Henry Goodman in
Fiddler on the Roof
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The West End revival of Fiddler on the Roof has extended its run by nine weeks to 1 December at the Savoy Theatre. Lindsay Posner’s production, which transferred to the Savoy from Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, stars Henry Goodman. It was originally booking to 29 September only.
Set in the Tsarist Russia of 1905, Fiddler on the Roof tells the tale of humble dairyman Tevye, an old-fashioned father who wants to see his daughters married in the traditional Jewish way. But as the atmosphere of revolution begins to eddy about them, the family is thrown into emotional turmoil as the former certainties of Tevye’s world are inexorably swept away.
[AD]In his Theatre.com Review, Matt Wolf wrote, “Any worries that the new London revival of Fiddler on the Roof may not be Jewish enough—a charge commonly levelled at David Leveaux's recent Broadway revival of the same 1964 musical mainstay—are forestalled at once by the casting of Henry Goodman as Tevye. Goodman was a defining Shylock in Trevor Nunn's great National Theatre production of The Merchant of Venice and is now at last playing the iconic musical theatre role for which he seems tailor-made (with Motel, of course, surely the chosen tailor). But ethnic identification isn't everything in performance, any more than it is in life, where other factors inevitably come into play. And that, I suppose, is a roundabout way of describing a star turn that is certainly committed, at times obsessively so to the point that it risks shutting the audience out. It's not that Tevye is so busy communing with God as that Goodman throughout remains so in thrall to shtick, funny voices and endlessly busy gestures that our point of connection to the character is lost. If it's possible that a performer is too hyper-attuned to a role—sounds crazy, no?—then that's what's on offer here. Not for the first time with this immensely talented performer, less would be more."