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He’s 87 and shows no sign of slowing down. Except when he’s driving in the snow.  ”I have to drive up to Richmond Hill and I don’t trust the other drivers when it’s snowy,” he says with a twinkle in his eye, as he asks how it is outside.

“At home in L.A., just a little bit of rain makes the drivers crazy,” he admits, before settling into place for a run-through in the rehearsal hall, deep in the bowels of the St. Lawrence Centre of the Arts, on Front Street.

He’s no stranger to Toronto. This time, he’s here for the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company’s production of VISITING MR. GREEN.

Click here to watch video report on Theodore Bikel in Toronto

The legendary Bikel stars as Mr. Green, who is almost hit by a car driven by a young corporate executive, Ross Gardiner, played by Aidan deSalaiz. When Gardiner is found guilty of reckless driving, he is ordered to spend the next six months making weekly visits to Mr. Green.

What starts off as a comedy about two people who resent being in the same room together develops into a gripping and poignant drama, as family secrets are revealed and old wounds opened.

The play has been performed in hundreds of productions the world over. How will Bikel make the leading role his own? “I use my own sense of theatre,’” he tells Friday Night Magazine. “My own sense of the art form, my own sense of literature, and in this case, my own Jewish sense that comes into play.”

He is pleased to return to the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company, now in its sixth year, and appreciates the importance of Jewish theatre, as he does theatre of any ethnic group.

“We are who we are,” he says. “We have extraordinary writers, extraordinary performers and why shouldn’t they toil in the Jewish arena from time to time? It’s not what I do exclusively. I play in the general arena. I sing in 23 languages, but when I sing in Yiddish, I’m singing my own.”

Nominated for an Academy Award for The Defiant Ones in 1958 and for a Tony Award for originating the role of Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music on Broadway, Bikel is probably best known for playing Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, a role he played more than 2,100 times on Broadway.

Most recently, Bikel won a 2010 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance for Sholom Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears, presented in Toronto by HGJTC in 2009.

Considered the consummate Renaissance man, Bikel has also performed opera and had a recording/performing career as a talented folksinger. For 60 years, Bikel has been a force in film, the stage, and the arts, from his supporting role in The African Queen in 1951 to his appearance at the 1960 Newport Folk Festival to his appointment to the National Council for the Arts in 1977.

Austrian born, he moved early in life to pre-state Israel, later to England, and the United States.  He speaks five languages, sings in many more, and his recordings of Hebrew and Yiddish folksongs in the early 1950s were staples in record collections in Jewish homes. He served as a vice president of the American Jewish Congress.

So, after such an illustrious career working so many art forms, not to mention political activism, is traveling to Toronto to do this play still fun for Bikel?  “Absolutely. Absolutely; I don’t do things I don’t enjoy.”

At 87, retirement seems like an alien concept. “I don’t retire, because within that word is contained the notion of ‘tiredness’, and I’m not tired,” he says with the same twinkle in his eye.

VISITING MR. GREEN, by Jeff Baron, plays at the Jane Mallett Theatre, St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, from January 28 to February 18, 2012.

Click here to watch video report on Theodore Bikel in Toronto

Video and text by David Bale