Word: fiddler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...FIDDLER ON THE ROOF strays far from Broadway to record the gentle joys and occasional sorrows of a Jewish community in a Russian town in 1905. In his finest performance to date, Zero Mostel gives this musical an unfaltering heartbeat...
...Fiddler on the Roof. Zero Mostel is a bundle of Zero Mostels, and a fresh one comes to view with each new performance. He can dance like a bear, sing like a frog and outstare an owl. A rhinoceros cannot readily distinguish Mostel from a rhinoceros. What links all of Mostel's roles is his gift for reaching the heart of a character and sympathetically synchronizing every heartbeat in the house with his. This gift is greatly evident in Fiddler on the Roof, a pleasantly nostalgic musical of Jewish community life in a tiny Russian village just prior...
...Fiddler is sweet in spirit, true in tone, and its shawled, long-skirted women and bearded, black-hatted men look more like folk than showfolk. Jerome Robbins' dances are closer to the soil than to concrete, and a male wedding dance with empty wine bottles perched on the men's hats is a tingling display of rigid torsos and agile Slavic slides...
Paradoxically, Fiddler's conscientious good taste may have robbed it of the richer seasoning of the Sholem Aleichem tales it comes from. Fiddler does not swell with Aleichem's yeasty joy, pain and mystery of living. Zero does...
...lovely Swedish import Ulla Sallert. Book and lyrics are by prolific Sidney Michaels, who adapted Tchin-Tchin. Sherlock Holmes would hardly have approved, but he and Watson become song-and-dance men in the long-postponed Baker Street, now Broadway-bound with Fritz Weaver under the deerstalker. Fiddler on the Roof is nominally based on Sholom Aleichem's moralistic tales of Jewish life in pre-revolutionary Russia, with irrepressible Zero Mostel in the leading role. The season's most technically ambitious adaptation will be a Broadway version of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, with book...