The Fantasticks

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The Fantasticks original Off Broadway CD cover

The Fantasticks is a 1960 musical comedy with music by Harvey Schmidt and lyrics by Tom Jones. It tells an allegorical story, loosely based on the play "The Romancers" ("Les Romanesques") by Edmond Rostand [1]. The play's first iteration was as "Joy Comes to Deadhorse" at the University of New Mexico in 1956; after substantial rewriting, it appeared on a bill of new one-act plays at Barnard College for one week in August 1959.

The Fantasticks premiered at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, a small off-Broadway theater, on May 3, 1960, with Jerry Orbach as El Gallo, Rita Gardner as Luisa, and Kenneth Nelson as Matt, among the cast members. The spare set and semicircular stage made the show very intimate and immediate for theatregoers. The play is highly stylized and combines aspects of old-fashioned '40s Broadway styles with a more modernist, "fantastical" style and is accompanied by a piano and harp. A mime character represents various set pieces and silent characters, such as the wall between the two houses, and one of the characters, the bandit El Gallo, also serves as a wry narrator.

The show was produced on a very low budget. They spent $900 on the set and $541 on costumes at a time when major Broadway shows would spend $1-2 million on sets, props, and costumes. The original set designer, costumer, prop master, and lighting designer was Ed Wittstein, who performed all four jobs for a total of only $480 plus $24.48 a week. The set was similar to that for "Our Town"; Wittstein designed a raised stationary platform anchored by six poles. It resembled a traveling players wagon, like a pageant wagon. As for a curtain, he hung different small false curtains across the platform at various times during the play. He also made a sun/moon out of cardboard. One side was painted bright yellow (the sun) and the other was black with a cresent of white (the moon). The sun/moon was hung from a nail in one of poles and is referred to in the libretto.

The show was broadcast by the Hallmark Hall of Fame on October 18, 1964. The cast included John Davidson, Stanley Holloway, Bert Lahr, Ricardo Montalban, and Susan Watson, who had appeared in the original Barnard College production. Others who appeared in the off-Broadway production throughout its long run are F. Murray Abraham, Keith Charles, Kristen Chenoweth, Bert Convy, Eileen Fulton, Lore Noto (the long-time producer), Dick Latessa, and Martin Vidnovic.

On July 24, 1996, the show reached its 15,000th performance, and the show closed on January 13, 2002 after a record-shattering 17,162 performances. It is the world's longest-running musical, and the longest-running, uninterrupted show of any kind in the United States [2].

An unsuccessful 1995 feature film version, directed by Michael Ritchie, starred Joel Grey, Barnard Hughes, Joe McIntyre, and Jean Louisa Kelly. A.O. Scott wrote of it in the New York Times, "Unfortunately, what looks like magic on stage can seem manic by the light of the screen. Live theater can tolerate outsize gestures, rickety sets and willful illusionism more easily than film, which is a stubbornly literal-minded medium.... The musical numbers are bizarrely edited.... The haphazard cutting wrecks the moment with self-consciousness. [It] is, at bottom, a tribute to the transformative power of theater, and the theater is where it should have been allowed to remain...." Other writers criticized the casting.

On August 23, 2006, a revival of The Fantasticks opened at the off-Broadway Snapple Theater Center in New York City [3]. The revival is directed by lyricist Jones, who also appears in the role of The Old Actor under the stage name Thomas Bruce. A cast recording of this production was released by Ghostlight Records.

On May 1, 2007 actor and singer, and American Idol finalist from AI Season 4, Anthony Fedorov, will be playing the role of Matt in the off-Broadway production. Fedorov is scheduled to perform through the end of July.

1 Plot
2 Impact
3 Controversy
4 Reference
5 External links

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Act I

The musical takes place in a small town. A boy (Matt Hucklebee) and a girl (Luisa Bellomy) who live next door to each other fall in love, but their fairy-tale romance must be kept secret from their feuding fathers (known simply as "Hucklebee" and "Bellomy"). Later, it is revealed that the "feud" was manufactured by their fathers (who are really the best of friends), as a way to bring their two children together by making them believe that their love was "forbidden fruit" ("They did it 'cause we said 'no'!").

Seeking to end the charade, the fathers hire the services of a rogue (El Gallo, who is also the play's narrator) and a roving actor and his sidekick (the "Old Actor" and "Mortimer") to stage a phony "abduction" (or "literary rape") of Luisa so that Matt can "rescue" her and win the approval of Luisa's father. The plan succeeds, and the two families are united.

Act II

Act II follows the young lovers into temptation and through the loss of innocence, which is a necessary condition for real love.

With their love no longer fresh or forbidden, Matt and Luisa begin to grow restless, and the fathers begin quarreling for real. Matt leaves angrily, to find out what lies "Beyond that Road", while Luisa allows herself to be seduced by the mature and dashing rogue, El Gallo. After various Huckleberry Finn-like adventures with the rogue, the "Old Actor" and Mortimer, both Matt and Luisa, having been burned by their respective experiences, rediscover their love for each other and try to develop a more mature relationship.

[edit] Impact

In addition to being the longest running theatrical show in U.S. history, The Fantasticks has become a staple of regional, community, and high school productions virtually since its premiere, despite a deceptively simple plot line and several politically incorrect themes. It is one of the few musicals to have been made available to smaller theaters before its original production closed. Its popularity in these spaces may be due to its budget-friendly small cast and minimalist set design, as well as it's breezy, hummable score and public familiarity with its signature song, "Try to Remember", a theme in waltz time.

[edit] Controversy

Despite its success, The Fantasticks' book became somewhat controversial due to its use of the word "rape" and euphamistic evocation description of one of the character's anus as her "jazzhole".

When El Gallo offers to stage the phony kidnapping of Luisa, he refers to the proposed event as a "rape" -- although he makes it clear that he uses the word only in its traditional literary sense of "abduction", explaining that many classical works, including Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, use the word in this sense.

In his song "It Depends on What You Pay" he describes different kidnapping scenarios -- some comic or outlandish -- that he classifies as the "Venetian rape", the "Gothic rape", the "Drunken rape", etc. However, as the public issues of rape and sexual assault became more of a delicate subject during the play's long run, some people in the audience became offended or puzzled by the use of the word.

To deal with changing audience perceptions, the book was edited to reduce the number of usages of the word "rape" and to replace them with other words, usually "abduction". In addition, the authors wrote an optional replacement piece called "Abductions", which uses the music of the show's overture (although this song did not replace "It Depends on What You Pay" at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, where, with the edits made in the book, audiences did not seem to have much difficulty in accepting the song). It is generally agreed that this song is not as inspired as the original, but it does allow producers of the musical a way to avoid the controversy raised by the original song. In order to conserve the quality of the original song "It Depends on What You Pay", some directors choose to simply substitute the word "raid" for "rape", evoking the "Indian raid" which El Gallo stages.