Live theater returns to The Wallis with the world premiere of Tom Dugan’s one-man show, Tevye in New York!. Dugan, whose previous solo shows were Wiesenthal and The Jackie Kennedy Project (which he directed), takes on the persona of Tevye the Milkman, the flamboyant patriarch in Fiddler on the Roof. Dugan asks us to believe that Tevye has gone on to a new life as an immigrant in New York’s Lower East Side, where he sells ice-cream out of a pushcart on the corner of Delancey and Orchard.
The time is July 4, 1914, and Tevye is in a blissful state because the holiday parade is going to pass right by him, bringing crowds who will surely clamor for his home-made treats. Though wouldn’t you know it, his best-friend Maria has mistakenly taken off with the key to his pushcart. So all he can offer for sale are sweet and sour pickles.
Tevye, being the same cunning survivor he was back in the Old World, does not let this bit of bad luck get him down. After all, as he exclaims, “A Jew must always move forward in life.” And that’s just what he does in Tevye, move onward and upward, solve problems, face the future with optimism and hope. He’s like a Norman Vincent Peale clone, preaching the power of positive thinking with a thick Yiddish accent.
Like Fiddler, Tevye in New York! is based on a series of Sholem Aleichem short stories, many of them dealing with the tzuris his six daughters give Tevye, scorning his advice and marrying “professional jackasses,” raising children improperly, behaving impudently. Tevye rages against them at times, only to switch emotional gears and suddenly make light of their quarrels, tell jokes on himself, reminisce about life in the shtetl. Dugan leaches all the darkness out of his text, giving us a romanticized view of Jewish history in New York and settling for an easy kind of nostalgia. He does not hold back as an actor, though. His performance is bold and strong; he commands the stage at all times. Yet I never felt that he was connecting intensely with the audience. That could be attributed to the pandemic restrictions: the production took place in The Wallis’s outdoor courtyard space. People sat in scattered small groups, rather than shoulder to shoulder. The audience was also distanced from the stage on tiered platforms better suited to a dance recital than an intimate drama.
