Matt Wolf writes about the timeless topicality of Fiddler on the Roof
Fiddler on the Roof
Sunderland Empire
Tuesday 25 – Saturday 29 November 2025
You may think you know Fiddler on the Roof, the iconic 1964 musical that spawned the beloved 1971 film, starring Topol as the beleaguered milkmen Tevye, and that gets revived regularly on the London and Broadway stage.
Direct from a completely sold-out season at London’s Barbican Theatre the production now touring the country stands apart, whether you’re coming to the material for the first time or you already recognise the story of a Jewish community seeking refuge from the fearsome pogroms of Czarist Russia in 1905. (The show’s source are various short stories from the Yiddish playwright-author Sholem Aleichem.)
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| Photo: Marc Brenner |
As directed by the expatriate American Jordan Fein, the production was first produced at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, garnering 13 Olivier nominations in April and winning three, including best musical revival. Told with unusual intensity of feeling and a revelatory attention to detail, the show felt that much deeper and richer when it transferred indoors to the Barbican Centre in London this past summer. That same staging, partially recast, is now touring the UK and Ireland through Jan 3, 2026, much to the delight of its 4 principal performers, each of whom spoke with great eloquence about the task at hand.
“This feels freshly minted,” Matthew Woodyatt, who has the leading role of Tevye, was saying in one of a sequence of interviews one recent afternoon. What the creatives Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein created over 60 years ago endures: they’ve created “such a masterpiece,” says Woodyatt, “that everything you need is there – it’s all so strong and clear.”
Within its structure is room for the individual to shine, which in Woodyatt’s case has meant bringing his own Welsh accent to the part and not having to mimic those who came before him, who famously include the vaunted Broadway funnyman, Zero Mostel, who originated the role onstage.
Tevye, says Woodyatt, “is such a glorious role. He contains multitudes, really – anger and love and wit and silliness.” You note his struggle to hold together a family threatened by fragmentation, alongside his ongoing conversation with God, not to mention such knockout numbers as “If I Were A Rich Man” and the show’s thrilling opening, “Tradition”. “Tevye’s relationship with God is directed outfront to the audience, which gives you a window to his soul. I would say I feel an elated exhaustion by the end” – he had been playing Tevye once a week at the Barbican, whilst otherwise appearing in the ensemble as the innkeeper Mordcha – “and I find it very energising, even though it’s a huge physical role.” As Mordcha, his job “was to serve the other people around me”; now, as Tevye, it’s to drive the show.
Woodyatt first came across the musical as a child growing up in the Welsh valleys. “One of the first things I went to see when I was 9 or 10 years old was Fiddler at our local theatre, and I think the husband of my infant school headmistress was playing Tevye.” He saw the film, of course, and later experienced the show “from the inside, really” as a company member of the 2017 Chichester production, directed by Daniel Evans, in which Woodyatt understudied Omid Djalili as Tevye but never went on in the part.
There may be an advantage, he notes, to the show being performed in Britain well away from the Borscht Belt Jewish humour roots that have always been part of its appeal on Broadway.
“That bold-stroke Catskills comedy” – the region of New York state where the Borscht Belt is located – “isn’t as innate and well-known here, so it gives the director and the cast the freedom to get into the material potentially more.” At the same time, the direct-address nature of Tevye, performed as here in the actor’s own accent, ramps up the intimacy, even in a large auditorium. “You never feel you’re watching a costume drama; there’s an immediacy to these conversations, as if they were happening now.”
The production’s Golde, Tevye’s ever-patient wife, is new to the touring cast, though the performer Jodie Jacobs had seen and greatly admired Fein’s staging before signing on to replace Lara Pulver in the role. “When I was younger,” Jacobs says candidly, “I might have felt Fiddler was perhaps a little dull, but I wasn’t as engaged politically then as I am now.” What’s changed? Her awareness, she says, of “the resilience and the power” of the show, alongside a sense that it allows her to inhabit “a space where you can be unashamedly proud of your faith and your community”. Born into a family of Dutch and Russian Jews, Jacobs laughs as she recalls “a case of terrible FOMO in the audition room” that came with a newfound appreciation for the material. “Golde’s very clear-cut, practical, pragmatic: if motherhood were a business, she’d be the CEO.”
Beverley Klein, the production’s Olivier-nominated Yente, had worked with Fein, the director, on the ongoing West End revival of Cabaret before taking the decision to join a show she knows so well, having twice previously appeared as Golde. “I do think this is a piece of genius,” she says of Fiddler, in which her gossipmongering matchmaker gains many of the show’s laughs.
“The juxtaposition between serious matter and the musical form is balanced in such an incredible way, and there’s not a wasted line. [Joseph Stein’s] book is as good as it gets.” Early in her career, she played the Innkeeper’s wife in a touring Fiddler, starring Alfred Marks. “I’ve been working for 45 years and seem to have done a different Fiddler once every decade. Now I’ve dwindled into Yente but I don’t feel it’s a dwindling. If you don’t want to work with Jordan Fein, there’s something wrong with you; this feels like bliss.”
Perhaps the staging’s greatest innovation is its use of the fiddler of the title. As reconceived for this production, he’s no longer a decorative element of the story but, instead, a sort of shadow-self to Tevye. The character here appears regularly throughout, which in turn allowed the Anglo-Israeli violinist Raphael Papo to get his own Olivier nod for the role – a banner achievement for a non-speaking part.
The idea this time out, recalls Papo, “wasn’t about, let’s put a violinist onstage and get him to
play pretty tunes, but, actually, why am I playing at which moments and what am I trying to say with what I’m playing.”
This fiddler, in Papo’s assessment, is “an extension of Tevye’s emotions, who can sort of reflect things back at Tevye that can’t be put into words. Every time Tevye is talking to God, the fiddler is there listening. In performance, I’m trying to sound like [the musical equivalent of] a human voice, not like some nice violinist”. The result is soul-searingly moving.
What of the onward resonance of the piece? Matthew Woodyatt is sure that “50-60 years from now, Fiddler will remain every bit as topical as it is now”: its themes are at once timeless and universal. Says Raphael Papo: “This is a show about love, it really is – about family and love and a shared humanity. I can’t think of any better way of putting it than that.” Fiddler belongs to the past and the present and, no doubt, the future, too.
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Writer: Matt Wolf is a London theatre writer for The New York Times and first saw Fiddler in 1977 on Broadway, with the legendary Zero Mostel.
📍 Fiddler on the Roof at Sunderland Empire
🗓️ Tuesday 25 – Saturday 29 November 2025
🕰️ Running Time: Approx. 2 hours 40 minutes (including interval)
👤 Age Guidance: 12+
🎟️ Tickets: Available now at ATGTickets.com/Sunderland (Transaction fee may apply)
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