On Sunday, my wife Gosia and I went to the Lee F. Salisbury Theatre to catch “Fiddler on the Roof.” We purchased our tickets way back when, and that was a good thing. As the show entered its final weekend, the website for the Fairbanks Light Opera Theatre warned that all advance tickets were sold out. Nothing was left but crumbs on the table, meaning only “space available” tickets were left.
A few minutes before the final show's opening scene, I eyeballed the audience from our first-row seat in front of the orchestra pit and a waving veteran musical director George Rydlinski in his newsboy cap. People stood in the back or milled from side to side in the aisles in hopes of landing a precious seat.
For me, this was déjà vu all over (as Yogi Berra said). In my mind’s eye, I was thrust back to the ‘60s. As a theater-mad undergrad and grad student, I caught cheap flights from Buffalo, New York, to the Big Apple to catch the likes of Lamont Washington and Diane Keaton in “Hair,” Angela Lansbury in “Mame,” and Pearl Bailey in “Hello, Dolly!” I was there when Ms. Bailey stopped the show mid-performance to admonish a fan who had snapped her photo with a flash right in front of the stage. I grieved when lead performer Washington died in a house fire in ’68 and was so smitten with Bailey that I wrote her a fan letter. You had to pick me off the floor when she wrote me a real letter back.
I also was present at the South African musical “Wait a Minim!” when the show was delayed briefly. The audience stomped their Florsheims, Converses and stiletto heels in impatience. Their rudeness displeased me. And I saw Chaim Topol in “Fiddler on the Roof” with a standing-room-only ducat and stood while chairs sat unclaimed. (The genius Topol died last March 8).
Back to 2023, that’s when I got impatient and stomped my feet for “Fiddler” to begin at FLOT. No, no, just kidding.
That’s when theater staff made an announcement, imploring audience members to stand up, make room, and point to empty seats as FLOT had sold a ton of last-second “space available” tickets.
We complied, and a young woman came down to sit on Gosia’s left. Dozens of others descended to claim the remaining empty chairs. This took time.
Finally, FLOT’s board President Kirsten Blair and board member Valerie Robancho took the stage to announce that everyone who had a ticket was seated. The crowd applauded as if they’d seen a great performance.
The politeness of the audience astonished this cheechako. No Huns stormed the gate. No one threatened to sue. No one grumbled, and certainly nobody stomped.
Oh yeah, FLOT’s performance of “Fiddler” compared very well with the New York presentation I saw 55 years ago. (“People don’t live so long,” my wife Gosia always says to tease me). Rydlinski’s musical direction was splendid. Choreography by Terri Massa and Jay Paggi-Howe turned the stage into the real-life doomed village of Anatevka in Russian Ukraine. As the grandson of a Polish peasant orphan who escaped the Czar’s army with bullets whizzing past his ear, I was moved to tears by the performance of Sylvain Demers as the milkman Tevye. Chaim Topol himself couldn’t have faulted Tevye’s acting and singing. Yes, a couple singers had voices in tune but too weak for stage, but overall I was sincere when I leaped up with Gosia to give the actors, orchestra and stage director Theresa Reed a standing ovation.
I walked out of the auditorium into a sun shower. Overhead was a bright, beautiful rainbow. Once again, the message rang true that Fairbanks is a special place, a different place, a place I’m proud to call home.
Tevya said this: “As Abraham said, I am a stranger in a strange land.”
But on afternoons like this, I feel less and less a stranger, and Fairbanks seems to me more magical than strange.
