TEVYE SERVED RAW Opens Tonight At Centenary Stage Company

Live professional Yiddish theater is back! Find out what happens to the beloved characters in FIDDLER ON THE ROOF after the musical ends. TEVYE SERVED RAW is an evening of Sholem Aleichem material, with adaptations of his Tevye stories ("What, Me Worthy?" and "Get Thee Gone!"), scenes from his own long-unseen Yiddish stage version, and three of his purely comedic stories, newly adapted ("Strange Jews on a Train," "The Yiddish Sisyphus" and "A Stepmother's Trash-Talk").

A smash hit (including two extensions by popular demand) during Off-Broadway's 2018-2019 season, TEVYE SERVED RAW is set to open at Centenary Stage Company tonight (Thursday) through this Sunday, October 25th. The strictly limited four-performance engagement will feature the original New York cast: Allen Lewis Rickman and Yelena Shmulenson (the Yiddish-speaking couple from the Coen brothers' A SERIOUS MAN) and Shane Baker ("the best-loved Episcopalian on the Yiddish stage today"). The production is performed in English and Yiddish with English supertitles. Unlike several recent Yiddish-language productions, the cast of TEVYE SERVED RAW are all authentic speakers of the language. Theater Pizzazz called the Off-Broadway production "Exquisite;" Theater Scene called it "Astonishing;" and The Forward hailed the production as "Brilliant!"

"We have tremendous fun doing the comic stuff, but the 'Tevye' material is something else entirely," said Rickman, who is also the show's director. "It's a revelation to people who only know FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. FIDDLER is a superb musical - one of the best ever - but they had to dilute the material to make it acceptable to a mainstream audience in 1964. And look, Bock and Harnick and Stein are brilliant musical theater guys, but they grew up in America, which is a very different place from Tsarist Russia.

What we did is go back to the source. What's in our show is what Sholem Aleichem, who was there in the shtetl and saw it all himself, actually wrote. It's his words, his observations, unfiltered, 'raw'. We're doing adaptations of his original stories plus scenes from his own stage version of TEVYE. A few of the plot points are also in FIDDLER, but we do them as Sholem Aleichem wrote them, without the compromises they had to make for Broadway.

It's a question of authenticity. If people want to get a sense of where most American Jews actually came from, this is the real deal. The characters in our show are the people that were there, not exaggerations from musical comedy."

TEVYE SERVED RAW has been in development for over four years and has been performed in New York City, Los Angeles; Kiev, Ukraine; Toronto; Massachusetts, and even at Carnegie Hall. In 2018, the production played to ecstatic acclaim in Romania, where it was presented with Romanian supertitles at the State Jewish Theater in Bucharest.

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