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On the shtet-L-train: Marcia Belsky
stars at Tevye in the parody musical
“Fiddler on the Rooftop Bar,” at the Bell
House on June 18. Jennifer Walkowiak
L of a ride ‘Fiddler on the Rooftop Bar’ moves the musical to W’burg
COURIER LIFE, J 24-7 UNE 14-20, 2019 53
IBy Kevin Duggan f she were a rich man — she wouldn’t
have a brand new show!
Two Williamsburg comedians have
reinvented a classic Broadway musical as
a gender-bending parody of the real estate
market in Brooklyn’s hottest neighborhood.
“Fiddler on the Rooftop Bar,” at the Bell
House on June 18, moves the original tale
from a 1905 Russian shtetl to modern-day
Williamsburg, with its characters forced to
move due to circumstances outside of their
control — a constant worry for renters in
popular Kings County nabes, said one of
its writers.
“The powerlessness of it, you really have
no control and it’s a power dictating what’s
going to happen to the place where you’re
going to live,” said Melissa Stokoski, who
created and stars in the show with Marcia
Belsky. “Just the uncertainty of living in
New York, especially in Williamsburg.”
The two comics, who previously wrote a
parody musical of “The Handmaid’s Tale,”
are familiar with that uncertainty — in
anticipation of the L train’s closure, they each
moved closer to the J and M trains, only for
Gov. Andrew Cuomo to announce the cancelation
of the L-pocalypse in January.
In their retelling of the 1964 musical,
Tevye — played by Belsky, who dons
an untamed beard and a raspy Russian-
Jewish accent — is a wannabe social
media influencer, working as the superintendent
for a couple of apartments in
trendy Williamsburg. He and his platonic
roommate Golde, along with several other
tenants, including actors portraying the
hip band Haim, consider moving due to
the impending L-train shutdown, then are
evicted when the landlord hears that wellheeled
employees of Amazon will soon be
moving to the neighborhood.
Just as the characters finish plans to
scatter to distant neighborhoods, the allpowerful
Tsar Cuomo announces the subway
closure averted, and the characters spin
conspiracy theories that real-estate developers
knew about the last-minute rescue far in
advance. Belsky discussed similar theories
with her friends, as condos sprouted up near
her former apartment in the months before
the governor’s announcement.
“I was living off the DeKalb L stop and
huge condos were going up and I was thinking,
‘Don’t they know about the L-train
shutdown?’ ” Belsky said.
She and Stokoski said they wanted to
stage the discussions they were having with
friends about the shutdown, to show how
real people talked about the event, beyond
the news cycles and social media debates.
“We like to make shows that talk in the
way we talk,” she said. “You see the news
takes and the Twitter hot takes, but you
don’t see how people talk among themselves.”
“Fiddler on the Rooftop Bar” at the Bell
House 149 Seventh St. between Second
and Third avenues in Gowanus, (718) 643–
6510, www.thebellhouseny.com. Jun. 18 at
7:30 p.m. $15.
Sister act: In the new play, Tevye’s three
daughters (pictured) have been replaced by
a gender-bending version of the California
sibling act Haim. Jennifer Walkowiak
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