School's In

School of Rock at the Winter Garden Theatre

 

Alex Brightman (far left) and the ensemble of School of Rock: The Musical.

            There’s a little miracle going on at the Winter Garden Theatre right now, which is strange, because that esteemed stage is better known for gaudy, misbegotten, mind-bogglingly long-running pieces; three of its last tenants are Mamma Mia!, Rocky, and Cats.  That the man responsible for this show, School of Rock, is the same man who wrote Cats, more than thirty years ago, cannot be said to be especially surprising.  It’s impossible to classify Andrew Lloyd Webber or squeeze his shows into any category; they vary wildly in quality and scope, often in the same score.  Mr. Webber hasn’t had a musical on Broadway in ten years, and he hasn’t written a successful Broadway musical since Sunset Boulevard, in 1993.  What a way to break a streak this is.

            School of Rock is, of course, based on the iconic Richard Linklater film, now (yikes) more than twelve years old, that made a star of a young Jack Black.  In retrospect, it begs to be musicalized; it includes a few original songs (by Black and Mike White) and an infectious spirit of rebellion and abandon, but it’s Jack Black’s movie.  Even Joan Cusack, in an underrated turn as an overworked principal, can’t interrupt his runaway train to stardom as the wannabe rock god Dewey Finn.  (Sierra Boggess plays her role in the show, and though she has unmistakably the best Broadway voice in the cast, whenever she’s on stage you almost want her to get out of the way and let Dewey do his thing.)  As a comic role, Dewey, who’s forced to impersonate his substitute-teacher roommate to raise money for rent, is an actor’s dream, and Alex Brightman, who plays Black’s role here, grabs hold of it with both hands.  The first intimation that this show isn’t going to run on nostalgia is the immediately apparent fact that Mr. Brightman is not a Jack Black impersonator.  With insane energy and dedication, he throws himself into this hard-rocking, joyous musical as no one but himself, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.  He is the unmatchable emcee of a big ball of fun.  Tony’s calling.

            If Mr. Brightman’s the anchor of this far-out cruise ship, then the phalanx of children in his class, whom he wrangles into a pea-sized but unstoppable rock band, are the crew.  The pre-teens who make up the show’s ensemble (and play all the instruments live, themselves, every night, as Mr. Weber reminds us in a prerecorded announcement) are blessed with a level of talent that completely defies the usual critic’s reluctance to embrace child actors.  When Dewey tells his lead guitarist, Zack (Brandon Niederauer), “You’re only ten and you’re already better than me,” and calls him “the next Hendrix,” you believe him.  Those who don’t play instruments are just as talented — deserving of special mention is Isabella Russo as Summer, the band’s overachieving manager, who brings an earnestness to the part that Miranda Cosgrove, who played Summer in the film, could never manage — not to mention a singing voice Cosgrove, supposedly a musician, would envy.  But it seems useless to describe these kids with words — much like this shockingly entertaining production, they kind of have to be seen to be believed.

            Expanding if not improving on the comfortable, lived-in universe of the film are Glenn Slater (of the Disney film “Tangled”), a consistently capable, workmanlike lyricist whose flashes of brilliance line up almost exactly with Mr. Webber’s, and, oddly, Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey, who wrote the book.  It’s not so surprising that Mr. Fellowes would be attracted to this project — thanks to Mr. Weber, it’s got British street cred, and Mr. Fellowes was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for his book for 2006’s Mary Poppins.  What is surprising is that he’d do it so well.  Without losing any of the best parts of Mike White’s original film script (“I have been touched by your kids… and I’m pretty sure I’ve touched them” still gets laughs), he has rounded out characters, elucidated motivation, and adapted the hazy world of Richard Linklater to the more brightly lit one of Broadway, all without missing a beat.  His contribution refuses to be overlooked.

            What this all amounts to is a show that never fails to be exciting and new, but recalls and replicates the comforting, sympathetic, artistic, explosive spirit of the original film.  It strikes a perfect balance between cutesy escapades and its true, rebellious heart (a balance its forerunner, Matilda, didn’t manage quite so effectively), and it leaves you grinning from ear to ear days after seeing it.  Andrew Lloyd Webber’s projects are, as a rule, hit or miss.  This is a hit.  Let there be dancing in the aisles.

The Lion in Winter

Al Pacino in China Doll.

(L-R): Christopher Denham and Al Pacino in David Mamet's China Doll.

    Damn you, Al Pacino.  You really had me going there for a minute.
    I walked into China Doll, the new David Mamet play at the Schoenfeld, with a deep feeling of foreboding.  The signs were not encouraging.  The opening of the show had been delayed by weeks, with reports that Pacino hadn’t been able to remember his lines during previews.  Ben Brantley compared his performance to nails on a chalkboard.  The Post headlined an article about the production: “Tantrums, Terror, B12 Shots: Inside Al Pacino’s Broadway Bomb.”  Though the house was packed, it was beginning to look like one of those much-heralded, much-anticipated Broadway productions that wilt on impact.
    The naysayers were right about a couple of things.  There’s only one set, two scenes, and two characters in this play, and one of them, a corporate underling called Carson (Christopher Denham) hardly speaks at all.  Mickey Ross (Pacino), a former political organizer and current multi-billionaire/ultra-wise demigod, spends most of the production on the phone, alternately wheedling, cajoling, and bellowing at his lawyer, his former crony, and his years-younger girlfriend.  And they’re right that for the first time in his career, Pacino acts his age -- Mickey Ross is more Willy Loman than Michael Corleone.  What they’re wrong about, oh so very wrong, is how immediate, real, and electrifying Pacino’s performance is, and what tightly written, thrilling, perfect Pacino showcase Mamet has written for him.  In my years of theatergoing I have rarely been so pleasantly surprised.
    Not that this hasn’t happened before.  2012’s revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, another great Mamet play about basically innocent wheeler-dealers laid low by the hands of fate, also starred Pacino, and advance notices were equally dire.  That production’s opening, too, was delayed, ostensibly (or so said the hordes) to keep the critics from discovering its fatal flaws.  Unfortunately for those hardened cynics, that production had no fatal flaws -- it was simple, not particularly daring, true, but I was captivated all the same.  This show, if anything, is better than that one -- it’s one of the most naturalistic performances of Pacino’s career.  When he’s on stage -- which is the entire show -- you can’t look away; he strips the artifice away from Mamet’s language (the beautiful stop-and-start overlapping of which, by the way, is as thrilling as ever) and takes you by force out of your reality and into his.  Denham, whose performance is delicate and expert, serves as a great audience surrogate here -- Carson watches Ross with deep-seated admiration, following his every move as if storing it for use later, and can barely restrain an ear-to-ear smile for most of the running time.  He and me both.
    I’ve seen every Broadway production directed by Pam McKinnon, who won the Tony -- very much deservedly -- for her 2012 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  This could be her strongest outing as a director since that storied production.  The sinewy symbiotic relationship she’s formed with Mamet’s fascinating text is incredibly evident as the suspense, at first a mild undertone at most, ratchets up.  She gets a performance out of Pacino that’s nearly unique in his career aside from Frank Serpico -- a genuinely benevolent man, driven to the brink by circumstances beyond his control.  Mickey Ross has no fatal flaw that brings him to his ultimate doom -- the powers that be run roughshod over a man who, in the end, is driven by love.  Love is not an emotion that usually comes through in Pacino’s acting, as he usually plays men who believe in nothing but themselves, but he nails this role.  Why wouldn’t he? Despite what the critics would have you believe, he’s still Pacino, goddamnit, and Mamet’s still Mamet.  After all these years, it's still an offer you can’t refuse.

Resident Aliens

Two productions from Ivo van Hove.

(L-R): Richard Hansell, Nicola Walker, Mark Strong, Michael Gould, and Michael Zegen in A View from the Bridge.

The most brilliant piece of scenic design in Ivo van Hove’s production of A View From the Bridge, at the Lyceum, isn’t the colossal cubic structure that rises from the stage to reveal a stark, sterile boxing ring of a set, on which the production unfolds.  No, a much more interesting visual experience is Mark Strong, playing the doomed Eddie Carbone as colossal in more than one way.  Backlit by the same unforgiving white glare that floods the entire production (Jan Versweyveld, van Hove’s partner in life and theater, did the scenic and lighting design), Mr. Strong in profile, his nose like a tomahawk above his near-perpetual sneer, is terrifying, an avenging angel.  When he turns toward the audience, you cower.

Mr. van Hove is a Belgian director who has three productions in New York this year -- this Bridge, Lazarus, and the upcoming Broadway revival of The Crucible, another Miller play about accusations gone horribly wrong.  His signature is treating American classics with the same probing interest most contemporary directors have for Shakespeare -- in his Angels in America, the wings and delicate airs of the Angel are traded for vainglorious abusiveness; in his Rent, Mimi dies.  His idea of a good time is taking the self-regard this country has for its theatrical heroes and stripping away the accoutrements.  That this practice works for the story of Eddie Carbone, a paranoid longshoreman who has no idea of a good time, is not a surprise in itself -- Miller plays, with their unique moral dilemmas and cutting focus, practically invite minimalism -- but that it works so extraordinarily well is a testament to the international theatrical bravery of upending tradition.

The actors playing Americans are European -- from the British Isles, mostly -- and those playing Italians are either British or American.  But for Mr. Strong, whose perfect accent and mannerisms are basically a stupendous audition for The Godfather Part IV, the cast doesn’t focus on dialect. Phoebe Fox, as Eddie’s teenage niece, for whom he harbors unspecified feelings, is only a couple of steps away from an Irish brogue.  Michael Zegen (from New York) and Russell Tovey (from Essex), as the Italian cousins of Eddie’s wife, Beatrice (Nicola Walker), don’t even attempt Sicilian accents.  There is no pretension here.  The actors walk the stage barefoot, cordoned in by a knee-high Plexiglass square -- once you’re in, you don’t come out, as proven by our guilt-ridden narrator, Alfieri (an excellent Michael Gould), who slips off his shoes and reluctantly enters the fray.  Truths and souls will be bared.  The only liar here is Eddie, who can’t decide whether to hide his world-shaking insecurities with violence or sexual aggression.  Mr. Strong, reckless, ruthless, and daring, embodies Eddie as carnal, even monstrous, but never less than a man.  Miller would be shocked but impressed.

Rarely on Broadway has scenic design and staging intersected so directly with the heart and soul of a production.  A View from the Bridge is about a cycle of destruction, the remnants even of the things we hated crumbling to reveal that there was something worse lying beneath all along.  “I am inclined to notice the ruins in things,” Alfieri says, mournfully.  Van Hove begins the play with the actors being showered with water, cleansing themselves of the inequities of their lives.  At the end, from on high, they are doused with blood.

*

At the end of the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth, Rip Torn, as an elder rocket scientist, meets up with David Bowie, as an alien named Thomas Newton, in a cafe.  Newton, who came to Earth looking for water for his people, gripped by drought, has, over a number of years, founded a massive technological empire (using materials, of course, not of this world) and lost it, after a hostile takeover by a mysterious crime organization and a series of brutal scientific experiments designed to root out his space oddities, so to speak, to no avail.  The scientist once worked for Newton; together they devised a rocket ship designed to get Newton back home.  They were young together (or as young as Rip Torn can ever be on screen, anyway).  Now it’s years later, and the scientist is gripped by age.  Newton hasn’t aged a day, and he’s turned to making music that no one can understand (art imitating life) and drinking gin by the bottle.  It’s meant to be a sad ending, but we wonder what comes next.  An alien troubadour played by David Bowie must have some more interesting and bizarre adventures to share, mustn’t he?

Not, it turns out, if he isn’t played by David Bowie.  Newton’s back now, almost forty years later, in the new musical Lazarus, at the New York Theater Workshop, with book by Bowie and Enda Walsh, a score of Bowie hits, and direction by the aforementioned van Hove.  Far from the intriguing figure glimpsed at the end of that great and underappreciated Nicholas Roeg film, equal parts John Lennon and J.J. Gittes, we are given only Michael C. Hall, not even attempting a British accent or the affected reserve that so marked Bowie on screen.  His hair is red and his skin white, but he is as grounded and barrel-chested as a nightclub bouncer; where Bowie was a beanstalk, Hall is a giant. What made Bowie such a phenomenal presence in The Man Who Fell to Earth was the idea that David Bowie, of all people, was working full-time to seem normal, and the result was the man who once praised Hitler in a magazine under the influence of cocaine.  On the other hand, you can see the gears whirring in Hall’s head as he desperately attempts to seem bizarre.  He isn’t out-of-it in an appealing, Bowie-esque way.  He’s just trying to figure out how to approach this whole Lazarus business.

So was I.  Thomas Newton is apparently now a shut-in in an apartment on Second Avenue (despite the fact that, in the film, he notably and permanently renounced New York for the American Southwest), cared for by the obsessive Elly (Cristin Milioti), who keeps putting on his ex-girlfriend’s clothes.  He’s also swigging booze from the bottle every other sentence, which brings on alien hallucinations (one of very few carry-overs from the film) including a teenaged girl (Sophia Anne Caruso) who may or may not be his daughter, and may or may not be a hallucination, and may or may not be a ghost.  Either way, the universe of Man Who Fell to Earth can’t sustain this added level of mythology.  In my mind, the only meaningful thing about this character is that, in a truly inspired bit of ridiculousness by van Hove, she bleeds milk, which may not make her any less annoying but certainly adds to her uses if you ever need a hand topping off your coffee.

The film that now serves as the first part of what I must reluctantly call the Thomas Newton canon worked so well because even those experimental bits of it that existed basically to confuse the audience eventually gave in, with a reluctant sigh, and agreed at least temporarily to transmogrify into a plot.  This libretto will do no such thing.  Everyone seems to be going crazy in this show, perhaps because insanity is the only justification for expressing your innermost thoughts through David Bowie lyrics.  The crux of the dramatic tension appears to be that Newton (or that dead girl, or no one -- I’m not quite sure) is being pursued by a serial killer named Valentine (Michael Esper), who Bowie-as-Newton would’ve snapped in half but Hall-as-Newton, being Dexter, after all, must confront meaningfully.  That Valentine’s spookiest moment of the show involves popping balloons with a dagger is indicative of the hamfistedness that hovers about the book like a listing UFO.  Ms. Walsh and Mr. Bowie seem to come from the Disney Channel school of exposition, as when Elly shouts, literally to the heavens, “I just want to be surrounded by love all the time!” and Valentine replies, wittily, “Me too.”  At one point Caruso’s character recounts the events of the film so simplistically that when, later on, she and her ethereal friends declare, “We’re doing a play based on your life.  It’s biographical,” I was tempted to stand up and correct them on some of the specifics.  Further, I’m not sure what we get out of the extension to Newton’s fictional lifespan apart from confirmation that his co-workers being brutally murdered is a trend rather than a one-time thing.  It’s a discredit to Paul Mayersberg’s screenplay and Walter Tevis’s original novel, on which this production claims to be based.  I hope, sincerely, that the bulk of the script was written by Mr. Bowie, so that both of the parties involved can happily return to their day jobs.

So the question, then, is what Messrs. van Hove and Versweyveld can do with all this.  Not much, I’m afraid, but visual and aural supplementals.  There are subtle musical references to the movie -- “Hello Mary-Lou” by Phillips and Taylor plays on and off throughout -- and brilliant video projections (by Tal Yarden) that bring a modicum of excitement to the proceedings.  As for the scenic design in itself, it’s as simple as A View from the Bridge, if not simpler, but much of its significance seems to hinge on Newton’s fridge being left open, and while I welcome visual metaphor, after a while I became concerned that his milk might spoil.  And wouldn’t you know it, there probably won’t be any ghost girls around just then.

The awkwardness of Lazarus as a whole makes a lot more sense if you see it for what it is, which is a jukebox musical.  All the laziest parts of endeavours like Jersey Boys and Beautiful are summed up in the fact that when Valentine makes his last stand, it’s with a chorus of “Valentine’s Day.”  But it comes harder to incorporate Bowie songs into a narrative than “Oh, What a Night,” because his lyrics are nicer to listen to than to actually examine in context (which is a nice way of saying that they’re for the most part terrible -- come on, tell me "The Laughing Gnome" is Broadway-quality writing).  Pretty much the best it gets is watching a shirtless Milioti, in her extraordinary vocal talent and sexual daring the closest thing this cast has to a Bowie, belt “Changes,” the best song Bowie ever wrote, but even this gets tiresome by its conclusion.  There were no applause breaks after any number, which, depending on how charitable you’re feeling, you could ascribe to how deadly seriously this show seems to take itself or the fact that no one in the audience or the cast seems to be having a particularly good time.  Either way, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.  By the time Walsh and Bowie are trying to ascribe emotional meaning to “Life on Mars,” one of the most joyfully nonsensical songs in rock’s canon, the whole thing has become viscerally upsetting.

Thomas Newton really was an autobiographical character for Bowie in a sense, which may have been why he was interested in examining him again.  That scene at the end of The Man Who Fell to Earth feels particularly relevant now.  When Rip Torn’s character expresses disappointment with Newton’s recent album, the extraterrestrial party responds, almost snidely, “Well, I didn’t make it for you.”  It’s impossible to say for whom Bowie made Lazarus, but I am sure that it will go over quite well on some other planet.

Heavy Lies the Head

King Charles III at the Music Box Theatre

Tim Pigott-Smith (center) and the cast of King Charles III.

            If you’ll excuse the British-ism — and if you’re at all interested in this show, I think you will — Mike Bartlett’s new play King Charles III is absolutely bloody fantastic.  It’s the best time I’ve had in a theater in longer than I can remember — possibly years — and it couldn’t be smarter, or more audacious, or better-acted, if it tried.

            There are no words to express the daring it takes, these days, to write a play in Shakespearean blank verse — iambic pentameter, all: if you’re ever less than completely entranced by the play (which I doubt) and count the syllables, you’ll never note a fault in the rhythm.  But the daring it takes to write a play in Shakespearean blank verse about the current royal family of England, deigning to explore, in a probing way, the relationships such a position might engender (not like, say, Peter Morgan’s lovely but hagiographic The Audience) — and to do it exceedingly well — this leaves a critic beyond wordlessness and more into the realm of a worshipper.

            It seems so very natural that Mr. Bartlett would choose to make his brilliant exploration of power and those who wield it a “future history play” dealing with the eternally patient Charles taking up the crown of the United Kingdom.  It allows him to explore with reality and depth of feeling characters who are in one sense imaginary and one sense real, which could, in some circles, be a very accurate descriptor for the royal family itself.  Indeed, in the play, the very legitimacy of the throne is challenged, for we follow not only the House of Windsor and the scuttling, competitive climbers who call Buckingham Palace home but the protestors, wearing Guy Fawkes masks, who congregate outside that palace when Charles’s early reign goes horribly wrong.

Yes, something is rotten in the State of England, though the stakes may seem low at first.  In one perfect iambic phrase, our hero, played by the astonishingly perfect Tim Pigott-Smith, intones, “My life has been a ling’ring for the throne.”  (Put that up there next to Marlowe’s “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?,” by the way.)  His challenge, it seems, is to reconcile his genuine desire to do good for his country with the reality that his family is rapidly becoming irrelevant in the public eye — the readers of the Daily Mail may read with interest, nay, fascination, of the doings of the younger generation of royals, but Charles and Camilla (Margot Leicester) aren’t exactly breaking news.  But, as it turns out, that isn’t all the new king has on his plate, for when he refuses to sign a new bill limiting the power of the press in the wake of the News of the World scandal, rendering it technically unpassed, he ignites a constitutional crisis.  Suddenly the Prime Minister (Adam James), once merely an uncooperative stablemate, is an enemy in the ranks.  Harry (Richard Goulding), once comfortable playing the “buffoon” for the good of the family, has taken up with a radical protestor (Tafline Steen), and thinks he’s in love.  And William (Oliver Chris) and Kate (Lydia Wilson), who before waited just as patiently for the throne as the new paterfamilias, turn to scheming, and, eventually, treachery.  Before Charles has even been crowned, the burden of a king lies heavy.

If I compare this play to Shakespeare, it isn’t just because it’s so transcendently good, nor is it just because it comes off not as a style parody, but almost a new Elizabethan drama the world is lucky to see for the first time.  It’s because the director Rupert Goold, working with the same cast he directing in London, succeeds in shepherding a troupe of extraordinary players with the same dexterity Shakespeare once might have.  Mr. Pigott-Smith takes on Charles with all the professionalism and seriousness he might use for Lear.  Mr. Chris, who at this very theater three years ago played a masterpiece of comic posh idiocy in One Man, Two Guvnors, acquits himself so well in drama it’s shocking to realize 2012 Oliver Chris and 2015 Oliver Chris are the same person, or even in the same family.  And Ms. Wilson, as Kate, the Lady Macbeth of this play, is like a goddess of the theater descended to Earth, so perfectly does she portray the appearance-savvy traitor whose eventual loathsome betrayal is so much fun to watch I’m almost shivering describing it here.  These actors (and the rest of the cast, too, is marvelous) sink their teeth into these parts with such abandon because not only is the language beautiful, as it would be in a Shakespeare play, but they can engage with the characters, understand their motivations, because they understand the world they live in.  So does the audience.  Thanks to Mr. Bartlett, we now know how it felt to be groundlings at the Globe firsthand.

In thirty or forty years, we’ll be quoting the “GPS soliloquy” or mentioning the “kebab vendor scene” offhand by name the way we’d mention the gravedigger scene or “To be or not to be.”  They may not have exactly the staying power of Shakespeare — by its very nature this play is not exactly timeless — but they are for our times what Shakespeare’s writing was for his.  Perfect language.  Perfect acting.  Perfect staging.  Long live the king.

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.