The Fantasticks

Show Description:

It is a safe bet that not too many people—in fact, to be truthful, no one!—would have bet in May 1960 that the small-scale show opening at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Manhattan would run for 42 years and more than 17,000 performances. The world’s longest-running musical, The Fantasticks is based on the 1894 play Les Romanesques by Edmond Rostand (of Cyrano de Bergerac fame). The immense popularity of the work rests with its fanciful, affecting, and poignant Romeo-and-Juliet-like storyline, its compact dramatic structure, and—to be sure—the seemingly timeless popularity of its opening song, “Try to Remember.” The plot centers on two young neighbors, Matt and Luisa, who have fallen in love, but whose seemingly feuding fathers are determined to keep them apart, even to the point of erecting a wall between their properties. In truth, this is all part of the fathers’ plan to bring them together: forbid children from doing something, and they will do it. Their attempt to end the “feud” and let the children have their way goes temporarily awry when a mock abduction, coordinated by the gallant and alluring El Gallo, has unintended effects on the children, who separate and “venture out in the world.”