A full-fledged musical is the most redoubtable of theatrical genres. Not only because of the number of personnel it involves, multiplied by the many human eccentricities, but also because of the range and complexity of technology it demands that in turn requires trained and trusted manpower as well as a huge budget.

Just to hear of such a project undertaken by a school makes one sceptical, specially when La Martiniere took on Jerry Bock’s record-breaking Fiddler on the Roof, which had run for eight years on Broadway. All reservations, however, proved completely and joyously unfounded.

The first thing that took us totally by surprise was the message. We all know about Fiddler — besides the moving love stories of Tevye’s daughters, of Russian Jewish families finally evicted from their village by edict in the early 20th century. But I must confess that I did not see its impact coming. Suddenly it became a comment on our part of the world, which has been a witness to communities being turned out of their homes by friends and neighbours for reasons of religion, politics or, recently, ‘progress’.

Musicals, as we understand them, entertain and give instant pleasure. This one achieved much more; gently it turned the eyes of the participants and the audience towards topical happenings, thanks to a perfect choice of script by the director, Katy Lai Roy.

In stagecraft, she conjured up the kind of seemingly effortless magic, which paradoxically arises out of rigidly rehearsed discipline. Individual acting here matters less than the collective picture, which Lai Roy painstakingly constructed with the help of meticulous attention to every person in view — even walk-ons — so that we saw full-blooded crowd scenes that caught the energy of real life. Above all, every actor was a school student that gave the venture a special spirit (and why I shall not single out any names), unlike other projects that choose the alternative of inviting star alumni or teachers to play lead roles, thereby undercutting the purpose of a school show.

Also, exceeding all expectations was the solo singing, entirely live, supported by a 35-strong choir, with only some of Jonathan Ramgopal’s instrumental backing canned, everything else taking place real-time. The choreography, too, was dynamic. Yes, the occasional glitches occurred — the sound balancing took a while to settle down, the smoke machine belched too much in a predictable manner and the menorah could have appeared more often and more prominently. But these are minor issues. La Martiniere’s Fiddler has become the benchmark against which we must measure any future effort in this domain.