With each production, 'Fiddler on the Roof' brings new meaning

LACONIA — A story of family and tradition, the themes of "Fiddler on the Roof" still connect with audiences, some 60 years after its Broadway premiere. Its latest staging with Powerhouse Theatre Collaborative will bring some back to familiar roles, and some into completely new ones. 

Powerhouse, the Colonial Theatre’s resident company, will stage the musical Aug. 9-11. Director Bryan Halperin is excited for the show.

“It really is just a sort of a marvel of the musical theater and in that, it speaks to just about every culture, every segment of society and everybody can find something to relate to in the story,” Halperin said.

Set in the fictional town of Anatevka, Russia, "Fiddler on the Roof" is about a dairy peddler named Tevye, who grapples with tradition, love and change, all during societal upheaval and growing antisemitism.

Halperin said professionally, he believes "Fiddler on the Roof" is one of the best musicals in Broadway history, but he also has a personal connection to it. He and his wife Johanna, who are both Powerhouse producers, met in a "Fiddler" production in college in 1993. The two of them almost didn’t participate in the production, but after they did, the rest was history. It’s been 30 years since then, and both are excited to revisit it now with a new perspective.

“We were playing the sons and daughters back then, and now we’re the mamas and the papas, and we can relate to the story on a different level for that reason,” Halperin said. “It will be fun to look at it again and sort of remind ourselves of the time when we were we were the young lovers who wanted to break traditions, and now the parents worrying about the future for our children with the state of the world.”

While Bryan and Johanna are married now in real life, in their college production, it didn’t exactly happen that way.

“She played Tzeitel and I played Perchik. So, we didn't get together in the show. I got to watch her marry somebody else.”

Tzeitel's father Tevye is being played by Joel Iwaskiewicz, an English teacher who runs the theater program at Exeter High School. Iwaskiewicz comes all the way from Exeter to participate in Powerhouse productions. He started working with the Halperins in Concord eight years ago, and immediately joined them when they started Powerhouse in 2020.

“There's something the way he and his wife Johanna run the program there. There's something magnetic about it,” he said. “You're drawn in by their passion and their creativity. But then you're held there by their kindness and their generosity.”

This will be Iwaskiewicz’s third time appearing in "Fiddler on the Roof." The last time was his senior year at Nashua High School South in 2006, where he also played Tevye. This show has particular importance to him as well, as his grandmother from Montreal, Canada, saw him in the performance. She was his last living grandparent and it was the only show she ever saw him perform.

“She attended every performance of the run and it was so special to have her there and to be able to share that story,” he said. "So now — a literal lifetime later, I was 18 last time I played the part — 18 years later, I'm getting to play the part again. Approaching it feels really different because now I'm a dad. So the role of this father, as a father, adds a whole new a whole new layer of meaning. Which is exciting, but I know is also going to really drum up a much different emotional connection than I know I had last time, but I'm really grateful that I get the chance to step into a part like this again.”

Despite being a long time since both the Halperins and Iwaskiewicz performed in "Fiddler," the musical remains relevant today. With the war in Ukraine and conflict in Israel and Palestine, the themes of the musical remain topical. Barbara Katz, vice president of marketing and public relations for Temple B’nai Israel, affirmed this, and said it was great to see a production regarding antisemitism only two decades after the Holocaust, when many survivors who experienced it were still around.

“There was a lot of joyousness around this production that was on Broadway and able to tell the story of how people were ejected from their homeland,” Katz said. “What their lives were like, in these little shtetls, in these little communities. How they held to their Jewish traditions, and then how those Jewish traditions started to seep away as the world encroached more into their community. It's a very relevant, very relevant and important piece for us today.”

Halperin made these contemporary connections as well. He finds theater as a medium can help build understanding.

“Using theater to create empathy and share stories from other cultures and other places that you might not be familiar with is a great way to create an understanding. And a reminder that we share a common humanity and we shouldn't be consistently make the same mistakes of persecuting for silly reasons,” he said. “Whether it's religious or where they're from, or what language they speak or economic level.”

Halperin is also proud to bring this musical to Laconia, where there is a small Jewish community who gathers at Temple B'nai Israel. Katz visited a recent rehearsal to inform cast members about Jewish traditions.

“We live in a very non-Jewish community in central New Hampshire, and I think sharing a little bit of the traditions and culture in our community, especially in this time, while it's going on in the world, is an added bonus,” he said.

This production of "Fiddler on the Roof" will be distinct from other productions as Halperin will be taking some creative liberties to the structure of the story and Tevye’s journey. Following "Fiddler," Powerhouse is offering a reading of a play called "The Immigrant," Sept. 7-8, at the Laconia Public Library and Congregational Church of Laconia. It is about one Jewish immigrant’s experience arriving in Galveston, Texas, in the early 1900s, and explores the experience of those coming to America to seek a better life from poverty or violence in their homelands. It will act as a companion piece and epilogue to their "Fiddler on the Roof" production.

For more information and tickets, visit powerhousenh.org/showstickets.