A kazoo has joined the music makers of the placid Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof at the Minskoff Theater. From the moment it sounds its first word, Harvey Fierstein's voice causes an entire audience to prick up its ears in the manner of a dog startled by a sharp whistle.

Heard not so long ago issuing from the plus-size form of Edna Turnblad, the agoraphobic housewife in the musical Hairspray, Mr. Fierstein’s voice is one of the most distinctive in theater, belonging to the legend-making league of those of Carol Channing and Glynis Johns. And though a kazoo is what it most often brings to mind, it also variously evokes a congested saxophone, wind in a bottle and echoes from a crypt. It is, in a way, its own multicolored show. Whether it fits comfortably into the little Russian village of Anatevka, where Fiddler is set, is another issue.

When David Leveaux’s production of this much-loved, much-performed 40-year-old musical of life on a Jewish shtetl first opened last February, it was notable principally for its elegant, autumnal set (by Tom Pye) and its anesthetizing blandness. In the central role of Tevye the milkman, a part created in 1964 by Zero Mostel, the usually excellent Alfred Molina seemed sad, tentative and often absent. The whole show appeared to suffer from a similar lack of engagement with its material.

Mr. Leveaux, the fashionable London director behind the Broadway revivals of Nine and Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, may have been aiming for a tone of lyrical lament, of a goodbye to a folkloric way of life about to disappear. But it has always been the robustness as well as the sentimentality of Jerry Bock’s and Sheldon Harnick’s songs and Joseph Stein’s book that has made Fiddler such an enduring favorite. Led by the somnambulistic Mr. Molina, and a bizarrely chic Randy Graff as Tevye’s wife, Golde, Mr. Leveaux's interpretation sometimes barely had a pulse.

That omission has been remedied to some extent by Mr. Molina’s new replacement. Even at his quietest, Mr. Fierstein, who won a Tony Award for Hairspray, has the presence of a waking volcano. And lest anyone think he needs drag to be big, let it be noted that he wears Tevye’s tattered trousers with a homey and winning ease. To see the gray-bearded, bright-eyed Mr. Fierstein pulling a horseless milk cart with sardonic resignation is, you may well think, to look upon the image of the Tevye of the Sholem Aleichem stories that inspired the show.

It is Mr. Fierstein’s greatest asset as a performer, that unmistakable voice, that perversely shatters this illusion. Theatergoers who saw - or more to the point heard - this actor in Hairspray will require at least 10 minutes to banish echoes of Edna. But even audience members unfamiliar with Mr. Fierstein may find him a slightly jarring presence.

Tevye must to some degree be an everyman, albeit in exaggerated, crowd-pleasing form. And Mr. Fierstein, bless him, shakes off any semblance of ordinariness as soon as he opens his mouth. Every phrase he speaks or sings, as he shifts uncannily among registers, becomes an event. And the effect is rather as if Ms. Channing were playing one of Rodgers and Hammerstein's simple, all-American heroines in "Oklahoma!" or "Carousel."

A master of droll comic melodramas in fringe theater long before he became a Broadway star with his Torch Song Trilogy in 1982, Mr. Fierstein inflects every line with at least a touch of the grandeur of old Hollywood movies, whether he's being husky with sentimentality, smoky with regret or growly with displeasure.

This can be quite a bit of fun. Tevye‘s first solo, “If I Were a Rich Man,” takes on a fascinating new life, as Mr. Fierstein slides and rasps through its wordless connecting phrases. But it is sometimes hard to credit this exotic spirit as that of a tradition-bound father who has trouble making the adjustment to changing times.

Andrea Martin, who has replaced Ms. Graff as Golde, might do well to borrow a bit of Mr. Fierstein's idiosyncracy. This actress, who first came to attention as a flamboyantly eccentric comedian on “SCTV,” is on her best behavior here, as if being in a classic Broadway musical meant being quiet and dignified. (She was livelier in the recent revival of “Oklahoma!”)There is nothing jolting or inappropriate in her performance, but there is nothing memorable either.

The same might be said of the rest of the show, though Tricia Paoluccio and Laura Shoop bring a fresh and welcome piquancy as two of Tevye’s five daughters. John Cariani, who was nominated for a Tony as the nerdy Motel the tailor, has now pushed his performance to grating comic extremes.

The onstage orchestra sounds perfectly pleasant, and the dancing, restaged by Jonathan Butterell from Jerome Robbins’s original choreography, is agreeable. Yet somewhere there is a disconnect between Mr. Leveaux's elegiac reimagining of Fiddler, evident in its poetically somber look, and the dinner-theater-style comic performances of much of the cast. To mourn the passing of the traditional life of Anatevka, you need to have an organic and fluid sense of that life that this production rarely achieves.

As for the show’s new Tevye, it would seem that this Fiddler has gone from having too little of a personality at its center to having too much of one.

Still, as Tevye himself might argue, better an overspiced feast than a famine.