"Fiddler On The Roof" - Magic Circle Theater, Roseville

Pictures from final bows. Left, the cast.

Left: Jeffrey Lloyd Heatherly, as Tevye

Left: Apologies for the bad moonwalk shot: Chava (Samantha Ellinwood) and Fyedka (Rick Zimmerman).


Met the DMTC gang at Magic Circle and saw "Fiddler On The Roof" on Friday. It was fun seeing old friends play familiar roles, and see how different people created new and interesting characters from the script.

Jeffrey Lloyd Heatherly made a great Tevye: excellent characterization, with fine touches. We'll have to keep our eye on him in the future.

At first, I thought there was something wrong about Tevye's three daughters, but I couldn't quite place it. Finally it dawned on me that the Tzeitel (Ada Schmidt), Hodel (Jenna Cook), and Chava (Samantha Ellinwood) were all approximately age-appropriate. The iron law of musical theater, however, is that 70-year-olds play 40-year-olds, 40-year-olds play 20-year-olds, and teenagers play children. So, is this tradition? Well, I suppose our traditional ways were once new too....

(Motel the Tailor) Jason "Clocky" McDowell and Lazar Wolf (Richard Spierto) were fine as well. For some reason, Clocky played the role better here than I remember him at Woodland Opera House: he didn't rush quite as much.

The Bottle Dancers (the most important part of the show) were excellent - no dropped bottles!

One strange faux pas, however. At the wedding reception, the Rabbi (Bob Eggert) briefly dances with Hodel and Chava, but he does so via a handkerchief: he never holds hands with them. My understanding is that he does so in order to maintain proprieties: while other men are not forbidden from dancing with women (and neither is he), he (presumably) is forbidden to touch women who are dancing. But immediately afterwards, the Rabbi joins hands with Chava and Hodel and joins a circle dance. Ouch!

Jackie Clauson played a fine Yente, but I wondered about the blocking in the scene where she talks to Golde. Golde faces towards the stove, away from the audience and away from Yente, basically leaving Yente to yammer on alone. Looked a little lonely up there....

I liked Samantha Ellinwood as Chava - she's improved over the last several years as a dancer, and the audience felt real sympathy for her portrayal as the daughter who marries outside the faith and is shunned. In most productions, she is literally pushed out of Annatevka, but here, she implores the village for understanding, and is abandoned, center stage, utterly alone. Very effective, new, staging.

The biggest surprise of the evening was just how good a job Rick Zimmerman did as the character of Fyedka. Fyedka is blessed with some of the most wooden dialogue in all of musical theater, and the script is utterly opaque, positively unhelpful in showing an actor how it should be played. I've seen several Fyedkas, and they've all done as good as they could with the character, meaning they were all horrible: as wooden as gnarled, stunted pine trees on the Siberian taiga.

Nevertheless, Zimmerman played the role as shy, smiling, diffident, and therefore very winning. He also affected an incredibly effective Russian accent. The net effect was to bring this neglected character to life, seemingly for the first time. No wonder Chava likes him - heck, I like him too! Wow! At last, Fyedka lives!

An excellent production!