Tomorrow night, on Exhibition Street, a milkman will hitch himself to his cart and ask God a few questions. Fiddler on the Roof opens at Her Majesty’s Theatre on Thursday, after five nights of previews, and settles in for a Melbourne season that runs until two days after Christmas.

This is the newest Fiddler there is. The production began in 2024 at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London, sold out there, and moved to the Barbican, where the producers say it became the best-selling musical in that theatre’s history. In 2025 it won three Olivier Awards: Best Musical Revival, Best Set Design for Tom Scutt and Best Sound Design for Nick Lidster. The director, Jordan Fein, and the choreographer, Julia Cheng, have restaged it in Australia with a company cast here.

Scutt’s design sets Anatevka in a field. Tall wheat hems in the stage, a wooden platform does for the village, and the villagers wear the greys, browns and patched blues of people who work. Into the field steps Troy Sussman as Tevye, the milkman with five daughters, a lame horse and a running argument with heaven. Alexis Fishman plays Golde, his wife of 25 years. Sigrid Thornton, who was Golde when the musical last toured Australia a decade ago, returns to it as Yente, the matchmaker, and John Waters plays Lazar Wolf, the butcher who wants to marry Tevye’s eldest daughter. Thornton and Waters starred together in the 1983 series All the Rivers Run.

The daughters are Freya Boltman as Tzeitel, Ellen Ebbs as Hodel and Caity Plummer as Chava, with Romy Juliette Glass and Ksenia Teliatnikova as the two youngest. Maxwell Simon plays Perchik, the student with new ideas, Felix Star is Motel the tailor and Jacob Steen is Fyedka. The fiddler of the title is Ben Adler, a concert violinist who, when he is not on a roof, directs SHIR, the Australian Jewish Music Festival.

The story has not changed since Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick drew it from Sholem Aleichem in 1964. It is 1905 in the Pale of Settlement. Tevye’s daughters marry for love, one by one, and each match costs him a piece of the tradition that holds his world together. Then the constable arrives with an order, and the village packs. More than 60 years on, the songs are still the ones audiences carry out of the theatre: Tradition, Matchmaker, If I Were a Rich Man, Sunrise, Sunset.

“At a time when our community needs joy and pride more than ever, a show like this is a gift, and it deserves the biggest audience Melbourne can give it.Dr Dvir Abramovich, Chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission

Dr Dvir Abramovich, Chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission, will be at Her Majesty’s on Thursday, and says he is looking forward to a memorable opening night. “At a time when our community needs joy and pride more than ever, a show like this is a gift, and it deserves the biggest audience Melbourne can give it,” he said. “There are few shows I could recommend more passionately than this one. Stories like this deserve to travel far beyond any single community.”

The Sydney season, at the Theatre Royal, ran from July to October before the production went to Brisbane. Melbourne is the third stop, and Perth follows in January. The show runs two hours and 40 minutes with an interval, and is recommended for ages 12 and up.