Star rating: ****

There's a strangely subdued air prior to this touring revival of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick's 1964 musical set among the Jewish community in early twentieth-century Russia. It's as if the lights have been lowered in mourning for the serious musical. Because, in this yarn about milkman Tevye and his daughters, Joseph Stein's book is integral to the action in a way at which makers of cheaply-strung-together modern shows would be agape.

Director Julian Woolford keeps his nerve, however, in an elegant rendering set against golden skies on which choreographed silhouettes play out the spirit of shattered community. And it can surely be no coincidence that the towers that line either side of the stage resemble the equally stark Holocaust Museum in Berlin.

Joe McGann leads things as an understated and avuncular Tevye in a show that at times is an extended set of family rituals set to music. As the everyday comedy of the life he's built gradually unravels, he and his family are forced to come to terms with change at every level. While admirably restrained, McGann could nevertheless do with more pathos than stoicism, but Bock's score, sensitively arranged, more than compensates in a show that's as much history lesson as it is slow-burning entertainment.

From yesterday's later editions.