Lyric Opera 2022-2023 Issue 3- Fiddler #2

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 10 Dear Lyric Family, Welcome to the opera house to celebrate and enjoy a piece that has been part of many of our lives for as long as we can remember: Fiddler on the Roof . This wonderful work, with its focus on tradition, family, community, prejudice, persecution, and enforced exile tells a story which is both specific and completely universal. It is both timeless and highly topical. Barrie Kosky’s magnificent and highly-acclaimed production was conceived for a full-scale opera company and had its premiere at the Komische Oper Berlin in 2017, performed in German. Lyric is proud to be presenting its North American and English language premiere. For Barrie, Fiddler on the Roof is an intensely personal work, his family having emigrated to Australia from a shtetl very like Anatevka. His identification with the characters and community of Anatevka is palpable. Kosky brings this very familiar piece to life in a way that confounds its familiarity. It offers us everything we expect from a performance of Fiddler on the Roof , but it also takes us by surprise through portraying the characters, their relationships, and their community with a powerful freshness and vividness. Kosky hopes we will laugh and cry, and he wants us to experience his production as if we are “seeing an old friend, who is speaking the truth.” We are delighted that you are joining us for Fiddler on the Roof , a work that is both grand in scale and incredibly intimate in its power to move and transform. As with so many of the shows that we produce, from Hansel and Gretel to West Side Story , we hope this performance will remind you of the incredible resilience of the human spirit and just how relevant this work remains to all of us. L’chaim! To Life! From the Chair and the General Director SYLVIA NEIL Chair ANTHONY FREUD OBE President, General Director & CEO The Women’s Board Endowed Chair Todd Rosenberg Todd Rosenberg