Stop miking Bryn Terfel. Stop over-miking musicals; the show voices in a hybrid cast don’t need much. Too much ruined English National Opera’s recent Sweeney Todd, and in this Proms adaptation of Grange Park Opera’s summer crowd-pleaser it sent the voices ricocheting around the Albert Hall, making mush of the words and stridency of the few belt-it-out moments. It also made it hard to assess what seemed like a resourceful staging of a baggy-monster musical with four or five great songs, no masterpiece of musical theatre (unlike My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof’s near-contemporary).
The idea of a shtetl show wasn’t at all a bad idea, and goes some way to accounting for Fiddler on the Roof’s enormous popularity on Broadway, where it ran for over seven years and over 3,000 performances. But Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick never found a meaningful way of binding together the Sholem Aleichem tales they selected. Despite the constant presence of a mournful fiddler (for Grange Park, Houcheng Kian, excellent), courtesy of Chagall, who hated the musical, and the various refrains of the opening number “Tradition” as that very supposed virtue falls apart, there’s no music for the real emotional core of the piece, or to lead the action forward, least of all in the two piecemeal finales.
Best is the klezmer style that gives a special flavour to ensemble chutzpah and an almost painful bittersweet quality, especially wistful in "Sunrise, Sunset" and beautifully underlined by David Charles Abell’s sensitive sway over an often luminous BBC Concert Orchestra (the miking at least doesn't harm them as it did the Britten Sinfonia in the turkey of last year's Proms, the horrible Rufus Wainwright late-night indulgence). Abell has tracked down Don Walker’s long-lost original orchestrations, with soulful roles for accordion, mandolin and lute; it’s not surprising if the score occasionally joins hand with Shostakovich in Jewish folk poetic mood.
Is the character of Tevye, the philosophical and (up to a point) adaptable milkman, enough to hold the show together? People used to think Chaim Topol did just that, though I found his routines cheesy when he returned to the role in London in 1983 (and I only ever got halfway through the film). Terfel's natural charisma and effortlessly dominating figure kept it all believably low-key except for the explosions of anger and tearful emotion. He phrased every number with originality, vocal colour – much as the amplification threatened to flatten it out – and suavity when needed; who thought “If I Were A Rich Man” could have sounded this fresh?
Grange Park's supporting cast was good: Janet Fullerlove as the matriarch (pictured above with Terfel) brought much-needed pathos to her evasive answers in one of the only two numbers to stand out in Act Two, Tevye’s question “Do You Love Me?”, and Katie Hall struck the right note of pathos in the other, as the second of the five daughters to make her own marriage choice leaves to join her activist husband in Siberia. Jordan Simon Pollard as said idealist also managed to make something of one of the more anodyne numbers. The worst was an interminable scene in which Tevye fakes a nightmare to persuade his wife that another daughter should marry her beloved tailor and not the old butcher; it was mostly the miking’s fault if not a word could be made out of the two ghost-women in this narrative.
Other set-pieces worked better, thanks mostly to the superb negotiation of the space in front of the orchestra and dance routines (one pictured above) from the ever-dependable Lucy Burge, with just the right degree of Jewish and Russian nationalist traditional steps (Burge didn'tget a biography in the programme; nor did the original director Antony McDonald, though there was one for the Proms stager Peter Relton). At moments like this the spirits soared, but Fiddler on the Roof is too much a work of fits and starts for the magic to last for long. Bring back Grange Park Opera to the Proms, bring Garsington and Longborough too, but mike-free.