Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s The Fantasticks, the longest-running stage show in modern history at 17,162 consecutive performances, seems an easy show to produce, but it is hardly foolproof.
I once saw a production that made the fatal mistake of enlarging its simple, elegant, piano and harp accompaniment to a full-size orchestra, adding a chorus of seven and lots of superfluous scenery. It also starred Robert Goulet, alas, but that’s another story.
The show’s inherent charm disappeared under the weight of the added elements, no longer asking the audience to use its imagination on this tale of love and loss of innocence. And don’t get me started on how misguided the 2000 literal-minded movie version is.
So it is with a sigh of relief that one encounters the fragile, little show at Palm Beach Dramaworks. Resident director J. Barry Lewis seems to really understand that this fable is a balance of dark and light, at its best without additional staging concepts.
Even the often ingeniously elaborate Michael Amico underplays his hand, with a minimalist set design of a central playing platform which holds a few pipe poles on which a simple curtain can be hung. The few stage effects are strictly low-tech and artful. Handfuls of colored paper squares are tossed into the air, a paper lantern floats upward in defiance of gravity and glitter dust rains down, sprinkled by hand. It is not a matter of saving money, but accepting how to best cast the show’s charming spell.
Jones and Schmidt hit upon the idea of adapting and musicalizing Edmond Rostand’s little known Les Romanesques, and after a few false starts, the show opened at off-Broadway’s Sullivan Street Playhouse in 1960, where it became the Energizer bunny of the then-emerging off-Broadway movement.
The story centers on Matt and Luisa (Dramaworks newcomers Jacob Heimer and Jennifer Molly Bell), a callow couple whose fathers (Barry Tarallo and Cliff Goulet) conspire to trick them into falling for each other by faking a feud and forbidding them to see one another. Once they are smitten, the dads dissolve the feud by hiring a roving bandit, El Gallo (Jim Ballard), to abduct Luisa and then be vanquished by Matt’s dashing, if trumped-up, rescue.
The first act ends happily, as everything seems to be sweetly resolved, but in the darker, more cynical second act new complications arise. Matt goes off to experience the cruel world while Luisa stays home and falls into El Gallo’s clutches, impediments to a true, lasting romantic resolution.
Jones and Schmidt went on to write 110 in the Shade and I Do! I Do!, but nothing that approached the intimate success of The Fantasticks. Their score includes the much-recorded pop ballad Try to Remember, the delicate love duet Soon It’s Gonna Rain and the jazzy, intertwined male duet, I Can See It. These and the rest of the simple, yet enduring musical numbers are deftly rendered by Craig D. Ames on piano and Kay Kemper on harp.
Heimer and Bell spout the lovers’ goopy dialogue with earnest and lift their voices ably on the score. Ballard strikes the right note of sinister mystery as El Gallo and stands out with the bravura laundry list of available abductions, It Depends on What You Pay.
Tarallo and Goulet slyly pilfer their scenes as the vaudevillian fathers, excelling on their two song-and-dance turns, Never Say No and Plant a Radish. Outdoing them in the clowning department are Dennis Creaghan as a hammy, if dithery Old Shakespearean and Tangi Colombel as his quasi-Indian sidekick, who specializes in extravagant stage deaths. But the most original performance comes from Cliff Burgess as The Mute, who stage-manages and plays the wall that separates the lovers, all with a silent, cynical attitude.
If you are up for a little light summer fare, the West Palm Beach company that usually traffics in the depths of Albee, O’Neill and Miller, shows it knows how to tiptoe through shallower waters very winningly.
THE FANTASTICKS, Palm Beach Dramaworks at the Don & Ann Brown Theatre, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. Through Sun., Aug. 5. Tickets: $55. Call: (561) 514-4042.
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For 22 years, Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival has been offering the area free outdoor classical theater, often with a revisionist twist on the plays of its namesake playwright.
“Free” is the operative word, a bargain rate that draws sizeable crowds to Jupiter’s Seabreeze Amphitheatre in Carlin Park. Many of these theatergoers seem to be veteran Festival-goers, who probably know to expect wildly uneven and occasionally downright puzzling performances, plus a few superior players.
So it is again this year, with the troupe’s third mounting of the popular comedy Twelfth Night. Guest director and cast member Kevin Crawford keeps the conceptual fiddling to a minimum, though the production now opens with an airplane crash — nicely realized by production designer Daniel Gordon and sound effects guy Chris Bell — instead of the usual shipwreck.
The crash separates grown twins Viola (Krys Parker) and Sebastian (Zach Myers) — who would never be confused for each other, as the plot requires — on the tropical island of Illyria. Donning a dapper three-piece, vanilla-colored suit and a male persona, Viola becomes Cesario and attracts the attentions of countess Olivia (Katherine Seldin) and Duke Orsino (Jim Brogan), before things get sorted out, sort of, at the end.
Parker, a Festival favorite, carries the evening with an assured, verbally adept performance and a fair amount of pheromones. Seldin, however, seems too bland and girlish for Olivia and Brogan is in way over his head as the black-clad, Goth rocker Orsino.
As is frequently the case with PBSF, the acting honors go to Crawford, in the pivotal, though supporting role of Malvolio, Olivia’s puritanical steward. The buttoned-down prude is easily duped into believing his mistress has romantic feelings for him, and Crawford earns the laughs of a well-written scene where he reads a forged love letter. His comic timing and conversational facility with the Elizabethan language are very welcome in the production.
Also assets are Missy McArdle as quick-witted fool Feste, who sings most of her riddled wisdom, Alan Gerstel as inebriated Sir Toby Belch, who lives up to his name, and Laura Ruchala as Olivia’s saucy servant Maria.
It is a typical up-and-down Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival show, which requires a forgiving audience. But remember, admission is free.
TWELFTH NIGHT, Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival, Seabreeze Amphitheatre, Carlin Park, A1A and Indiantown Road, Jupiter. Through Sunday. Tickets: Free, with a $5 suggested donation. Call: (561) 561-966-7099.