Fiddler on the Roof

In 2015, when millions of Syrian refugees had no guarantee of a lasting welcome in Europe or the United States, director Bartlett Sher opened his Broadway revival of the epic 1964 musical on a cold, empty, modern-day train platform, as a man holding a book of Sholem Aleichem’s tales of Anatevka scanned the landscape for any sign of the shtetl that stood there a century before. The starkness of that frame, grounding audiences in a comfortless present, looking into a past for what has been lost, signaled a definite departure from a Fiddler that had become cemented, to quote the famous first-act song, in tradition. So did Sher’s choice of Hofesh Shechter, the contemporary dance choreographer regional audiences have seen at the American Dance Festival, to replace Jerome Robbins’s iconic original choreography. But no shortage of patrons are interested in seeing an old work with new eyes; only a few tickets remain for the one-week visit by this professional touring version at DPAC. —Byron Woods