Tradition is important, but it’s not everything. Starting with Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in 2023, Austin Opera has been experimenting with adapting works best known as musicals for the operatic setting. Now it’s the turn of the 1964 popular masterpiece by Jerry Bock (music), Sheldon Harnick (lyrics), and Joseph Stein (book), based on Sholem Aleichem’s stories of the joys and pains of Yiddish life in Tsarist Russia. This new version stars Tony-nominated Steven Skybell in the working boots of Tevye the milkman as he navigates his fatherly duties and the eternal threat of pogroms. And watch out for former Chronicle Arts editor and Austin theatrical mainstay Robert Faires as Lazar the butcher. – Richard Whittaker
