THEATER REVIEWS : Bosnia Gives a New Tune to ‘Fiddler’

NEWPORT BEACH —  Even in an undernourished, half-hearted staging at the Newport Theatre Arts Center, “Fiddler on the Roof” has a new, bitter identity.

Indeed, it really wouldn’t matter where it was staged: the Joseph Stein book, combined with Sheldon Harnick’s still-witty lyrics and Jerry Bock’s deep-in-the-shtetl music, carries freshly dark resonance because of a tragedy everyone is now summing up in six-letter shorthand.

Bosnia.

Tevye the milkman has always been one of the great Broadway Everyman creatures; his “If I Were a Rich Man” is the supreme song of just the kind of immigrant who seeks out the mythical gold in American streets. (Stein’s “Rags,” now having a Los Angeles premiere at the Colony Studio Theatre, is a kind of “Fiddler” sequel, in which a Tevye-like figure has arrived in America.)

Through the combination of his stalwart self-deprecation in the face of misery and the 1905 terror presented by the Czarist Russian army and his lonely, funny talks with God, Tevye has become an American musical comedy symbol of a popular collective memory of where we came from.

The musical’s climactic depiction of Tevye’s village of Anatevka being forcibly depopulated has always been read as a Holocaust metaphor. But with the world watching a new chapter in the grim, ongoing saga called “ethnic cleansing,” “Fiddler” has suddenly attained new power as a musical, with a rare, solid inner core of sadness.

No, it really wouldn’t matter where it was staged right now (imagine a “Fiddler” staged in Sarajevo, where an indomitable company recently did “Hair”).

Still, one could wish that director-choreographer Larry Watts had put the passion into this Newport production that the times demand. The village set, functionally designed by Gary White, looks squeezed on this stage, and the smaller roles are filled with actors who look like they wandered in from somewhere far, far from the Russian farmlands.

Stephen Grant Reynolds’ Tevye, on the other hand, looks and sounds so, well, Anatevkan, that it only accents the thinness of so many of the characterizations around him. He’s a thick, juicy corned beef-on-rye amid lots of peanut butter-on-white bread.

Reynolds’ dilemma is the perennial one of the actor truly inhabiting a role when too many of his cohorts seem clueless. His affectingly gruff demeanor and fog-cutter voice concentrate all the energy on stage; everyone around him is all too willing to let him carry scenes.

While Tevye is a star role among star roles, and while he’s Stein’s symbol of humanity’s capacity to survive with grace, there are other characters here. It’s almost too much Reynolds’ show.

Not completely, though.

Lisa Gary’s Golde, Tevye’s enduring wife, carries her maternal burdens with a kind of weary charm, and embraces Golde’s anti-glamour with a bear hug. Erin de los Cobos’ Tzeitel, Tevye and Golde’s eldest and first of three daughters to marry, feels the most pained on cutting the apron strings, but Adriana Sanchez’ Hodel and Gretchen Weiss’ Chava certainly sing with feeling.

Rick Shapiro’s Motel is appropriately obeisant as Tzeitel’s beloved, though Ken Larsen’s revolutionist Perchik isn’t even on a slow burn, let alone on fire.

Other problems include the uncommanding presences of Arthur Shef’s village rabbi and Rusty Brown’s Lazar Wolf, a group of absurdly wimpy Czarist soldiers, passionless dancing and a taped score by musical director Brad A. Steward on a wheezy synthesizer sounding so distant that it may be drifting in from the neighboring village.

But Reynolds acts and sings to the heart of the matter, and there’s something about watching little Brian David Batsel climb down from the roof as the Fiddler with his glued-on beard and take a bow that says everything about community theater. Or maybe we should call it Village Theatre.

* “Fiddler on the Roof,” Newport Theatre Arts Center, 2501 Cliff Drive, Newport Beach. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sunday matinees, 2 p.m. Ends June 13. $15. (714) 631-0288. Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes.

Stephen Grant Reynolds: Tevye

Lisa Gary: Golde

Erin de los Cobos: Tzeitel

Adriana Sanchez: Hodel

Gretchen Weiss: Chava

Shirley Horowitz: Yente

Rick Shapiro: Motel

Ken Larsen: Perchik

Rusty Brown: Lazar Wolf

Arthur Shef: Rabbi

Marty T. Maurer: Mendel

John Herrera: Fyedka

A Newport Theatre Arts Center production. Music by Jerry Bock. Lyrics by Sheldon Harnick. Book by Joseph Stein. Directed and choreographed by Larry Watts. Musical director: Brad A. Steward. Lights: Larry Davis. Set: Gary White. Costumes: Tom Phillips. Production stage manager: Mike Fuller.