Having a queen of sci-fi make this cameo is among the show’s campy touches, like Carlos J. The production places the “Ring” in the metaverse, with Valhalla as a digital creation whose back story is recounted by Sigourney Weaver in a video introduction.
Yet a casual audience member could also enjoy it at face value, a self-contained drama with the subtlety and punch of short fiction.
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His excerpt from “Die Walküre” - the 85-minute third act, called here “The Valkyries” - reflects Wagner’s ambitions for the work’s stage magic, but also the state of opera performance in our time, by presenting it as a sci-fi movie filmed against a green screen and rendered live with the help of Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. The brightest director in the United States, he put on a drive-through “Götterdämmerung” in a Detroit parking garage when live performance was virtually nonexistent during the pandemic and, as artistic director of Detroit Opera, has made that city an opera destination - along with Los Angeles, where his company the Industry has created the most innovative, original productions of recent years. Sharon is also woefully absent from New York’s stages. It is the finest “Fiddler” I’ve seen, one that could be adapted with ease and success on Broadway - where, in addition to the Met, Kosky belongs. And the production’s nearly three hours breeze by. Otto Pichler’s choreography, a nod to and break from Jerome Robbins’s original, left the audience on Saturday roaring. This year, it’s impossible to see the show’s characters - inhabitants of present-day Ukraine - haphazardly packing up their lives for an unknown future and not think of the war there.Īnd yet Kosky’s staging is also entertaining. The last Broadway revival, in 2015, was haunted by the Syrian refugee crisis. “Fiddler” is specific, a tale of change coming rapidly to the traditions of Anatevka in the early 20th century yet it has resonated time and again, whether for its themes of rigidity amid progress or for its depictions of intolerance and exile. Yet while the forces were operatic, the scenic design, by Rufus Didwiszus, wasn’t the first act sprang out of and around a unit set of wardrobes and dressers stacked like a barricade, some of their doors and drawers opened to reveal lingering clothes, as if they had been hastily emptied and gathered in a public square.
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Many more: This is a “Fiddler” beyond Broadway proportions, with a cast large enough to fill out a shtetl and a full orchestra, conducted with committed enthusiasm and dancelike flexibility by Kimberly Grigsby. Among them are a wealth of sympathetic, skilled performers: Debbie Gravitte as a resilient Golde Lauren Marcus, Austen Danielle Bohmer and Maya Jacobson as her and Tevye’s pathbreaking daughters Drew Redington as a meek then audacious Motel Adam Kaplan as a brazen yet desperate Perchik Michael Nigro as a honeyed Fyedka and more.
Out from the wardrobe steps Tevye - Steven Skybell, who played the role in the recent Yiddish-language “Fiddler” Off Broadway and who again lends the character the sculptural dimensions of a Shakespeare protagonist - then the rest of the villagers from Anatevka. He pauses, and the tune continues with a whistle from within. At the center is a wardrobe and inside is a violin, on which the boy begins to play the show’s opening theme. It begins with something like a summoning of the past: A child (Drake Wunderlich) rolls across the stage on a scooter, beats emanating from his headphones. Most natural, perhaps, is the way in which Kosky’s take on the musical - unaltered, but for welcome Yiddish additions - unfolds as an act of memory, at once melancholy and warm.
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