and Alison’s final encounter is so perfectly and tragically portrayed as a silent car ride, with Alison, the grown-up who never got to spend time with her father, taking over the memory from Middle Alison. Beth Malone tearfully sings to her former self to say something to her father before the chance is gone, yelling to hurry up before the ride is over, as she knows in hindsight that it soon will be.
This story would work as a play, sure, but the music makes it so much more felt and heart-breaking. One of the best songs, “Ring of Keys”, is a startled realization that little Alison can dress however she wants, when she sees “an old-school butch”, as her older self remembers and explains (and as CBS/the FCC f-ing had them change on their Tony Awards performance because I guess some Americans aren’t okay with the word butch???!!!). Sydney’s performance of this song is so thoughtful and natural and incredible that it’s hard to believe she’s a child. No child actor has ever been this talented in history. It’s why she was considered the front-runner for the Tony Awards. Her fiercest competition was thought to be not from winner Ruthie Ann Miles (for “The King & I”) but from the actress who plays her mother, the great Judy Kuhn. Quiet, clearly long-suffering, she surprises us when she tells her college aged daughter about her father’s secret and that she’s known for, well, for “Days & Days & Days”, as her astounding, stunning big song goes. She freaking kills it, sharing how hard it has been to silently let her husband dictate and destroy their lives and how she sat by and watched for so long as nothing changed. In just one song, Kuhn defines and redefines her entire character’s story and adds new layers of wrenching emotion to the show as a whole. It must be such a pleasure to play a complex character for once (Kuhn originated the thankless role of Cosette in the original Broadway production of “Les Miserables”).
“Fun Home” is a flawless show that in only 100 minutes presents such depth and range of emotion and experience and it is all completely spell-binding. That it won the Tony Award shows that audiences and musical theatre as a genre are both ready to be treated with respect and given art that is worthy of being called art. (Of course, last night’s premature closure of “The Visit” argues in the opposite direction but we can’t win every battle.) I hope everyone sees it, learns from it, and remembers it as a benchmark for future shows. This is the direction Broadway needs to move in, and it’s a relief that people seem to accept that.
“Fun Home” is based on the graphic novel of the same name by Alison Bechdel. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard of the Bechdel Test for movies: when two female characters are in a scene together and talk about something other than a man, it passes. (Movies rarely pass this test.) So Bechdel is professionally a very noteworthy modern voice. Her personal story, on the other hand, is the basis for the novel and the show; Tony winner Lisa Kron wrote the show’s book based tightly on its source material. It chronicles Alison’s upbringing in a small country town of Pennsylvania, from when she’s a little kid discovering herself and her sexuality; to when she’s a college student accepting who she is while learning more about her disciplined and particular father; to the modern-day adult looking back on her relationship with her father. Bruce Bechdel, a very rigid and exacting man, hid his own homosexuality his entire life. The story is told from grown-up Alison’s perspective as she looks back on her childhood and tries to come to grips with her father’s suicide (not a spoiler, real person, point of show). So, yeah, not the most expected story for a Broadway musical, but it works so well that you’ll be questioning your assumptions about everything, not just musical theatre.
Grown-up Alison (played by a superb Beth Malone (Tony nominee)) takes us on a tour through her memories of her younger years, as she tries to accurately recall the memories to draw, as her comics were what helped her deal with her complicated relationship with her father. As she revisits her childhood museum-like home, the funeral home her family ran (hence the title, what they referred to it as, the ‘fun home’), and different moments with her family, we watch with her as she witnesses her childhood memories being lived by the younger versions of herself (Sydney Lucas as Young Alison, an absolute legend in the making, and Emily Skeggs as Middle Alison (both Tony nominees)). She laughs along with us as she sees her little self and her little brothers stage a hilarious musical commercial for the fun home. Watching little kids pop out of caskets and dance on them is shocking and hilarious and the happiest time of the heavy show. She smiles along with us at the most poignant moments in her life, like when her younger self, always yearning for contact with her father, goes ‘flying’, balancing on Bruce’s feet as he lies down with his legs up, a happy memory of the best of their relationship that remains untarnished. Just thinking about that moment makes me cry.
Young Alison’s relationship with her father is the crux of this story, and it’s a wonder. You clearly see that they have a bond but one that is easily strained, especially when she pushes his rigid lines and rules. She doesn’t want to wear barrettes or dresses, but he can’t allow the blurring of gender boundaries, an obvious result of his hidden side and the shame he feels at not being what he feels he’s supposed to be. Their beautiful house is decorated perfectly with antiques and museum-worthy furniture that he dictates be positioned exactly as he says. He controls fastidiously anything he can because he can’t control himself or his urges as he believes he should. And you see all this so well in the subtle and poignant portrayal of Bruce by Michael Cerveris, the great. His Tony win was completely deserved; his portrayal is beautiful and crushing and I was rooting for him even though he’s a past winner (I am usually socialist in my awards decisions but not for him). His nuanced Bruce makes you feel terrible for his tragic persona even when his inability to control his urges leads him to make terrible decisions, like leaving his little kids alone in a NYC apartment so he can go cruising, or having flings with his underage high school students. It’s this loving but lacking relationship with his young daughter that makes it so hard to watch as it strains further, as she grows and becomes more self aware as a college student. Middle Alison accepts and embraces her personality and her sexuality as a young lesbian, and with this evolution her relationship with her father weakens, because he can never accept himself as his daughter has learned to do. Her coming out is barely acknowledged by her family, not out of disrespect or denial but because it would shatter the very fragile world her parents strived to keep balanced. And yes, her mother (Judy Kuhn) was aware and struggled her whole life to keep quiet and pretend that everything was fine.
Bruce and Alison’s final encounter is so perfectly and tragically portrayed as a silent car ride, with Alison, the grown-up who never got to spend time with her father, taking over the memory from Middle Alison. Beth Malone tearfully sings to her former self to say something to her father before the chance is gone, yelling to hurry up before the ride is over, as she knows in hindsight that it soon will be.
This story would work as a play, sure, but the music makes it so much more felt and heart-breaking. One of the best songs, “Ring of Keys”, is a startled realization that little Alison can dress however she wants, when she sees “an old-school butch”, as her older self remembers and explains (and as CBS/the FCC f-ing had them change on their Tony Awards performance because I guess some Americans aren’t okay with the word butch???!!!). Sydney’s performance of this song is so thoughtful and natural and incredible that it’s hard to believe she’s a child. No child actor has ever been this talented in history. It’s why she was considered the front-runner for the Tony Awards. Her fiercest competition was thought to be not from winner Ruthie Ann Miles (for “The King & I”) but from the actress who plays her mother, the great Judy Kuhn. Quiet, clearly long-suffering, she surprises us when she tells her college aged daughter about her father’s secret and that she’s known for, well, for “Days & Days & Days”, as her astounding, stunning big song goes. She freaking kills it, sharing how hard it has been to silently let her husband dictate and destroy their lives and how she sat by and watched for so long as nothing changed. In just one song, Kuhn defines and redefines her entire character’s story and adds new layers of wrenching emotion to the show as a whole. It must be such a pleasure to play a complex character for once (Kuhn originated the thankless role of Cosette in the original Broadway production of “Les Miserables”).
“Fun Home” is a flawless show that in only 100 minutes presents such depth and range of emotion and experience and it is all completely spell-binding. That it won the Tony Award shows that audiences and musical theatre as a genre are both ready to be treated with respect and given art that is worthy of being called art. (Of course, last night’s premature closure of “The Visit” argues in the opposite direction but we can’t win every battle.) I hope everyone sees it, learns from it, and remembers it as a benchmark for future shows. This is the direction Broadway needs to move in, and it’s a relief that people seem to accept that.
Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles, A Must-See Documentary for Theatre-Lovers
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about a theatre documentary film that will be in select theatres tomorrow, August 23.
Few musicals have the staying power and continued resonance of Fiddler on the Roof, the 1964 musical about Tevye the poor milkman, his wife Golde, their five daughters, and their struggles as Jews in their tiny village of Anatevka at the turn of the century. After all these years, it’s hard to imagine a world without this miraculous piece of theatre, and the new documentary Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles, from director Max Lewkowicz, shows us how fortunate we are that all the pieces came together as they did. The amount of jaw-dropping names that appear throughout the doc exuding praise over this classic musical is endlessly entertaining. Featuring interviews with composers Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, book writer Joseph Stein, producer Hal Prince (to whom the film is dedicated; he died just a few weeks ago), and tons of actors, writers, experts on cultural studies, journalists, and family members of the creative team, this Fiddler does the unthinkable and makes the musical even more special.
Interspersing footage of various productions, the classic film version, and even footage of Aleichem’s silent films with interviews, the doc provides interesting historical context and testimony as to why it’s such a lasting show. Joel Grey, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Harvey Fierstein, Fran Leibovitz, Itzhak Perlman, and endless amazing historians and writers share worthy thoughts on what makes Fiddler still resonate.
Everyone today loves Fiddler, and for dern good reason, but it opened to surprisingly bad reviews. Variety even wrote that there were no memorable songs, a statement that is beyond ludicrous for a show without a single weak moment and a widely known and widely loved score (okay except for “Now I Have Everything”). But it took a lot of hard work to create the final masterpiece, as Harnick, Bock, Prince, the original actors, and their relatives and those of Jerome Robbins share. H&B got the idea to write a show inspired by Russian-Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem’s short stories, narrowing their idea down to the story of Tevye the milkman and his daughters in turn of the century czarist Russia. They faced a lot of obstacles in the early days from people who, rightly so, heard this idea and went, ‘are you crazy?’ Who would see a musical based on such a niche story that will likely be super depressing? But this genius team turned this depressing, niche story into one that’s as heartwarming as it is heartbreaking, and one of the most relatable pieces in the canon, since at any time in history, people have been oppressed. One of the best stories is when during intermission of a Japanese production, an actor asked if Americans actually enjoy the show since “it’s so Japanese.”
I could talk forever about how wonderful this documentary and Fiddler itself are, but Ima let you discover some things for yourself because I hope you are seeing it, if you are near a theatre playing it. However, I do want to share a few of my favorite discoveries with you.
A few things I learned from the Fiddler Documentary
The idiot defense attorney from My Cousin Vinny was Broadway’s original Motel the Tailor
Now look, I’m not reducing Austin Pendleton’s stellar theatre career in calling him the bad lawyer from MCV; I just never realized that that was him until I was watching this doc, okay? I wish I could have seen him in this role!
There’s a Sholem Aleichem statue in Kiev.
Oops.
I don’t think I love any move more than Danny Burstein’s Tevye Shimmy
If you read my review of the 2016 Broadway revival of Fiddler, then you know how I feel about Danny Burstein’s Tevye and, above all, Tevye’s Lil Shimmy. With a solid amount of footage from this production interspersed throughout, we get to see a few of his positively delightful shimmies and I couldn’t be happier. (I put a clip of what I’m talking about in my instagram stories today, and it will be saved in the 2019 Theatre highlights so you can enjoy the Burstein Shimmy FOREVER.)
Jerome Robbins and Zero Mostel were not BFF
Although an undeniable genius, Jerry Robbins was extremely difficult to work with, and Zero was not a fan. During Joe McCarthy’s (more like McCunther (“that cunther made a list???”)) Senate hearings for Trying To Find Commies and Destroy Careers, Robbins named names, like the one thing you were not supposed to do if you wanted to still be considered Not An Asshole. But as always, it’s not as simple as that. McCunther S. Prick and his cronies threatened to out Robbins as a gay man if he didn’t cooperate, and back then that would have been a serious problem. They say he always regretted it afterwards, which like of course, but it wasn’t exactly a black-and-white situation. He was still an asshole to actors and others on set though, and no amount of genius can excuse that away, but he was a g-d genius.
The original Tradition lyrics were hilarious
Luckily, H&B perfected everything before the show was frozen, but we saw an early CBS television appearance of theirs in which they sang a song to the tune of what would later become “Tradition”: “There’s noodles to be made, and chickens to be plucked, and liver to be chopped and challah to be baked.” It’s a good change, it’s a goood change.
Every character has a name – like every character
Despite my assumption that my ensemble role in high school was just ‘one of the village daughters’, she had a specific name. In the original rehearsals, Jerry Robbins named every ensemble character and treated them all as integral parts of this show. So there’s a good chance I was actually playing Anya or Rivka, to name two I saw when they showed his original sketches, which is prettay prettay cool.
Jerry Bock says ‘ambience’ so amazingly
Not really a thing just wanted to remember how cute it is for him.
Yiddish Fiddler includes the best line ever
Currently in New York there is a Joel-Grey directed production of Fiddler being performed entirely in Yiddish, and receiving critical acclaim. The doc shows a snippet of the recording session for its album, in which Steven Skybell sings the Yiddish version of “If I Were a Rich Man”. The subtitles show us that these lyrics include just the best thing ever to exclaim probably at any point in your life: “Jews, I laid an egg!”
Marc Chagall’s work inspired the title and thematic elements of Fiddler
You know the Chagall painting with the violinist in a purple coat floating between two rooftops? Well helloooo, that’s the fiddler on the roof! Chagall’s work inspired the creators in establishing that central thematic element of the difficulty of finding balance between tradition and progress in a changing world, balancing like a fiddler on the roof. The Fiddler in the movie version is even wearing a purple coat. After learning more about Chagall in the show The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, I imagine Chagall would have loved this show and the homage it pays to the plight of Jews in Russia during this era.
There’s so much information and emotion jam-packed into this beautiful film and I want to rave about all of it (like, did you know The Temptations covered “Rich Man”? It’s so fun) but definitely go see for yourself. And if you have to wait longer until it comes to your town or for it to be available for purchase, spend that time listening to one of the many great cast recordings. Or better yet, go see a local production. Chances are you’re near one, whether a regional theatre or a middle school, because the most heartwarming, unbelievable fact shared in the film is that, since debuting in 1964, a production of Fiddler has been performed somewhere in the world every single day, a fact that proves just how incredible and indelible this musical’s mark is on the world.