Henry Goodman in Fiddler on the Roof

You’re having quite a year! What was it like appearing with the ENO at the Coliseum—and doing Fiddler on the Roof on either side of it?
With 2,500 seats, it’s terrifying to play there. It’s scary in the sense that it forces you and the director and everybody to just get down there and sell it. I’m really proud to be a Savoyard, though; I can actually put that in my bio now. They were such fun people to work with and being with posh singers was just a joy. The production was really frothy and slight and fun, but the singing and being with English National Opera and the way they work is so different, especially after doing Fiddler in Sheffield for eight weeks before it. I only had a couple of weeks’ break between the jobs to learn it. Of course, there’s room in Gilbert and Sullivan for character, insights and layers, but essentially the production of The Gondoliers we did concentrated on witty, satirical, rather thin, fun things. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s perfectly OK, but I’ve been really rooting what we are doing in Fiddler on the Roof in a very real world, so it’s very different.

This production of Fiddler was first done as the Christmas musical at Sheffield last year. Was it a deliberate decision to launch it on that scale?
I was very keen to start it outside of London. Lindsay Posner [the director] and I had discussed trying to really get a sense of honouring the Broadway traditions that are built into the way it is written, but not trying to out-Broadway Broadway. Instead, we tried to bring it to life with people who live and know each other and in that way, to honour those fantastic Sholom Aleichem stories. He knew that culture intimately—he castigated some of the excesses of the over-religious Jews, but he also had great affection for the warmth between them and the way they supported each other, and the beauty within that rather seedy, and sometimes even ugly, community. So it’s not just a tearful musical about the pogroms—that actually only comes in towards the end—but going to back to the stories and reading them we found that there is such warmth and wit and humour and gags. We wanted to try to capture some of that folkloric feel, rather than a purely Broadway tradition.

A scene from Fiddler on the Roof

The original production of Fiddler on the Roof was famously directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins. How much of his work survives in this production?
Of course, you can’t begin to do this without honouring Robbins, especially as he changed the map of musical theatre. He was the man who would walk around and check that peoples’ fingernails were dirty and that they didn’t have any lipstick on—he wanted to get rid of all the tall blondes. He needed dance-skilled people, but he desperately tried with both this and West Side Story and other things to break that tits and teeth, in-your-teeth, entertainment schtick. But what’s happened in the years since is that they’ve tried to freeze his work. And his agent, who has always fought to have every step preserved, has—for the first time in the show’s history—allowed us to not treat this as a museum piece in which every step has to be the same. Instead, we’re now harnessing bits of things for the West End that we might not have used before, but we didn’t want to do it again unless they respected what we’d already achieved. So they’ve looked at it, and said that they’d like us to have more musicians if we can afford it—which which we wanted anyway—and to have a few more dancers, which we also wanted. So we’ve been able to build on the spirit of what we did before, but improve and expand it. We’ve got the freedom here to have performers who’ve got to be able to sing and dance really well, but the trick is that rather than to feel that the curtain goes up and they go into a Broadway routine, it is coming out of the action. In Sheffield, it just clicked and took off—once the word got out, it just went crazy and broke all box office records. And if we had started this show in the West End, it would not have been what it is now.

And you, of course, are a very different actor to Zero Mostel, who created the role on Broadway, or Topol, who made it his own on film and in the subsequent endless stage revivals.
There’s a great story that when they did the original production, they auditioned Walter Mattheau, and he said, "You don’t need me, you need Zero Mostel." And they replied, "If we could get Zero Mostel, you think we’d be auditioning you?" That’s Broadway. But I’ve not had any of that here—they wanted me and I wanted to do it. If you think of the tradition of Zero Mostel, who was a phenomenal, charismatic, marvellous performer, there was a point where instead of playing the show he played with the show. That’s often what personalities have to do. What I am trying to do is to play the show with personality, with humour, with charm and with the book—it is brilliantly written. Rather than trying to stop the show and engage in lots of business where you love me and I love you, and we’ll go on doing this for 20 minutes then go back to the story that was written—we’re trying to move the show on all the time. I know from the reactions that we’ve been getting that we’ve made it stronger. We’re adding more musicians and more dancers, but we’re still not a 50-piece Broadway orchestra—we’ve got 12, so it’s still a village band, and I’m very, very proud that Lindsay has been sticking to it.

[AD]There was a Broadway revival a few years ago that made it positively Chekhovian. Did you see it?
No, I didn’t, but it sounds like it was a rather difficult thing to pull off against the tone of the piece. It needs that warmth, charm and the innocence of a community to work.

That production was also famously criticised by some for not having enough Jews in the cast. What about your production?
We’ve got many more Jews in the cast, but also importantly we’ve spent a lot of time with the non-Jews, going through the Sabbath festivals, explaining the Hebrew and background; we liked doing the research. Some of the people from a purely musical world got very frightened—they were wondering why we were sitting around the table discussing this as if it’s Chekhov, but yes, actually, let’s really bed these relationships. And what happened is that certain things happen that are now just so intimate—you’re watching something that when it lifts off, when people get drunk and happy and celebrate life in the inn, for instance, we go crazy. But we’ve also got the bottle dancers—everything that is meant to be there is there—but it’s more intimate.

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