Goodbye, Cruel World

Revivals of Spring Awakening and Fiddler on the Roof.

Daniel N. Durant and Krista Rodriguez in Spring Awakening, one of two familiar revivals now on Broadway.

            Are there no new ideas?  One can’t escape that feeling nowadays, especially upon hearing the news that Imelda Staunton’s turn in Gypsy on the West End may be coming to the Great White Way in 2017 (making it the fourth Broadway revival of that show and the third in fifteen years, if anyone’s keeping count).  In this time of limited recoupments there are sure things and then there are surer things and then there’s bringing back shows so familiar a theatergoer could almost get whiplash — didn’t I just see this?  2014’s Cabaret was a revival of a revival, the Les Mis from that same year is essentially the same thing.  Fitting, then, I suppose, that two of the most buzzed-about productions of this still-young season were playing Broadway no less than ten years ago.  Two separate groups of European teenagers in bleak times are very angry at their regimented, traditional parents this season, in Bartlett Sher’s Fiddler on the Roof at the Broadway (last seen: 2004-06) and Michael Arden’s Spring Awakening at the Brooks Atkinson (2006-09).

I don’t think anyone would argue that Spring Awakening is the better musical, but it’s certainly the better production.  Mr. Arden (an actor, late of The Hunchback of Notre Dame at Paper Mill, with one of the best voices ever deployed on a stage) directs a Deaf West production, in which upwards of half of the performers are deaf and communicate via sign language, a conceit which, shockingly, never becomes an impediment to the visceral desires Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater convey so well with their rollicking cool-kid rock score (and, less effectively, in the stop-and-start book, also by Sater).  Mr. Arden and the producers seem fixated on developing some thematic similarity between deafness and 19^th-century sexual repression, which is a little bit of a stretch.  The more poignant connection lies in the intersections between Sater’s meandering lyrics, which, at their best and worst, remind one vividly of abstract poetry, and the phantasmagorical visual impact of the show — thank Spencer Liff’s mind-bending choreography and Dane Laffrey’s purple-accented, cosmic set.  Love it or hate it, this is a show reborn — the only semblance of similarity to the original production is the hard-rock staging of “Totally Fucked,” in which intellectual Melchior Gabor (Austin P. McKenzie) laments the realities of the establishment.  The signing can overwhelm performance—it doesn’t seem worth mentioning standouts because the cast seems to function more as a unit than individually—but it’s wild and wonderful, a wholly new and welcome approach to what came before.

I’m not sure one could say the same about Fiddler, which is now on its fifth revival, tying it (with Guys and Dolls) for the most-revived musical written since 1927.  The problem many had with the last revival (starring — sigh — Alfred Molina) was its distinct lack of Jewishness, and Bartlett Sher’s staging definitely rectifies that issue.  If anything, this Fiddler is more Jewish than most, which is to say it’s a little tired, very warm and familiar, and perhaps a little too steeped in tradition to justify its existence.  To call it unpleasant would be completely unfair — the first Broadway production starring Danny Burstein was going to be inherently thrilling no matter what.  But, knowing Mr. Sher (who directed 2008’s South Pacific and last season’s The King and I), one expects more; a visual innovation, at least, would be welcome, and scenic designer Michael Yeargan’s towering gray brick wall, confronting the audience like a monolith, can’t help but invite comparisons to The King and I’s magnificent ship plunging toward the audience like a battering ram that smashes complacency.  You start to hope, as the show goes on, that that ship will smash through that wall and reveal a more interesting set for what should be a more interesting show, but it doesn’t.  The most we get is that, in the final seconds of that show, the wall rises into the rigging, revealing only another, blanker, white cyclorama, which is not only depressing but a blatant rip-off of the aforementioned Cabaret revival.

There are moments of brilliance from Mr. Sher — he couldn’t help but have them.  The sets, falling into place, don’t plunk down unceremoniously but drip continuously behind the actors like drops of amber, and the Fiddler himself, in previous productions an unconnected thematic thread, here becomes an enigmatic personification of old-world custom.  The staging of the “Tevye’s Dream” number is a director’s dream, and Catherine Zuber’s Chagall-inspired costumes are marvelous.  But any Fiddler, eventually, comes down to the actors.  Everyone’s pretty much fine here, especially Samantha Massell as a sweet and understated Hodel, and disincluding Jessica Hecht as Golde, who, genuinely confusingly, seems to have no singing voice at all. But Tevye, the dairyman, patriarch and persecuted intellectual, bursts off the page so definitively he demands an actor who can burst off the stage.  Danny Burstein, excellent in every role he’s ever played, does Tevye as a kind of a sitcom protagonist, forever winking at the audience and kvetching to God.  This is an appealing but not necessary take, and the same could be said of the entire production.  It’s generic, over-the-counter.  It’s redundant.

What could have been Mr. Sher’s saving grace is the immediacy of the issue of Eurasian refugees.  But that connection is only obliquely drawn, mostly through Hofesh Shechter’s choreography, inspired in equal measure by Jerome Robbins and ethnic dance.  It makes its most memorable appearance, naturally, in the “To Life” sequence, the first truly energetic number of the show.  Yet when the Christian elites who are drinking in the corner join in the dance, it’s not, as it’s seemed in other productions, a threatening prospect but an altogether exciting one.  These Russians, at least, seem to be having a grand old time.  Maybe it’s time for a show about them, or, at the very least, a new show.