BITTERSWEET.

The thrill of "Fiddler on the Roof" (at the Minskoff) begins with its first beat, when the beleaguered milkman Tevye (the bighearted Alfred Molina) describes the precariousness of shtetl life. "And how do we keep our balance?" he asks us. "That I can tell you in a word." He turns upstage and stamps his foot. "Tradition," he says. It's the signal that launches the march of the entire village of Anatevka, singing in celebration of its closed world.

From that first ravishing moment, amid birch trees and the crepuscular glow of flickering kerosene lamps, the static comfort of the Old World community, where every person has a place and a role, is dissected before our eyes. Of the many Jewish traditions that go unmentioned in the terrific song, the most pervasive is the one to which the show itself is eloquent witness: the storytelling tradition. "Fiddler on the Roof," which is based on the tales of Sholem Aleichem, is a seamless collaboration of an especially cunning book by Joseph Stein, music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and choreography by Jerome Robbins. In this elegant revival, the star, the director, the costume designer, and the set designer are English; they bring to the production a certain cultural detachment, which imposes a powerful lucidity on the story and allows its moral debate to gather proper poetic momentum. The production's panache reverses the English joke "Look British, think Yiddish"; in this "Fiddler," it's indubitably a case of "Think British, look Yiddish."

The show is greater than the sum of its parts, which is a rarity on Broadway. The expert director David Leveaux has positioned the musicians upstage and visible among the trees, so that the tale seems almost to emerge out of their sound; Tom Pye's shrewd, understated set and Vicki Mortimer's witty costumes conjure a captivating sense of place--provincial Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. Onstage, the totem of storytelling is the Fiddler (Nick Danielson), who first appears perched on the gray makeshift beams of the roof above the proceedings but prowls around the edges of events playing his occasional woeful measures when life seems at its most fragile. The bittersweet strains of his violin represent the invisible thread of narrative--the signature that carries in its distinctive ambivalent refrain the culture's memory of loss and of wisdom. Disclaimers to the contrary--"Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as . . . as a fiddler on the roof," Tevye says--the fiddler represents the emotional cement that binds and defines the tribe. At the finale, the members of the community are forced by the Cossacks to sell up and move off their land into exile. Upstage, silhouetted against an ochre scrim, the fiddler hands his instrument to a young boy. The image, which is an added visual grace note to the original production, plays as a passing on of the narrative tradition and a foreshadowing of the American musical itself, most of whose great practitioners--Kern, Gershwin, Rodgers, Arlen, Bernstein, Sondheim, et al.--were "Red Sea pedestrians," as Dame Edna would say.

On the surface, "Fiddler on the Roof" is all romance. Tevye has five beloved daughters; however, he is a poor man, who has neither the status nor the wealth to insure them a good marriage. He kvetches to God about money--"So what would have been so terrible if I had a small fortune?" Tevye asks him before beginning the showstopping melisma of "If I Were a Rich Man." The daughters' plea is to God's romantic stand-in, the omnipotent being in whose power is their destiny on earth: the matchmaker. With deft concision, Harnick's splendid lyrics spell out the girls' desires: "Find me a find / Catch me a catch."

At issue, beneath the hubbub of husbands and happiness, is Jewish patriarchy, a bulwark that is beginning to crack under progressive rumblings from the outside world. Each daughter offers a challenge to Tevye's authority, which allows many happy opportunities for the excellent Molina to be both gruff and ...