In Yiddish, Fiddler on the Roof embraces tradition – or traditsye

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Sixty-two years ago, Fiddler on the Roof opened on Broadway. The Tony Award-winning show – nine trophies in total, including best musical – was an instant classic, and not just in the world of Jewish theatre. For more than six decades, the show has played to audiences around the world – some Jewish, most not – and over time, Fiddler, about a tradition-obsessed milkman named Tevye forced to adapt to an increasingly antisemitic world, has become one of the most enduring musicals in the canon.

In 2018, an experiment – performing the show in Yiddish for American audiences with English surtitles – exploded into a wave of renewed interest in the musical, originally written in English by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick and Joseph Stein and translated into Yiddish by Shraga Friedman in 1965.

The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s production, initially slated for six weeks in New York in 2018, instead played for a year and a half; critics and audiences alike were rapturous about how much more meaningful Tevye’s story felt when told in his mother tongue.

Now, that production – directed by Broadway legend Joel Grey (Cabaret, Chicago) – has landed in Toronto.

It’s led by the same Tevye – Steven Skybell, whose career has included a string of Fiddlers on Broadway and beyond – but features a mostly Canadian cast, few of whom spoke much Yiddish before joining this process.

Set to begin performances at the Elgin Theatre on May 25, the show is transformative, according to its producers, both of whom recall feeling profoundly affected by the production when they saw it in New York. As in opera, they say, a baseline understanding of Yiddish isn’t necessary to enjoy what’s happening onstage.

“This is a gift to this city,” says Avery Saltzman, co-artistic director of Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company. Since 2018, the group has dreamed of bringing the Yiddish Fiddler north for Canadian audiences, he says – while the pandemic threw a wrench in early plans, the Harold Green team has worked behind the scenes to ensure Canadians get to experience the production.

“It’s hard to explain the feeling of it, but the Yiddish adds a deeper level to the story,” he continues. “Even if you don’t look at the surtitles, you feel that sense of community and solidarity and peace and lovingness, just in the language.” (The Toronto production will include surtitles in both English and Russian.)

For co-artistic director David Eisner, performing in Yiddish is a cultural imperative: Before the Holocaust, an estimated 11 to 13 million people spoke the language. Now, estimates hover around 600,000 native Yiddish speakers worldwide.

“This show is about recognizing the past – and understanding that it’s a past that could have a future,” he says. “This language is a connective tissue to who Jewish communities are as people.”

For the actors, language-learning has been all-consuming. During the audition process, performers were asked to demonstrate how well they could learn the “music” of the dialect – the rhythm of the syntax, the pitch of its inflection. Once cast, they were given private coachings with associate director Matthew (Motl) Didner. Many have downloaded Duolingo for nightly grammar brush-ups.

“You really have to work hard to get it right,” says Eisner. “When I saw this in New York, I was taken aback: I started getting emotional even when I didn’t want to. It came over me like a wave, the authenticity of the story, the intimacy of it. And I was surprised by the investment the audience had in it.”

Even Skybell, whose string of Tevyes has included the Yiddish New York production, has had to double down on his language skills. Like many Jewish children, he grew up hearing Yiddish but not speaking it: “I cursed that, because I could have had a leg up on the Yiddish Fiddler if I’d learned it as a child,” he jokes. A few adult classes gave him some Yiddish vocabulary, but he was by no means fluent when he started working through one of Broadway’s most prized leading roles in the language.

“Learning the Yiddish was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “Tevye never leaves the stage. He never stops talking. And I realized that, as an actor, I don’t only need to know what I’m saying, but what everyone else is saying to me. So I kind of have to know the whole show.” Rehearsals in Toronto, he says, have allowed him to brush up on whatever’s gotten rusty – small accent flourishes and pronunciations, mostly.

But one of the biggest takeaways from this experience, he says, has been seeing how the Yiddish translation fundamentally affects the story – not just how it’s told.

“In the English version, Tevye seems a little like he doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he’s quoting the Good Book,” says Skybell. “But of course he does, he has a Jewish education and all these Talmudic sources. He’s not a fool. Tevye seems so much more real, and placed in time, with the Yiddish. I really, really cherish that.”

Tracy Michailidis plays Tevye’s wife Golde, the sharp-tongued mother to five daughters. Like Skybell, the Toronto-raised actor is no stranger to Fiddler: She played middle daughter Hodel in the Stratford Festival’s production in 2000.

“I found doing this show so healing,” she says of her time in the Stratford run. “To come back to the piece half a lifetime later is such a gift.” Michailidis spoke some Yiddish before joining the cast of Fiddler – she portrayed Halina in the off-Mirvish production of Indecent when it played in 2022 – and she speaks Greek, which shares similar sounds.

“The Yiddish really helped me find the character, and find the world of Fiddler,” she says. “It’s been painstaking… I’m learning things phonetically, but also writing down what every single word means. There’s a music to the language – I’m learning the music. It’s closer to learning another instrument than to learning another language.”

Even Grey, who’s been directing Fiddler’s Toronto transfer over Zoom, was new to Yiddish before working on the 2018 production in New York. “I do not speak the language in which this beautiful story excels,” he says over the phone. Grey, 94, is practically Broadway royalty – he won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Tonys in 2023.

It was important for his Fiddler to use a mix of Jews and gentiles, he explains – the show is not an exercise in Yiddish linguistics or competency, but rather one in specific, grounded storytelling.

“We cared about hiring the best actors, regardless of what they spoke,” he says. “This is a universal story of people trying to live their lives, people who get caught up in history and are totally obliterated. But it’s told with a light touch, a human touch. The Canadian cast has accepted that challenge.”