Photo Flash: FIDDLER ON THE ROOF Stars Attend Opening Of TEVYE SERVED RAW

TEVYE SERVED RAW opened Tuesday, July 17th. Just two nights earlier, the NYT/Folksbiene opened the first American production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish. Two of the stars of that highly successful production were in attendance at the opening of TEVYE SERVED RAW. Jackie Hoffman, who plays Yente in FIDDLER, and Daniel Kahn, who plays Perchik, were the first to jump to their feet at the evening's standing ovation.

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 lot of TEVYE SERVED RAW is very funny. Some of it is not. But all of it is served up onstage in a form that's very close to how he originally wrote it. This is not a Broadway musical version of the world most American Jews come from. This is the genuine article as written by the man called "the Jewish Mark Twain," who was really there and wrote what he saw.

TEVYE SERVED RAW stars 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 and delves deeply into what life in the shtetl - where most American Jews' ancestors come from - was really like. Unlike several current Yiddish-language productions, the cast of TEVYE SERVED RAW are all authentic speakers of the language.

TEVYE SERVED RAW has been in development for over two years, and has been performed in Los Angeles; Kiev, Ukraine; Toronto; and Massachusetts, among other places. This marks its New York premiere. Direction and translation are by Allen Lewis Rickman.

One of the most beloved writers of Yiddish literature, Sholem Aleichem was born Solomon Rabinowitz in Pereyaslav, Ukraine in 1859. One of his first stories appeared in a Yiddish newspaper under the pseudonym "Sholem Aleichem", which in Hebrew means "Peace unto you" -- and this became his pen name. He wrote stories, sketches, critical reviews, plays, and poems in both verse and prose. His immense popularity did not decline after his death in 1916 but rather increased beyond the Yiddish-speaking public. His works have also been translated into most European languages as well as into Russian and English. His plays and dramatic versions of his stories have been produced in some of the most prominent theaters in America, Russia, Israel, Poland, and many other countries, in a great variety of languages. And perhaps most famously, his 'Tevye' stories became the basis of Fiddler on the Roof.

The playing schedule for TEVYE SERVED RAW is Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays at 7 pm through August 14th at The Playroom Theater in the Heart of the Theatre District, 151 West 46 Street (just east of Seventh Ave.) Tickets are $38 and are available through www.TevyeServedRaw.com or by calling 1-800-838-3006.

Photo Credit: Jonathan Melvin Smith