The Big Picture and the Closeup

A jukebox musical, whatever its dramatic blueprint, is first and foremost a delivery vehicle for nostalgia. This is a popular thing and to a great extent a good one. It is no easy trick, though. Almost every song tells some sort of story. The stories in most songs, even the simplest ones, imply surprisingly extensive contexts, and taken together, these contexts tangle rapidly. There exist only a few possible fundamental ways to minimize those tangles.

Fiddler traffics in the safest kind of nostalgia, reminiscences of a world no one would want to return to. It’s a lovely flirtation with a way of life that is safely dead. Naturally, none of that would have mattered, had the songs not been so infernally catchy, the dancing not so athletic and exotic, the sentimentality not so powerfully schmaltzy, and the love-stories, even perfunctorily sketched, not so appealing.