I was in the stalls at Her Majesty’s on Thursday for the Melbourne opening, and the first thing you see is the fiddler. Ben Adler, alone in the wheat, lifts his violin and plays the tune everyone in the house knows before a word is spoken. Then the ground he stands on climbs into the air, the villagers flood in for Tradition, and the band hits the opening chord so hard you feel it in your chest. This is a production that trusts the material and trusts the room, and the trust pays off all night.

Tom Scutt’s design is the simplest idea on stage and the best: a bare wooden floor, wheat all around it, and a wooden roof that hangs in the dark and moves: it rises, it lowers, and at the wedding it settles on poles the villagers hold up and becomes the chuppah. The actors carry on the tables and chairs themselves and sit at the edges, watching, when they are not in a scene. It is a village made of people, which is the point.

And at the centre of it all, Troy Sussman. He does not do Topol, and he does not do the shrug-and-shtick Tevye the role invites. His milkman is a big, tired, decent man who argues with God because God is the only one who will listen, and the “on the other hand” monologues land as real thinking, not routines. If I Were a Rich Man is the first number he makes entirely his own, and he does it with his whole body: the pleading hands, the little dance, the look to heaven. He is funniest when he is most serious, and he is at his best in the quiet moments: the Sabbath Prayer, the cart with Golde, and the scene with Chava where the words run out. Sussman has said he drew on his own grandfather, a tailor who came from Poland. It shows. This is a Tevye you believe has milked cows, and the warmest performance in a musical I have seen in this city in years.

Alexis Fishman’s Golde is the vocal standout, heartbreaking in Anatevka, and her Do You Love Me? with Sussman was, for me, the quiet centre of the night. The daughters are three distinct women: Freya Boltman’s Tzeitel, who returns as Fruma-Sarah in a wild dream sequence; Ellen Ebbs’s Hodel, whose Far From the Home I Love is the saddest goodbye of the night; and Caity Plummer’s Chava, who picks up a clarinet in Little Bird and plays it herself.

The two best-known names on the bill earn their billing. Sigrid Thornton, who was Golde in this city a decade ago, comes back as Yente the matchmaker and has the house laughing within seconds of her first entrance; she plays the part with nerve and perfect timing, and never once winks at us. John Waters, who was in the Australian Hair in 1969 and has been on our stages for more than fifty years, makes Lazar Wolf the butcher a big, genial, slightly bewildered man with a voice to match, and his scene with Tevye, two men drinking to two different bargains, is the funniest in the show. In To Life he is up on the tables with the younger men.

Julia Cheng’s choreography sets the men of Anatevka loose in To Life, up on the tables with the Russians. For the wedding the production keeps Jerome Robbins’s original bottle dance, and this cast makes it look easy. Fein has restaged the dream, the wedding and the pogrom that ends the first act, and the pogrom hits like a blow.

“It is a village made of people, which is the point.Dr Dvir Abramovich

Adler is the thread through all of it. The fiddler in this production barely leaves the stage, and in the second act, where the ballet usually goes, he and Plummer’s clarinet play a duet instead. Adler, who directs SHIR, the Australian Jewish Music Festival, plays the role as what the fiddler has always been: the tradition itself, never quite in balance and never silent.

The themes are the ones the show has carried since 1964. Tradition against change: three daughters who choose for themselves, and a father who bends for the first, bends for the second, and with Chava finds the place where he cannot bend. Faith as an argument: Tevye talks to God all night, gets no answer, and keeps talking.

The last scene is Anatevka, sung as the village packs. It is a Jewish story about being made to leave home, and I watched it in a city where Jewish families have spent the past year wondering whether they are still at home. The production never says so. What it does instead is throw a wedding, raise a glass, lift a roof into the air and send a whole theatre out onto Exhibition Street humming. London gave it three Olivier Awards. Melbourne can give it something better: a full house, every night, until two days after Christmas.

So here is the recommendation, without a hedge in it. If you see one musical in Melbourne this year, make it this one. Take your parents, who will know every word. Take your children, who will not, and who will leave knowing why these songs have lasted sixty years. Take the friend who thinks Fiddler is a museum piece and watch their face when the roof lifts. The company that won three Oliviers in London has been matched here by an Australian cast that sings it, dances it and means it. It runs until 27 December. Do not let it leave town without you. L’Chaim.