The long-awaited Toronto run of Fiddler on the Roof performed in Yiddish (with subtitles) which was an off-Broadway hit, finally opens this May. In New York, the production’s original six weeks first stretched to six months, then wound up playing for about two years through extended runs, and earned several theatre critics’ awards for best musical revival in 2019.
Toronto’s show, produced by Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company (HGJTC), features a Canadian supporting cast (13 of 24 of whom are Jewish), alongside several members of the New York creative team. Most of the Canadian actors in the supporting cast learned to speak Yiddish as part of their preparation for the show.
New York-based director Joel Grey (Tony Award winner), lead actor Steven Skybell, and musical supervisor Zalman Mlotek (both Tony Award nominees), are on board as key anchors of the show that debuted in 2018.
The Canadian production had been in the works for years, originally envisioned as one stop on an international tour, but that plan was shelved with the COVID pandemic, until HGJTC revived the idea a couple of years ago in conversations with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF), which produced the New York show.
After months of work, performances will run May 25 to June 7 at the Elgin Theatre, an ornate, old-school playhouse in downtown Toronto.
Mlotek, the show’s musical supervisor and NYTF’s artistic director, was in Toronto for the first week of rehearsals, and in an interview with The CJN after the first rehearsal, he said he was “a little high” from the energy the 25 actors (including Skybell) were bringing from the start.
Each actor studied heavily ahead of the four-week rehearsal period, including Zoom coaching sessions with the NYTF associate artistic director Matthew “Motl” Didner, who serves as the production’s dialect coach (and designed the supertitles).
Mlotek found the cast’s preparation evident from the get-go. Energized by their enthusiasm, he listened to the actors during rehearsal—starting with “Tradition,” the show’s opening number—then offered the players pointers on pronunciation or how to accent a certain phrase.
“What I made clear from the very beginning is that it’s the words. You have to have a relationship with the words,” he said.
“What’s exciting to me is that they came in with that energy, with that desire to really own the words and let it become theirs. And that’s no small feat for an actor who doesn’t speak the language to then be able to then produce it and present it as if it’s theirs. On day one of a four-week process, I’m thrilled with where things are.”
After the first week of rehearsals, Mlotek leaves only to return at the end of the rehearsal period for any final tweaks as music supervisor. He’ll also work with the 13-piece orchestra assembled by music director Mark Camilleri, and he says the music—adapted from the original 1960s Broadway orchestration—brings the joyous, celebratory vibe of klezmer.
“What you’ll hear is Broadway-influenced, but infused with klezmer, with a special nod to [that] sound,” he said. “You’ll hear that in the clarinet playing, you’ll hear that in the trumpet playing, you’ll hear that, of course, in the fiddle playing.”
During a recent event at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, Mlotek noted that director Grey had used colour-coded scripts for the New York cast to read in English first, to ensure the cast fully grasped the subtext before delving into the idiom. “That was an important learning tool,” he told a crowd of nearly 500 attendees, adding that NYTF sometimes also provides actors with recordings for study.
Speaking to The CJN, Mlotek notes that Skybell as Tevye and Grey in the director’s seat are crucial to remounts, including the Toronto show.
“It’s an intimate production,” he said. “Even though it has a full complement and it’s the full, big, beautiful sound of the shtetl singing, there’s an intimacy that Joel [Grey] has created in this production that I think also resonates for audiences. They’re involved. They’re right there with the actors, experiencing the various moments.”
An event at the Royal Ontario Museum featured a conversation with and songs performed by lead actor Steven Skybell (pictured in projected image) and musical supervisor Zalman Mlotek, followed by a reception and viewing access to the museum’s upstairs Judaica collections, April 22, 2026. (Credit: Jonathan Rothman)
Yiddish language presentation, layered audience experience
While the Yiddish production tells the story in the language of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Milkman stories forming the basis for Fiddler, Mlotek emphasizes the English and Russian subtitles (or surtitles) will be projected above the stage that audiences will be able to follow, along with the idea of embracing the narrative, and the feeling of the language.
Many of those following the surtitles closely end up watching them less as the show progresses, he says. For those in doubt about seeing the show because it’s in Yiddish, Mlotek points to the similarity of taking in an opera presented in French or Italian with surtitles.
“It’s a unique opportunity to hear a work that was conceived in this language, [to] then hear it brought to life in this way.”
He says in the past, non-Yiddish speaking audience members have told him even if they didn’t understand the words, the sound still evokes a response.
“It goes right to your kishkas.”
Toronto production the first outside New York
The Toronto show marks the first time the production that kept audiences coming back in New York has mounted the full show in a new city with local players and producers.
In 2025, a narrated concert production of the musical repertoire took place in Los Angeles, with a local cast and musicians. A full theatrical production in that city is slated for February and March 2027 at the Ahmanson Theatre in the Music Center complex that hosts the Oscars gala, LA Philharmonic concerts, and numerous musicals.
“We’re seeing this production in Toronto as the beginning of a re-interest, [of] all the interest nationally and internationally that was cut down from COVID,” said Mlotek.
Originally planned as part of an international tour halted by the pandemic (that had been set to include China, Australia, and the Ahmanson in Los Angeles), the Toronto run now serves as a potential launchpad for future North American engagements.
“I have a very strong feeling that the response to this production will spark interest in other cities in Canada, I hope, and in the United States as well.”
But Mlotek emphasizes he’s excited about the present Canadian production. “The cast here in Toronto is extraordinary… it’s a very special group of people.”
The Mamaloshen full circle moment of ‘Yiddler’
Most of the cast didn’t know Yiddish before this show, though a few had some grasp of the language, producers told The CJN. But doing the show entirely in Yiddish is at least one cast member’s lifelong dream.
For actor, musician, and arts advocate Theresa Tova, the opportunity to play Yente, the matchmaker, for a fourth time—the first was as a child in Calgary in her synagogue and Yiddish school’s production—adds to her moment of full-circle joy. Doing this in her mamaloshen (native tongue), though, sets the experience apart.
“I dream in Yiddish. I speak in Yiddish. I gave birth in Yiddish, screaming at my gentile husband and my gentile obstetrician in Yiddish, and so for me to be able to land in this world, in Sholem [Aleichem]—which I have on my bookshelf in the original Yiddish, which I have read—and to be able to just live in this world, is so brilliant,” she said in an interview.
The author of Still The Night, a Dora Award-winning play about the experiences of her mother, a Holocaust survivor, Tova told The CJN her Yiddish language challenge for the show wasn’t learning the language, but adapting from her native Polish-Yiddish dialect to what the production’s YIVO Standard Yiddish.
For the others, Didner’s Yiddish coaching meant teaching words’ meanings, “where the stresses are, and how to get those words out of their mouths,” says Tova, while hers was taking on a new accent.
Tova, who has toured extensively as a performer working in Yiddish, and created the 2015 Jewish Radio Hour live show in Toronto, says doing Fiddler in Yiddish (“I’ve started calling it Yiddler,” she quips) feels like coming home, a revisiting of her childhood in Calgary.
“We didn’t speak English in the house. We only spoke Yiddish, and I used to live and dream and everything in Yiddish. But living in an English world, working in an English world, I’m not immersed in that world anymore,” she said. “I mean, I sing [in] Yiddish concerts because I can, and I love the music, but I don’t live in a Yiddish-speaking world.”
Diving back into it means everything to Tova.
“The joy for me is to be immersed in my mother tongue, to be able to live this show that was originally [a story] written in Yiddish—translated, made into a Broadway musical, but inspired by this Yiddish language, by Sholem Aleichem, one of our greatest writers… this is a dream.”
She’s performed the role of Yente in productions at different ages of her life, and is fascinated with the direction she’ll take the role this time out.
“I did it when I was 17, I did it when I was 40-something,” she said. “I’m a grandmother now, so when I talk about children being the treasure that the age gives you, I actually own that now, and when I talk about wanting to go and help build Israel, there’s a different awareness now than there was when we did it 25 years ago… and understanding and knowing that she doesn’t have the context that we have now, or how hard that journey is going to be for her, or whether she’ll even get there.”
Her job is to ask those questions, she says. “It’s the work of being an actor finding the subtext of where we are now. That’s all I can bring to it.”
A veteran of musical theater, including Broadway and major theaters across Canada and internationally, Tova remains excited for Fiddler on the Roof. (This includes for working with the cast and Grey, and working again with past collaborators Mlotek and Didner.) Despite running through the material for months, she keeps finding something new in the story.
“It is so finely crafted, so fine-tuned. It is one of the best written and realized pieces of the Broadway canon,” said Tova. “People should come see it because it is entertaining. It is funny as hell. It pulls at your heartstrings. And it gives you faith in humanity.”
She says resonance abounds in the piece for everyone.
“It is so universal. And it is also incredibly profound, I think for us as a Jewish [people], for the—it’s too easy to say pride, because there’s so many complications right now, and we’re struggling so much—but our heritage and who we are, and to take some comfort in what we’ve come from, and how much we’ve grown and developed and moved, and still kept our culture, and still kept our community.”
At the end of the play, she points out, many characters are leaving.
“Where are they going? Some are going to Chicago. Some are going to Eretz Yisroel to try and help build a nation. Some are going to visit cousins in the archipelago, in Siberia.
“We, as Jews, we say where should I go? And that’s our constant struggle.”
She’s impressed with Fiddler’s popularity with non-Jews as well, and adds: “I really do hope that Toronto embraces it.”
‘Something special’ for Toronto, wider community
David Eisner, the co-artistic director of HGJTC, recalls how the production came together once Skybell was on board to anchor the cast. Around 500 people, from Vancouver to Halifax, responded to casting calls for the show. Eisner says that once it was down to fewer than 100 actors at callbacks in Toronto, the rigors of the audition process involved spot tests of actors’ Yiddish skills.
“You have to go through a lot of hoops to get a part in this play,” said Eisner. “I mean, not only do you have to dance, not only do you have to sing brilliantly, you have to be able to speak in Yiddish, and they tested everyone quite vigorously so far as their ability with going back and forth, corrections, and how easily they adapt.”
(During the audition process, according to Tova, actor Tracy Michailidis, who plays Golda, told her: “This is the hardest I’ve ever worked for an audition.”)
Eisner had seen the show in New York, years earlier, and it touched him unexpectedly.
“My parents spoke Yiddish, so we wouldn’t understand it, and wouldn’t understand what they were saying. And I’m not alone in this story, and I don’t know why it is, but involuntarily when I saw it in New York, the fiddle happens, and then he [Tevye] starts talking, and you get emotional. It hits you to your core, and it’s just the authenticity of: ‘These are our ancestors, doing this play in this language.’ There’s a certain truth and honesty.”
With casting underway, another heavy lift was securing capital, and Eisner told The CJN he credits leaders within the Jewish community whose sponsorship and donations comprise part of the show’s seven-figure production costs.
He says groups from around the region are booking blocks of tickets and coming in by bus from London, Ont., and Buffalo, N.Y. One matinee performance was arranged for students from Catholic and Jewish schools.
Eisner calls the Fiddler production significant on multiple levels for HGJTC.
“It’s our 18th season and we wanted to do something really wonderful, because COVID did have an effect on all theatres, but we also want to do it because of the time that we’re in now, and as someone once said: ‘Instead of the oy, let’s give them the joy.’”
Fiddler does just that, he says. “This is something special, for the whole community to come [to] together, and I think there’s some solace and comfort and pride and coming together… and this show delivers that, and we’re thrilled to be able to do it.”
Events and exhibits
In the Elgin Theatre lobby, theatregoers will find exhibits by Ontario Jewish Archives and Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, highlighting Jewish immigration through the past century.
Additional events around Toronto in May spotlighting the Fiddler production include an evening panel discussion titled “Sholem Aleichem & Evolving Jewish Traditions,” co-presented by Koffler Arts and the Miles Nadal JCC at the Al Green Theatre on May 14.
Jonathan Rothman is a reporter for The CJN based in Toronto, covering municipal politics, arts and culture, and security, among other areas impacting the Jewish community locally and around Canada. He has worked in Canadian online newsrooms and on multimedia creative teams at the CBC, Yahoo Canada, and The Walrus. Jonathan’s writing has appeared in Spacing, NOW Toronto (the former weekly), and Exclaim! magazines, and The Globe and Mail. He has also contributed arts, music, and culture stories to CBC Radio, including an audio mini-documentary report from Brazil.