Yiddish Fiddler Will Move Off-Broadway In February
It’s next year in Midtown for the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbeine’s production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Playbill reports that the all-Yiddish production of the musical, directed by the legendary performer Joel Grey and translated into Yiddish by Shraga Friedman, will transfer from lower Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage to Off-Broadway’s Stage 42 where it will begin performances February 11, 2019, prior to a February 21 opening. This news follows a sold-out run, four extensions and near-universal acclaim for the downtown staging, which opened July 15 and is scheduled for its final curtain on December 30.
Steven Skybell, who plays the the lead role of Tevye the dairyman and Jackie Hoffman who plays matchmaker Yente will reprise their roles. Additional casting for the transfer is forthcoming.
The new run, which will be a commercial one, brings its Yiddishkeit tradition to a larger audience courtesy of English and Russian supertitles. Of course, it helps that the 1964 musical, written in English by Joseph Stein with music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, is known to many Americans already. But if the crowd comes out singing “Ven Ikh Bin a Rotshild” instead of “If I Was a Rich Man” we’ll call it a victory.
PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture intern. He can be reached at Grisar@Forward.com.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO