Sources
Help build the largest human-edited directory on the web.
Submit a site - Become an editor
Wikipedia. Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Are you an expert in this subject? Join the discussion and share your knowledge at Wikipedia.org.
The Fantasticks
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| The Fantasticks | |
 |
|
| Original Off-Broadway cast album cover | |
|---|---|
| Music | Harvey Schmidt |
| Lyrics | Tom Jones |
| Book | Tom Jones |
| Based upon | Les Romanesques by Edmond Rostand |
| Productions | 1960 Off-Broadway 2007 Off-Broadway revival |
The Fantasticks is a 1960 musical 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], concerning two fathers who put up a wall between their houses to ensure that their children fall in love, because they know that children always do what their parents forbid. After the children do fall in love, they discover their fathers' plot and they each go off and experience things in the world. They return to each other and the love they had, having learned from the world and made an informed decision. Elements of the play are ultimately drawn from the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, winding through Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream as well as Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore and Rostand's play.
The show's original production off-Broadway ran for 17,162 performances, becoming the world's longest-running musical, for 42 years. The poetic book and breezy, hummable score, including such familiar songs such as "Try to Remember," helped make this show so durable. Many productions followed, as well as television and film versions. The Fantasticks has also 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 discussed below under "Controversy". It is one of the few musicals to have been made available to other theaters before its original production closed. The show is very budget-friendly because of its small cast, two-person orchestra and minimalist set design.
Contents |
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 sparse set and semicircular stage created an intimate and immediate effect. The play is highly stylized and combines old-fashioned showmanship, classic musical theatre, commedia dell'arte and Noh theatrical traditions.
The original off-Broadway production was produced on a very low budget. The producers 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 crescent of white (the moon). The sun/moon was hung from a nail in one of the poles and is referred to in the libretto. The orchestra consists of a piano and sometimes a harp.
The original off-Broadway production 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]. Notable actors who appeared in the off-Broadway production throughout its long run included F. Murray Abraham, Keith Charles, Kristin Chenoweth, Bert Convy, Eileen Fulton, Lore Noto (the long-time producer), Dick Latessa, and Martin Vidnovic.
The Fantasticks has played in every state, in more than 11,103 U.S. productions in over 2,000 cities and towns. It has played at the White House, Ford's Theatre, the Shawnee Mission in Kansas, Yellowstone National Park and in America's more exotic locales from Carefree, Arizona to Mouth of Wilson, Virginia. Internationally, more than 700 productions have been staged in 67 nations from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. These include Canada (200+), Germany and Australia (approx. 50 each). Scandinavia has seen more than 45 productions including at least one each year since 1962, when it won an award there as the year's Outstanding New Theatrical Piece. Japan, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Czechoslovakia, have all seen multiple productions as have such newsworthy locales as Kabul, Afghanistan and Tehran, Iran. Recently, The Fantasticks has also been seen in Dublin, Milan, Budapest, Zimbabwe, Bangkok, and Beijing.
It has been translated into many languages including Pashto, Dari, French, German, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Czech, Slovak, Persian, Irish, Italian, Magyar, Thai, and Mandarin.
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.
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...."[citation needed] Other writers criticized the casting.
On August 23, 2006, a revival of The Fantasticks opened at the off-Broadway Snapple Theater Center on 50th Street in New York City.[3] The revival initially starred Santino Fontana as Matt. It 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. Anthony Fedorov, American Idol finalist from season 4 assumed the role of Matt from May through July 2007.
![[3]](http://www.fantasticksonbroadway.com/content/5_6_06_newyorktimes.gif){kind=link}
- Act I
The musical seems to take place in small town America, although it is unspecified. A boy (Matt) and a girl (Luisa) live next door to each other and are in love, despite their belief in their fathers' sentiment against their doing so. The fathers, Hucklebee and Bellomy, have concocted a feud so that their children might fall in love.
Seeking to end the charade, the fathers hire the services of a rogue (El Gallo, who also serves as narrator) 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 Act I ends with a happy tableau.
- Act II
Finding out that their love is no longer forbidden, Matt and Luisa begin to grow restless, and the fathers begin to actually quarrel. Matt leaves angrily, to find out what lies out in the world, while Luisa allows herself to be seduced by the mature and dashing El Gallo. Both Matt and Luisa, having been burned by their respective experiences out in the world, rediscover their love for each other and return home.
- El Gallo (the Narrator/Bandit)
- Matt (the Boy)
- Luisa (the Girl)
- Hucklebee (the Boy's father)
- Bellomy (the Girl's father)
- Henry (The Old Actor)
- Mortimer (the man who dies - an actor, pretending to be an American Indian)
- The Mute
|
|
Although the musical was a success, The Fantasticks' book became somewhat controversial due to its use of the word "rape." 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.
Another potential source of controversy is the character Mortimer's comic portrayal of an old-fashioned Hollywood-style American Indian, which has some racist connotations.
- "The Fantastick Career of Jones & Schmidt" by Robert Viagas, SHOWmusic, Fall 1996, pages 12-18, 69-70
- MTI site for The Fantasticks
- Official website of the original production of The Fantasticks
- Official website of the 2006 off-Broadway revival of The Fantasticks