It tells an allegorical story, loosely based on the 1894 play The Romancers (Les Romanesques) by Edmond Rostand, concerning two neighboring fathers who trick their children, Luisa and Matt, into falling in love by pretending to feud.
The show's original off-Broadway production ran a total of 42 years (until 2002) and 17,162 performances, making it the world's longest-running musical.
The poetic book and breezy, inventive score, including such memorable songs as "Try to Remember", helped make the show durable.
[3] The 1954 Marc Blitzstein adaptation of The Threepenny Opera, which ran for six years, showed that musicals could be profitable off-Broadway in a small-scale, small orchestra format.
[4] The musical is based loosely on The Romancers (Les Romanesques) by Edmond Rostand,[5] which draws elements from the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore.
[6][7] Jones, together with John Donald Robb of the University of New Mexico, first adapted the Rostand play as a Western titled Joy Comes to Deadhorse.
[11][12] Harley Granville-Barker's book, On Dramatic Method, provided the idea of using a series of images to help weave a unifying theme to the play.
[13] Thornton Wilder's Our Town gave Jones the idea of using a narrator, the staging of Carlo Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters provided the concept of having actors sit stage-side when not acting, and John Houseman's production of The Winter's Tale and Leonard Bernstein's Candide suggested the use of sun, moon, frozen action, and incidental music.
[9][16] The Fantasticks premiered at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, a small off-Broadway theatre in New York City's Greenwich Village, on May 3, 1960, with Jerry Orbach as El Gallo, Rita Gardner as Luisa, Kenneth Nelson as Matt, and librettist Tom Jones (under a pseudonym) as the Old Actor, among the cast members.
The play is highly stylized and combines old-fashioned showmanship, classic musical theatre, commedia dell'arte and Noh theatrical traditions.
[21][22][23] Other notable actors who appeared in the off-Broadway and touring production throughout its long run included Liza Minnelli, Elliott Gould, F. Murray Abraham, Glenn Close, Keith Charles, Carole Demas, Kristin Chenoweth, Bert Convy, Eileen Fulton, Lore Noto (the show's longtime producer), Dick Latessa, and Martin Vidnovic.
[27] On August 23, 2006, a revival of The Fantasticks opened at the off-Broadway The Theater Center, New York City where it closed on June 4, 2017 after an additional run of 4,390 performances.
The original cast of the revival also included Burke Moses (El Gallo), Leo Burmester (Hucklebee), Martin Vidnovic (Bellomy), Santino Fontana (Matt), Sara Jean Ford (Luisa), Robert R. Oliver (Mortimer), and Douglas Ullman, Jr. (the Mute).
The well-received production replaced the conventional "mysterious bandit" interpretation of El Gallo with a kindly carnival magician character.
Washington Post theatre critic Peter Marks wrote, "they have been reconditioned to conceal the telltale signs of age and yield a diversion that feels fresh and alive again".
[37][38] The production was directed by Amon Miyamoto, designed by Rumi Matsui with lighting by Rick Fisher, and starred Hadley Fraser as El Gallo, Lorna Want as Luisa, Luke Brady as Matt, Clive Rowe and David Burt as the fathers, Edward Petherbridge as the Old Actor, Paul Hunter as Henry and Carl Au as the mime.
[39][40] The production received mixed to poor reviews: Michael Billington wrote in the Guardian, "the time for this kind of faux-naïf, sub Commedia dell'Arte diversion has passed",[39] while Paul Tayolr, in The Independent, felt that, while "ingratiating [and overly long,] as an open-hearted antidote to soulless, big-budget hi-tech, The Fantasticks continues to prove that small can be quite fetching".
[43] Famous actors, other than those listed above, who have performed in productions of the show include David Canary, Robert Goulet, Richard Chamberlain, John Carradine and Ed Ames.
The cast included John Davidson, Stanley Holloway, Bert Lahr, Ricardo Montalbán and Susan Watson, who had appeared in the original Barnard College production.
It starred Joel Grey, Brad Sullivan, Jean Louisa Kelly, Barnard Hughes, Jonathon Morris and Joey McIntyre and included some changes to the book.
Hucklebee tells Bellomy of his plan to end the feud by having Luisa "kidnapped" by a professional abductor so that Matt can "rescue" her and appear heroic.
The hired professional, El Gallo, appears and offers the fathers a menu of different varieties of "rape" – in the literary sense of an abduction or kidnapping – that he can simulate ("It Depends on What You Pay").
A disheveled old actor with a failing memory, Henry Albertson, arrives with his sidekick, Mortimer, a Cockney dressed as an American Indian.
El Gallo collects the stage properties used in the "abduction" and wonders aloud how long the lovers and their fathers will be able to maintain their elaborately joyful poses.
Matt and Luisa are mortified, and the fathers' mutual recrimination quickly escalates into a real feud; they storm off to their respective houses.
El Gallo tells Luisa to pack her things for the journey, but before she goes inside to do so, he asks her to give him her treasured necklace, a relic of her dead mother, as a pledge that she will return.
As she goes inside, El Gallo promises her a world of beauty and grandeur; at the same time, Matt approaches, giving a contrasting version of the cruel experiences that one can suffer ("I Can See It" (reprise)).
[50][51] To deal with changing audience perceptions, the musical's book is usually edited to replace the word "rape", in most instances, with alternatives such as "abduction" and the similar-sounding "raid".