A SHTETL REBUILT IN THE ROUND

Douglas Sills leads Signature’s spare, deeply felt Fiddler on the Roof
that puts Anatevka’s communal heartbeat at the center

The beauty of tradition, Tevye the Milkman tells us, is that “everyone knows who they are.” At Signature Theatre, where Fiddler on the Roof unfolds in the round, that certainty is tested again and again as the villagers of Anatevka, a turn-of-the-century shtetl (a small Jewish village in eastern Europe) navigate poverty, Czarist oppression, and, for Tevye, the more intimate upheavals of daughters who insist on choosing their own futures. “You might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck. It isn’t easy,” he laments.

 Douglas Sills (Tevye) with Lily Burka (Hodel), Beatrice Owens (Tzeitel),
Mia Goodman (Shprintze), Rosie Jo Neddy (Chava), and Allison Mintz (Bielke)The cast

Vulnerable, authentic, and terribly moving, Douglas Sills—a Broadway legend with the comic instincts of a vaudevillian and the gravitas of a tragedian—feels simultaneously larger than life and painfully human as Tevye. His monologues to God aren’t tossed to the heavens; they seem pulled straight from a man exhausted by the daily calculations of surviving in a world designed to erase him. And yes, when he launches into “If I Were a Rich Man,” Sills deploys the famous shimmies, gyrations and guttural riffs of “Ya ba dibba dibba dum,” but there’s longing threaded through the humor in his fantasy of wealth and honor.

Douglas Sills

Though Tevye is an incredibly well-drawn leading character and dominates the narrative, the substance of the play lies in Anatevka’s large community. Signature’s staging insists on the power of the collective. Director Joe Calarco gathers the entire ensemble around a mammoth wooden square—modular tables rearranged throughout the show to conjure homes, streets, and gathering spaces. Creative and adaptable, yet simple, the idea is executed with focus by set designer Misha Kackman, and it pays off: the community feels physically braided together, even as traditions begin to fray.

Douglas Sills, Jeremy Radin (Lazar Wolf) and the castThe cast

Choreographer Sarah Parker extends that sense of communal force into the musical numbers. “Sabbath Prayer” becomes a soft mass of ritual, a community inhaling and exhaling as one. When Tevye, the affluent butcher Lazar Wolf (Jeremy Radin) and the male villagers celebrate Lazar’s arranged marriage to Tevye’s eldest, Tzeitel, “To Life” bursts outward—brawny, boisterous, and muscularly danced on every available surface. “Tevye’s Dream” turns anarchic, a carnival of bodies and ghosts swirling around a man desperate to deceive his wife Golde (Amie Bermowitz) for the sake of Tzeitel. Parker’s powerful choreography embraces every inch of space on the floor and on the tabletops instead of shrinking from it.

Douglas Sills, Amie Bermowitz (Golde), and the castDouglas Sills and Amie Bermowitz

The supporting cast isn’t ornamental; they shape the emotional temperature of the production. Radin brings a wounded dignity to Lazar Wolf, while the daughters—Beatrice Owens’ steady Tzeitel, Lily Burka’s resolute Hodel, and Rosie Jo Neddy’s quietly aching Chava—give the piece its moral center as Tevye’s life changes with each independent daughter’s choice in marriage. Bermowitz’s Golde is flinty and funny, the kind of partnership that makes Tevye’s emotional evolution feel earned rather than dropped in from the narrative gods.

Douglas Sills and Rosie Jo Neddy

Under the baton of Jon Kalbfleisch, the small orchestra plays with a clarity that highlights Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s endlessly rich score. And Jennifer Rickard’s bewitching fiddler—haunting, agile, unshowy—is exactly what this staging needs: an omen, a conscience, a reminder of fragility.

Stephen Russell Murray (Mendel), Joseph Fierberg (Mordcha),
Reagan Pender (Avram), and Ariel Neydavoud (Perchik)Douglas Sills and Jeremy Radin

By the time Anatevka is ordered to uproot itself, the production has done the work to make that exodus genuinely harrowing. The final stretch doesn’t aim for sentiment so much as inevitability, yet it’s a tearjerker. Signature isn’t trying to out-muscle the 1971 film or gild the Broadway classic written by Joseph Stein; instead, it offers a spare, considered retelling that emphasizes community, continuity, and the quiet heroism of adapting to life’s changes, a key to survival when the world refuses to hold still.

Ariel Neydavoud, Lily Burka and the castJake Loewenthal (Motel), Douglas Sills, Chris Bloch (Rabbi), and Beatrice Owens

While the show is built on the image of a man clinging to balance atop a roof, Calarco’s production delivers something sturdier than a metaphorical tightrope act; nothing here feels precarious. It is confident, emotionally clear-eyed, and far more grounded than the metaphor suggests.

Douglas Sills

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photos by Daniel Rader and Christopher Mueller

Fiddler on the Roof
Signature Theatre
4200 Campbell Ave in Arlington, VA
2 hours and 50 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission
ends on January 25, 2026
for tickets, call 703.820.9771 or visit Signature

for more shows, visit Theatre in DC

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