Cast announced for Australia’s Fiddler on the Roof

Troy Sussman began preparing for Tevye before he knew the role was his.

As soon as he found out he was auditioning for “Fiddler on the Roof”, he stopped shaving. By the time he sat down to talk about the part, the veteran Australian performer had grown the full beard he plans to take onto the stage at the Theatre Royal Sydney.

“I would never stick a beard or a moustache on,” Sussman tells JWire. “It’s the worst thing as an actor if you’re in a show and it starts to come off. If you can grow it, grow it.”

Sussman will play Tevye, the Jewish milkman at the centre of the acclaimed Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre production, when it opens in Sydney on 31 July 2026.

For Sussman, the role is not simply another major musical theatre credit. It is one of the parts he has wanted to play for most of his life.

“If people ask me what the roles I wanted to play in life were, this was top two,” he said.

The other is Fagin in “Oliver!”, a role with its own personal link. Sussman played the Artful Dodger professionally when he was 13 and hopes one day to return to that world as Fagin.

But Tevye carries a different meaning. “Fiddler on the Roof” has been part of Sussman’s life since childhood.

“You feel like you know it, because it’s in your ear, it’s in your body. Every wedding you go to, you hear ‘Sunrise, Sunset’,” he said.

The connection runs through his family. Sussman said his father has performed in “Fiddler on the Roof” four times in amateur productions, including as Lazar Wolf and, more recently, as the Rabbi.

“He’s played almost every role,” Sussman said.

Sussman’s father was also a chazan for many years, giving Sussman’s connection to Tevye an added layer of Jewish musical and communal inheritance.

Sussman’s Jewish background also runs through his own upbringing. He grew up in the Progressive Jewish community and spent his post-school Israel year with Netzer on Machon, the Jewish Agency’s leadership program for diaspora youth movement graduates.

That background, he said, is part of why Tevye feels personal rather than simply theatrical.

Sussman himself sang “If I Were a Rich Man” for his HSC music exam. Decades later, after years in major Australian and international musicals, he is preparing to sing it as Tevye in one of the most acclaimed recent stagings of the show.

He said the role is especially meaningful because of his own Jewish identity.

“To actually be the first Australian Jew professionally to play the role is something that I really hold quite dear,” he said.

The claim is Sussman’s, but the point is clear: he is approaching Tevye not only as a performer, but as someone with a lived connection to Jewish culture, family memory and community life.

Sussman said he is not interested in copying Chaim Topol, whose Tevye shaped the way generations of audiences know the role.

“I think some of the productions I’ve seen, people are putting on a veil of what Topol is and trying to be Topol,” he said. “I don’t think it reads authentic, whereas I think hopefully I’m authentically me and naturally authentically Jewish, and I think that will read in a very different way.”

Sussman has already begun reading beyond the musical. He has gone back to the original Sholem Aleichem stories on which “Fiddler on the Roof” is based and is looking for Yiddish translations through Kadimah Yiddish Theatre, where he sits on the board.

“They’re so much darker than ‘Fiddler’,” he said of the original stories.

The Sydney production is directed by Jordan Fein, whose revival won three Olivier Awards, including Best Musical Revival, after sold-out London seasons at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre and the Barbican Theatre. The producers say the production became the Barbican’s best-selling musical of all time.

Sussman said Fein’s staging is a different kind of “Fiddler” from the version many people may expect.

“This is a very different iteration of the show,” he said. “It’s really putting a microscope on the conversations of the piece, but it still has the soul and it still has the heart.”

He said the production places greater focus on the relationships between Tevye, Golde and their daughters, creating a more intimate version of the story. Sussman said Fein’s production also gives special weight to Tevye’s conversations with God, treating them not as comic asides but as intimate moments that reveal his doubts, fears and attempts to understand a world changing around him.

“It’s less performative,” he said. “It’s being really true and honest to the characters and the people, with so much heart and so much community.”

At the centre of the story is Tevye’s slow confrontation with change. At the beginning, he sets out a world held together by tradition. Across the musical, each daughter tests the limits of that tradition in a different way.

“We set up the show by going, this is how we exist, and this is why we exist, this is why we’re all safe, and then for these two hours we literally cut that apart, and he has to adapt,” Sussman said.

The role also comes with a serious memory load. Sussman said he knew the famous songs, but was struck by how much script Tevye carries.

“I’m floored by the amount I have to learn for this from a textual level,” he said.

When asked which songs he is most looking forward to performing, Sussman does not immediately choose the obvious one, “If I Were a Rich Man”, even though he first sang it as a student for his HSC music exam.

He says he is drawn to this production’s version of “Sunrise, Sunset”, which he described as “beautiful”. But the number he singles out is Tevye’s nightmare sequence, one of the show’s most theatrically playful moments.

“I’m excited to do the nightmare because it’s fun,” he said. “It just sits in this really weird space.”

He said Fein’s staging makes the scene feel like Tevye is actively inventing the story for Golde.

“You really see Tevye creating the story for Golde, so he becomes the puppeteer with the people in the space,” Sussman said.

The cast announced for the Sydney season includes Alexis Fishman as Golde, Tevye’s strong-willed wife and the emotional anchor of the family, while Sigrid Thornton will play Yente, the village matchmaker.

Fishman brings deep theatrical and Jewish cultural resonance to the role, with credits including “Anne Being Frank”, “The God of Isaac”, “Club Gelbe Stern”, “Cabaret” and “The Promised Land”.

Thornton, one of Australia’s best-known stage and screen performers, returns to “Fiddler on the Roof” after appearing in an earlier production and will take on Yente in her first starring musical role in more than a decade.

The daughters are played by Freya Boltman as Tzeitel, Ellen Ebbs as Hodel and Caity Plummer as Chava. Damien Bermingham will play Avram, and Ben Adler will play the Fiddler.

Sussman said he and Fishman, as Tevye and Golde, would help ground the Jewish world of the production.

“It’s an education,” he said. “You have to teach them, but then it’ll be led by Alexis and I from the front, and I think that’s really exciting to have the two of us as champions.”

He is also thrilled by Adler’s casting as the Fiddler.

“How exciting is that?” he said. “Virtuoso!”

Adler is well known as an acclaimed violinist and a prominent figure in Australian Jewish music, known as the director of SHIR, the Australian Jewish Music Festival; and founder of the klezmer fusion band CHUTNEY.

In Fein’s staging, the Fiddler is more than a symbolic figure. Sussman describes him as “the musical voice of the way Tevye is feeling”.

“It’s like an imp that sits on Tevye’s shoulder and reinforces where he is in the play,” he said. “They have this integration of form, and it’s like a personal conversation with him. It’s beautiful.”

The other major roles are also confirmed: Maxwell Simon will play Perchik, Felix Star will play Motel, Jacob Steen will play Fyedka, Ritchie Singer will play Lazar Wolf, Andrew Dunne will play Mordcha, Mark Doggett will play the Rabbi, Rubin Matters will play Mendel and Nick Brown will play the Constable.

The production also moves away from a conventional proscenium version of the show. Sussman said the design retains the feeling of the Regent’s Park outdoor staging, with wheat fields across the stage.

“It really helps create the community feel,” he said. “There are a lot of times where people stay on stage, so it’s not a bare stage. People walk through, and the orchestra is at the back in costume. They’re part of the environment.”

The musical’s renewed relevance is hard to miss. Set in the fictional Jewish village of Anatevka in 1905, “Fiddler on the Roof” is a story of family, faith, poverty, humour and tradition. It is also a story of antisemitism, pressure and forced displacement.

For Australian audiences in 2026, as Jewish communities face renewed public hostility and questions of safety and belonging, Sussman believes the show will carry a particular force.

“I think it’s an important conversation to have for the community and the more external community,” he said. “We’re talking a story that’s set 100 years ago, and I think outside the community they’ll see what it was like, and within the community they’ll see their history there.”

He said audiences will bring their own understanding to the story.

“It’s an important time to reflect on that,” he said. “People make their own decisions and put their own lens on what we’re doing.”

Yet Sussman also insists “Fiddler on the Roof” endures because it is a great Broadway musical, not only because it is culturally significant.

“Whatever world or time we’re in, it’s a story that needs to be told,” he said.

Sussman’s own career began early. He first performed professionally at seven, playing Michael in “Peter Pan” in Melbourne. He later played the Artful Dodger, and joined the original “Les Misérables” tour in 1989.

“I was a young performer in the halcyon days when there was one big show in the country at a time,” he said. “I was lucky to work with the best in the world and learn.”

His credits since then include “Back to the Future”, “Sunset Boulevard”, “Les Misérables”, “Phantom of the Opera”, “Disney’s Aladdin”, “Mary Poppins”, “Guys and Dolls”, “Miss Saigon” and “Oliver”.

The chance to play Tevye came after “Back to the Future” closed earlier than expected. Sussman said if that production had continued, he may not have been available for “Fiddler on the Roof”.

His father has seen every opening night of his career and is especially proud of this role.

“He’s very proud, because this story meant something,” Sussman said. “It’s family.”

“Fiddler on the Roof” opens at Theatre Royal Sydney from 31 July 2026 before touring to Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth.

For details, visit fiddlerontherooftour.com.