Only 50 days until July 4th, when Fiddler on the Roof premieres (in Yiddish) off-Broadway. And now, we know who will be in it.

If you’ve heard of anyone in the cast, it’s Jackie Hoffman, the Emmy-nominated comedian (for Feud) whose Broadway credits have included scene-stealing in everything from Hairspray to Xanadu to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. She is also extremely, very, super Jewish. She has performed musical parodies of pretty much every Jewish holiday you can think of— including Shavuot. Hoffman will be playing Yenta the matchmaker, because of course she will.

Your Tevya is Steven Skybell, who has been on Broadway several times, including in the last revival of Fiddler (he was a replacement Lazar Wolf). He grew up Jewish in Lubbock Texas, which would make shtetl-dwellers’ heads spin.

Jill Abramovitz will play Golda, and, yes, her Broadway credits too include the last run of Fiddler (she replaced Grandma Tzeitel, and understudied both Golda and Yenta). She’s also a songwriter, including contributing lyrics for Broadway intermarriage musical It Shoulda Been You.

Neither of the leads are big names, so it’s exciting to see what could be the big breaks of actors who have been in the business for some time.

The supporting cast is:

Kirk Geritano as Avram, Samantha Hahn as Bielke, Cameron Johnson as Fyedka, Daniel Kahn as Perchik, Ben Liebert as Motel, Stephanie Lynne Mason as Hodel, Rosie Jo Neddy as Chava, Raquel Nobile as Shprintze, Bruce Sabath as Lazar Wolf, Jodi Snyder as Fruma-Sarah, Lauren Jeanne Thomas as The Fiddler, Bobby Underwood as the Constable, Michael Yashinsky as Mordcha, Rachel Zatcoff as Tzeitel.

Also in the production is: Jennifer Babiak, Joanne Borts, Josh Dunn, Michael Einav, Evan Mayer, Nick Raynor, Kayleen Seidl, Adam Shapiro, and James Monroe Stevko.

Of course, the director is the legendary Joel Grey. Some of the cast members have experiences performing in Yiddish, but for some, it’ll be like a mamaloshen boot camp.

See you in July!

Photo by Joan Marcus

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The National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene gives the people what they want. “Folk” is in the name, after all. And obviously, the people want Fiddler on the Roof performed in the mamaloshen. Naturally. If you don’t, there is something wrong with you.

The time will be July. The place will be the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan. Most other details are still forthcoming, but the musical’s lyricist, Sheldon Harnick, and the great director Jerry Zaks are both signed on as production advisors. Beyond that, we only have this vague, and honestly sort of confusing statement by the Folksbiene’s executive Christopher Massimine to go by. He says the production “will be presented in the context of a historical retrospective hypothetically introducing the idea that Sholem Aleichem has been present at the conception of the adaptation of his work for the musical stage.”

What? So, does that mean a framing device where Sholem Aleichem appears as a character? Is this going to be for Fiddler what Indecent was for God of Vengeance? Do we breathe new life into Tevye and his family by making the actors break the fourth wall or something?

“The idea we are putting forth would be an accurate re-creation of how this musical might look in its native Yiddish tongue,” Massimine continued.

What does re-creation mean? Is the translation new? Is the choreography different, like in the most recent Broadway revival?

WHAT IS GOING ON?

In any case, this production is far from the first performance of Fiddler in Yiddish (to say nothing of other Yiddish adaptations of Aleichem’s work). Back in the 1960s, only a couple of years after the Broadway production premiered, original director/choreographer Jerome Robbins helmed a Yiddish-language version of the show— in Israel (there’s even a cast album, and it’s great).

So we have a ways to wait before seeing Yiddish Fiddler onstage, but ideally more information will come soon. In the meantime, stay strong, and listen to every single cast recording of the show there is (and there are at least a dozen,) over and over to pick your favorite.

UPDATE, AS OF MARCH 16: JOEL GREY IS DIRECTING THIS PRODUCTION. GET. HYPE.

Photo of  the 2015 revival of Fiddler on the Roof by Joan Marcus

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As the sun sets in an old marketplace in an unnamed Eastern European shtetl, a young man drinks by himself in a tavern, an old recluse studies holy texts in a cave, a wedding jester plots a revolution against God, and a young bride lies dead at the bottom of a well. She is Sheindl, the young man is her beloved Noson, a wise talmudic student, the recluse is Itzik, a wealthy man that Sheindl was married to against her will, and the jester is the badkhn from Sheindl’s wedding, whose crass jokes led to her untimely suicide.

Thus begins Alexandra Aron’s adaptation of I. L. Peretz’s classic Yiddish play, A Night in the Old Marketplace. In Aron’s version, the play, recently expanded and co-presented by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, has become a multimedia klezmer opera, featuring five singers, animation, narration, and a four-piece band. Aron has assembled a first rate ensemble of musicians and vocalists, including Klezmatics vocalist Lorin Sklamberg as Noson, Aaron Alexander of the Klezmer Brass Allstars, and Rob Curto of the Brazilian band Forró in the Dark.

The work combines both macabre humor and lofty ideas, weaving together such disparate themes as faith, mysticism, reflections on love and death, and an extended meditation on the Book of Job. The breaking of a wedding glass is compared to the shattering of the primordial vessels in the kabbalistic act of creation, the jester seduces a gargoyle, wrestles a tin rooster, and raises an army of the undead, and Noson weds Sheindl from beyond the grave. All throughout, nocturnal spirits swirl in the marketplace, such as the Singers of Brod, an itinerant family of Jewish musicians who died several years before in a plague.

The songs, composed by the Klezmatics trumpeter Frank London with words by Glen Berger, effectively recreate Yiddish folk melodies using English lyrics. The band, which consists of Alexander on drums, Curto on accordion and piano, Brandon Seabrook on electric guitar and Ron Caswell on tuba, provide able backing to the vocalists, occasionally venturing the terrains of rock and jazz but mostly remain within a klezmer vein. The vocalists are all capable performers, but with the exception of Manu Narayan, offer little in the way of physical dynamism to complement their voices. Edgar Oliver contributes tongue in cheek narration throughout, anchoring the convoluted opera in a way that makes it more readily comprehensible.

Perhaps one of the greatest pleasures of the work consists in the video-projection, animation that references both Marc Chagall and Monty Python, evoking the mythological shtetl with equal part irony and nostalgia. Housewives and ritual slaughterers cavort amongst typical wooden houses, while Jewish socialists and Cossacks face off in a headless dance. The overall effect is one of both homage and irreverence, offering a loving portrait of the lost world of Ashkenaz that succeeds in being equally timeless and contemporary.

Like the wedding jester, Aron and her ensemble bring back the ghosts of the Yiddish theatre and of Jewish shtetl life, allowing them to frolic in the old marketplace for one more night, reliving their past loves and losses and the world from which they came.

A Night in the Old Marketplace plays on Saturday, May 6 at 9:30pm at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park.

Michael Rom is from Vancouver, Canada, and is currently completing a PhD in Brazilian history. 

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• An Orthodox police cadet claims he was dismissed from the police academy for refusing to trim his beard.

• Don’t think about not picking up after your dog in Jerusalem, because the city might test the DNA, match it to your dog, and fine you.

• Madonna showed some skin, quite intentionally, at her concert in Istanbul. (NSFW)

• Brush up on your Yiddish: Kulturfest is here.

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