'Fiddler' plays beautifully in Flower Mound
Intimate space, talented cast draw audience into the classic musical
12:39 AM CDT on Friday, June 18, 2004
By LAWSON TAITTE/ The Dallas Morning News

FLOWER MOUND – The current Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof has been criticized for being too gentile, but it has its pleasures. Flower Mound Performing Arts Theatre's production probably doesn't have a large percentage of Jewish performers, either. It, too, though, offers plenty of rewards.

The classic musical about Jewish life in a Russian village during a time of political unrest takes on a particularly intimate appeal in the company's little barn of a space.

Mark Mullino, occasionally an actor and frequently a music director hereabouts, has taken on his first assignment as director, so the musical and theatrical elements bear equal weight. The tiny orchestra under Michael Plantz plays beautifully, and the singing is mostly strong.

As Tevye, the philosophical milkman with a demanding wife and five daughters to marry off, Bradley Campbell looks surprisingly tentative in the opening numbers. But he sings lustily and even delicately throughout, and soon he relaxes into crowd- pleasing charm. If only his accent were better – or weren't there at all.

The women in his family are uniformly terrific. Pam Dougherty, predictably, makes more of the overbearing wife, Golde, than any actress in memory. She's broad, she's subtle. She mourns, she mopes, she scolds, she fills up with joy. She's always doing the most amazing things, even in big crowd scenes, without drawing focus from where it belongs. Ms. Dougherty and Mr. Campbell are especially wonderful in their song of middle-aged crisis, "Do You Love Me?"

Kelly Rypkema, Kimberly Whalen and Carrie Slaughter bring enormous sensitivity to the daughters' roles. They don't just go through the motions, they act from the heart. The theater's intimacy is especially rewarding for them.

It also brings the dancers right up into the audience's laps; intimacy can breed excitement as well as subtlety. Even with dancers ill-sorted as to height and build, Paula Moreland successfully reproduces a surprising amount of the original Jerry Robbins choreography on the confining stage.

Performance reviewed was Thursday.

E-mail ltaitte@dallasnews.com