What: The Living Word Project presents Dahlak Braithwaite's non-linear interrogation of a young Black man's experience within a court-mandated rehab program, utilizing the the language of hip hop, step, and spoken word.
And? full review here.
 |
| Dahlak Brathwaite, center-ish, and the Los Angeles cast of Try/Step/Trip. Photo by MarKing IV Photography. |
1/16/26: The Great Escape
What: Ruthie Scarpino brings her clown, four-year-old Apfel Tucas, to New York with the story of her daring escape from Rosh Hashanah services to find the snack stash at her synagogue.
And? Pretty freaking adorable. Scarpino's well-gifted in the body- and gesture-isolation needed to do effective mime work, and her guileless persona as young Apfel endears her to the audience even as she continually drafts them into helping her physicalize her imaginings and enact the story of her great escape.
 |
| Ruthie Scarpino as Apfel Tucas. Photo source. |
1/17/26-1/18/26: Fiddler on the Roof
What: Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia presents a new intimate in-the-round (well, square) staging of the classic musical by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein, about a milkman Tevye in a shtetl in Russia facing both his family's gradual departure from the comfort of tradition, as well as the threat to the Jewish people by Russia's hostility and disdain.
And? Listen, if you had a chance to see a brand new staging of this show, starring the man who led the first Broadway show you ever saw, if you had the chance to see it more than once, wouldn't you? Well, we would. This production is a combination of the known and unknown in many ways. We know the songs, we know the story beats, we know that there will be a bottle dance during the wedding and destruction at the end of that wedding. But with such an intimate staging--a square performance space with audience on all sides, only four rows deep--the audience is brought into the conversation. Golde asks us if that wasn't so wonderful, the dance we just saw. Tevye asks individual audiences members what he should tell Lazar Wolf, expressing visible disgust if the suggestion isn't what he wants to hear.
But more importantly is the shabbat table. As the audience enters they see a great platform of tables, of varying sizes, but tetrised together into a square. Golde and her daughters emerge to set the space, spreading out a delicate white tablecloth over the surface with a practiced care. When Tevye summons the village of Anatevka to sing "Tradition," they all take their places at the table. So, too, are we invited in for the evening. For tonight, the audience is Anatevka, too. And as this is a pared-down cast (even more pared-down than the excellent Yiddish production that ran in New York several seasons ago) we are crucial to filling out the community of this shtetl, for however long we are allowed to stay. As the story continues on, the tables are gradually separated to create additional locales within Anatevka, until gradually there are only two tables left onstage: a table converted into Tevye's cart laden with what whatever the family can fit for their exodus, and the broken remains of a table destroyed by the Russians during Tzeitel and Motel's wedding. This, then, is all that is left of Anatevka: a pocket of land voided of Jews, of Jewish tradition, and of the structure that held the community together. It has all been smashed.
Anyone who reads my blog knows how swift I am to call out directors who don't know how to stage work in a non-proscenium space. Well, I have zero notes for director Joe Calarco and choreographer Sarah Parker. They manage a dynamic and ever-moving view of Anatevka, making sure somehow to never block an audience member's view and always offering an interesting stage picture. We saw the show from three different vantage points and every experience offered new perspectives we could layer over the others (and it's rather remarkable to see the Bottle Dance in profile). They do all this so effortlessly you forget to notice what a delicate feat it is, the characters shifting position to match their motivation or emotional state, rather than just spinning in a circle (yes, Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, I am atting you).
The cast has some great standouts, among them of course its headliner Douglas Sills. Sills, whose Broadway debut in The Scarlet Pimpernel showed him to be a performer with a fearless instinct for comedy and clowning, brings to this production instead a more drawn-in Tevye. So many moments in this show are tied inextricably to the ghosts of Zero Mostel and Topol, be they iconic (if over the top) deliveries of certain lines or even the nonsense syllables of "If I Were a Rich Man." And while Sills is adept at finding the human comedy in Tevye's mercurial interactions with his community, he also attempts to bring Tevye down to ground level within the intimate staging at Signature. When his Tevye shouts it is not for comedic effect but because he has reached his breaking point. Tevye's dreams are small, even when they sound large. Yes, he imagines having "one long staircase just going up, and one even longer coming down, and one more leading nowhere just for show," but the crux of the number in his hands is what he could have if he were just a "biddy biddy rich." And, for those out there who, like me, enjoy Sills's penchant for play as well as his agility at doing something slightly differently from performance to performance, I am happy to report that his three performances across the weekend all had delightful little moments like these, be they his shushing of a slamming door through his hangover, or remarking "modern children" when a young boy in the audience advises him to run rather than tell Golde about Tzeitel and Motel.
The rest of the company matches well Sills's level of groundedness, with Amie Bermowitz's Golde a sharp and impatient but loving woman without being inflated into a harridan. Susan Rome's Yente is amusing without reverting to cartoonishness. Jeremy Radin brings real humanity to his portrayal of Lazar Wolf, a man who, like Tevye, is just trying to get by. And Motel, oh Motel. I've always loved Motel, and Jake Loewenthal is wonderful in the part: sweetly timid but grown into a joyous (and gorgeously sung) celebration of finding his courage in "Miracle of Miracles." Now, of course, Tevye's dream sequence is over the top, but that's to a purpose, and I wouldn't change the marionette choreography or the bit with Fruma-Sarah's pearls for anything. We had a few understudies over the course of the weekend, which did thin the ensemble cast at times (three bottle dancers instead of four at one performance), but the cast remains strong regardless of its limited numbers.
One final note: with each newly realized production of Fiddler I see, something new strikes me. With the Yiddish production, it felt like the denizens of Anatevka had finally come home as they sang their sabbath prayer, which then made their final exodus all the more heartbreaking: we watched, knowing this would not be the last worst thing to happen to this family, knowing that those staying behind--Hodel and Perchik, Chava--remained in great danger of what would come next. We watched, knowing that for centuries the world has tried to rid itself of its Jewish people and yet we survive. With this production, the line that strikes me most forcefully is Perchik's rebuke to Hodel: "Horrible things are happening all over the land ... pogroms, violence, whole villages are being emptied of their people ... and it's reaching everywhere, and it will reach here." The awful echo of this line clangs as a warning bell: when I first encountered this show as a child, these tragedies felt long-past and long-dead, never again to be a threat to contemporary Jewish people. But I see pogroms and violence and Europe's Jewish people leaving en masse from a continent no longer safe. I see a 400% rise in antisemitism and violence against the Jewish people here in America. It's reaching everywhere, and it will reach here too.
 |
| The cast of Fiddler on the Roof. Photo by Daniel Rader. |
No comments:
Post a Comment