Moonlight and magic, and wistful love, are the stuff of America’s longest-running musical – ever – TheFantasticks, which opens today in Lincoln, onstage at Jean’s Playhouse. The fourth of their five-show professional summer season, audiences may recognize some of the actors who have been performing this summer, joined by additional cast members and a creative team that includes Bryan Halperin and Katie Proulx, both of whom won N.H. Theatre Awards for a production of the show more than six years ago. In fact, Halperin is a multi-award winner, and known to audiences from the Lakes region and Concord for his steady direction of professional and community theatre productions for a wide variety of well-established companies.
“This is,” says Halperin, “of course a new production of the well-told tale. I’m very fortunate to be able to work with the entire team at Jean’s, and to revisit the work with a fresh eye – and at the same time to continue exploring with Katie the concept of the Mute as a pivotal character in telling this story.”
The Jones/Schmidt musical fable owes much to Rostand’s Les Romaneques and elements plucked from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and other romantic classics. Not to mention the resonance of Robert Frost, as two neighbor dads believe good fences make good neighbors.
A mysterious and magical bandit, El Gallo, along with a secretive and nimble Mute, narrates the fable that is The Fantasticks: he with words and song, she with gestures and dance, at times posing as the wall. That wall divides the properties of Bellomy and Hucklebee, which they hope will drive their children, a son and daughter, to fall in love in defiance of their pretense differences. And their children, Matt and Luisa, do fall in love; whispering secrets over the wall, including Luisa’s fantasy of a heroic Matt rescuing her from a kidnapping.
And so, a kidnapping is arranged. The mysterious El Gallo offers the fathers a menu of different varieties of abduction that he can simulate to make of Matt a hero. Deciding to spare no expense for their beloved children (within reason), the fathers agree to a “first class” abduction scene which El Gallo delivers, aided by two characters who appear: one a disheveled old actor with a failing memory, the other his sidekick, a cockney dressed as an American Indian. Mission accomplished, the ‘feud’ ends, the wall is torn down, and all rejoice as the first act closes.
The fantasy is short-lived, and as mischief maker El Gallo observes, the romance of something by moonlight often turns harsh by light of day. The bright sun reveals the fake kidnap caper, starts a chain of bickering, and leads to rebuilding the wall and separation of the lovers … who eventually discover what El Gallo’s observation really means: “Who understands why Spring is born out of Winter’s laboring pain? Or why we all must die a bit before we grow again?” Mature love, which can only deepen becauseof the obstacles that are overcome, offers both moonlight and magic, if we can let ourselves only try to “remember.”
The Fantasticks performs Thursdays to Saturdays through Aug. 31, 7:30 p.m. at Jean’s, the North Country Center for the Arts, 34 Papermill Drive in Lincoln; with one matinee on Aug. 28. More information and tickets at jeansplayhouse.com or 745-2141.