Probably the most timeless maxim of all is that we don’t know what we don’t know. That temptingly trite but often overlooked gem is what keeps us plodding along in our lives and as a species.
The current production of “The Fantasticks” at the Aurora Fox Arts Center by Phamaly Theater Co. just as simply and just as remarkably brings that message home in a unusually fresh and powerful production of this aging show.
Fresh is unusual for a musical that has run longer and more prolifically than just about any other since the first NYC curtain call in 1960. As a teenager, watching “The Fantasticks” for the first time at the Belle Bonfils Theater, I marveled at the odd show and its tired parable. Although it was a very long time ago, the play was already moving across the country in the first generation of revivals. I easily identified with the two teenage roles in the play. Their characters, and the story itself, is really just one of endless variations on “Romeo and Juliet.”
I’ve seen the show a few times since then, as even later generations of revivals. I eventually began sympathizing with the kids’ two fathers in the show, a reflection of my life as a dad and my advancing years. Last week, I fully expected to see the show’s two crazy old fools as my peers and be done with seeing it ever again, since I’ve run through all the characters, except for the ageless Mute and narrator.
But the Phamaly cast and crew were able to reach back into the beat poetry roots of the play and bring a new universal appeal to the stage, in part because of who the company of players are.
“The Fantasticks” is a 1950s beat-generation creation of Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones. The show is so old that the spiel used to be, “No, not that Tom Jones.” Now, millenials have no clue who either Tom Jones were. Beat poets? Seems like most kids were texting during that day in high-school English.
The play is a surreal, minimalist tale about two young lovers who have unknowingly been led to each other by meddling, scheming fathers. The teenagers are impetuous, impatient and impertinent.
Although the show was written as a musical, it incorporated edgy, alternative theatrics, for its day. Later, such contrivances would became standard fare in shows like “Pippin” and “A Chorus Line.” In “The Fantasticks,” a narrator, El Gallo, slides in and out of the staging. The show also incorporates “a Mute,” who also moves in and out of the actors’ perception. It’s a small cast, and the show is easy to follow.
The plan for a blissful wedding goes awry when El Gallo is hired to feign a kidnapping so that the young Matt looks like a hero to his girlfriend, Luisa. When the plot is undone, Matt, disgusted, takes off to see the world. Luisa stays to struggle with her own hard lessons. Neither path is easy or pretty.
It can be stock stuff. Even if you’ve never seen the show, you’ve heard the songs, “Metaphor,” “Soon It’s Gonna Rain,” the play’s signature ballad, “Try to Remember.” You know, “ … a time in Septem-ber … ”
But rather than pull the old songs and innuendo along, the high energy cast pushes the show in a new direction. Director’s Bryce Alexander’s pacing helps make up for the show’s inherent shortcoming of not being able to tell when it’s all coming together. Like the beat poetry it’s modeled after, there often isn’t a defining, “this is it” moment.
It’s a testimony to this theater group’s strengths, which has made a name for itself by unmasking the truth about disabilities. They’re not weaknesses. The Phamaly company is made up of actors and artists who have one or several physical disabilities. In their famous fashion, they don’t mask the conditions or gratuitously draw attention to them. They become a natural and often innovative part of the show. The company of notably talented actors, singers and dancers adeptly play to their own personal challenges on stage to make the audience understand that they’re just different. And when you’re resurrecting 40-year-old musicals, different is good.
Jenna Bainbridge, as Luisa, bounds onto the stage as a tempestuous teenage girl. With a vocal range that seemed endless, she dominated the scene, just like dramatic teenage girls are so good at in real life. Daniel Traylor mastered the mercurial and obstinate Matt. Both kept the show on pace with a long list of solos and duets that finished just as strong as they started.
Jeremy Palmer drove the action as El Gallo, mysterious and egocentric, the embodiment of the beat generation bent on controlling everything.
Robert Michael Sanders, as Luisa’s father, Bellomy, and Mark Dissette, as Matt’s father, Hucklebee, both tap into 1960s stream of smugness that fueled a decade of “Oh, Daddy” sit-coms and movies. The Shakespearean tragicomic contrivances are fleshed out by what these two bring to stage.
But the show’s thieves were Stewart Caswell, as Mortimer, and David Wright as Henry. The two dark foils keep the play from drifting into taking so much spoken-and-sung verse too seriously. Their timing and their shtick are spot on, especially Caswell. In Hell, Satan’s sidekick rides a three-wheeler through the flames and abyss.
Lyndsay Palmer as the Mute, a device borrowed from Asian theater, not only pulled off a ghost-like performance to keep from being an odd distraction, but twice seriously conjured from the audience the only real emotion the bubbles up.
It’s an air-tight production. The minimalistic set seems expansive and a perfect pallet for lighting that cues a mood that can too quickly seem like extravagant reader’s theater. More than anything, the cast and crew reveal that none of us has to be defined by our disabilities or challenges. So many would scoff at the idea of physically disabled actors staging a Broadway musical, and Phamaly consistently proves them wrong, in part, because the company seemed unaware that they couldn’t. We’re all foolish Fantasticks because we don’t know what we don’t know. And life, or this show, couldn’t be sweeter because of it.
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‘The Fantasticks’
Presented by Phamaly Theatre Co.
Through Feb. 15 at the Aurora Fox Arts Center, 9900 E. Colfax Ave. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays
Encore performances at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities Feb. 27 – March 1, Fri. & Sat. @ 7:30 p.m.; Sunday @ 2 p.m.
Aurora Fox Box office: 303-739-1970
Arvada Center Box office: 720-898-7200
Tickets are $14-$36
Go to www.phamaly.org for details and tickets.