Iqaluit considers racism and the push and pull of tradition in ambitious musical production

Iqaluit's Inuksuk High School mounted its most ambitious theatrical production ever last week when students, teachers and a wide array of community volunteers brought the musical, Fiddler on the Roof, to the school gymnasium stage.

The production featured a cast of 35 and an orchestra of 19, with choir and the various crews for props, costumes, lighting and sound bringing the total number of people involved to more than 150.

Actors, orchestra and crew put more than 400 hours each into rehearsing, preparing and presenting the musical play, director Renata Solski said.

"They made me laugh and they made me cry," she said.

Solski, who also teaches English at the high school, said she thought the story of Fiddler on the Roof would have special ­resonance for many in Iqaluit.

"I see a lot of students trying to keep the old ways while being drawn to new ways all around them," she said.

Solski is an Italian-Canadian who grew up in Toronto's Little Italy, and who has struggled all her life with the push and pull of her own cultural tradition.

"It's okay to keep who you are, while expanding on it to find your way in a changing world," she said.

Fiddler tells the story of a small community of people – Jews in early 20th century Russia, not long before the revolution – struggling to survive and hold onto their rich cultural identity in the shadow of a much larger and oppressively ­bigoted society.

It centres around the story of Tevye, a deeply religious man whose love and compassion for his adventurous daughters gradually and painfully opens him up to a wider, changing world he fears and resists – and not without reason.

The student actors researched village or shtetl life and the social and political conditions of Russian Jews as they spent several months developing their characters, Solski said.

They also relied on stories and teaching shared by fellow actor Lorne Levy. His mother was born in a shtetl much like the play's village of Anatevka. His grandparents were forced out of their homeland while his mother was still a child in the same kind of pogroms portrayed in Fiddler.

A production like this one "brings all departments of the school together," Inuksuk principal Terry Young said – "drama, music, sewing, art, shop, physical education."

Besides wholeheartedly supporting the production as school principal, Young also played the role of the village's Russian constable.

With students, staff and community members working together, he said, "it helps people see each other in a new light and build positive relationships."

The cast, crew, choir and orchestra included Inuit, ­northern and southern Canadians of many European ­heritages, as well as Jews, Jamaicans and east Indians.

For 14-year-old Christine Tootoo, who played Tevye's daughter Bielke, this was the most challenging of several plays she has performed in.

But it was also "the most fun," she said. "There was lots of music."

As a piece of American Broadway musical culture that ­celebrates the Eastern European heritage of Jewish klezmer music, Fiddler is also very challenging for the orchestra, ­musical director Mary Piercey said.

Piercey, who teaches music at the high school, had five of her students in the 18-piece orchestra. It was a good experience for them to be treated like the rest of the adults in the orchestra, she said. The adult musicians "make good role ­models and wonderful mentors for the students."

This production of Fiddler is the most recent manifestation of a now-two-decades-old tradition in Iqaluit that started when a group of music and theatre lovers got together to see if they could mount a community production of Godspell.

They did, and since then have produced a number of ­successful musicals, including Grease, and most recently before this, Beauty and the Beast, the first production organized ­completely by the high school.

Fiddler on the Roof played to four nearly full houses, as the production ran from Thursday to Saturday evening, with an added Sunday matinee. The appreciative audiences laughed in all the right places and clapped along to the infectious dance music that ended the performance.