Swiftly fly the years

A strong case could be made for Fiddler on the Roof as the perfect musical—memorable songs with roots set deep in the traditional folk music of Eastern European Jewry; love stories that offer up just enough realism (and a little heartbreak) to balance out any lingering fairy-tale nonsense; a main character who is both frustrating and lovable; and historical context that leaves the entire story teetering on the precipice of tragedy, like a—well, like a fiddler on the roof.

This year’s Music Circus production—the 12th—gives us the glorious Bob Amaral as Tevye the milkman, who shoulders the burdens of his life, picks up his milk cart, and argues with God, his wife, and himself. The world changes around him, and he changes to meet it, kicking and screaming.

Now, that’s something we can all understand.

Adrienne Barbeau—memorable from stage, screen and General Hospital, if you’re not old enough to remember Maude—is Tevye’s wife, Golde, in a performance that matches Amaral’s Tevye tit for tat. Yep, she’s a Sacramento native who originally debuted at Music Circus as a child, and yep, she first made her mark on Broadway playing middle daughter Hodel (with, for a while at least, an equally young Bette Midler playing her sister Tzeitel).

She’s a pro, and it shows.

So when you throw in lovely, tuneful young actresses as their daughters (Lauren T. Mack, Leah Horowitz and Kristen J. Smith) and handsome young actors as the daughters’ suitors (Allen E. Read, Jordan Bondurant and Will Taylor), add in some fantastic dancers for the sequence at the inn and “The Bottle Dance” at the wedding, and top it all off with the usual high Music Circus production standards (direction by Glenn Casale and choreography by Bob Richard), you have a sublime production of a classic show.

Of course, like so many great musicals, that’s because it starts with a story that resonates on a number of levels. Sholem Aleichem’s stories about Tevye the milkman are funny and smart, but as we’re watching from the early 21st century, not the late 19th; we know that Tevye’s daughters head off to cities—Warsaw and Kraków—where the Jewish communities will be extinguished by the time his grandchildren are grown.

The angel of history faces backward, gazing on the chaos behind it; that’s why “Sunrise, Sunset” is sung in a minor key.