Fiddler on the Roof - Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick

The musical Fiddler on the Roof premiered on New York's Broadway in 1964. The work is an adaptation of the novel by Sholem Aleichem and tells about the fate of a Jewish family, exiled by tsarist officers from the village of Anatevka. The main character is the poor milkman Tevje, who dreamed of wealth and bargained with God. The Wroclaw staging of this most famous musical in the world is traditional, close to the Broadway original — it preserves what is most important in this work, adding what the viewer expects.

In Anatevka, recreated with pietism and kept in a Chagall mood, the protagonist is the collective. The director resurrects a world that no longer exists, a Jewish village swept by history from the beginning of the 20th century.

The highlight of the performance is the monumental decoration, a two-hundred-strong ensemble of performers, spectacular dances (especially the beautiful wedding scene), an orchestra that abandons the operatic pathos, and the breaking of conventions by theatricalizing dialogue scenes. We will see a show that is quite bland, entertaining, but also thought-provoking.