They Are the Sometimes
By Bill Hirschman, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Mar. 7–The ever-scrappy Public Theatre at the Soref puts its heart into The Fantasticks, the perennial pocket musical about the fantasy and reality of love and life. But it only succeeds in fits and starts. It’s a frustrating exercise in not being quite there.
Pulling off Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s wryly affectionate, deceptively simple fable requires hitting precisely the right tone — a devilishly elusive mixture of innocence and knowledge, unalloyed romanticism and battered skepticism, creating archetypes and individuals in the same performance.
It tells of youngsters whose fathers fake a feud to maneuver the contrary teens into a love match. With the help of a dashing narrator and down-on-their-luck actors, they stage an abduction of the girl and her subsequent rescue by the boy. But the fairy tale crumbles when the fiction is exposed and love must be tested by the real world before prevailing in the end.
Director David Jay Bernstein gets some promising moments from the sweet-voiced and effervescent Sarah Reich as the ingenue and Jack Livesey as her father. In fact, almost everyone has moments when you can see why he or she was cast. But they never last.
Particularly disconcerting is how often the cast and Jonathan White’s piano are out of synch, especially Richard Ianni’s narrator, who also seems to run out of wind in some songs.
Bill Hirschman can be reached at 954-356-4513 or bhirschman@sun-sentinel.com.
on stage
The Fantasticks
Musical, presented by the Public Theatre, through April 8 at the Soref JCC, 6501 W. Sunrise Blvd., Plantation. Shows 8 p.m. Thursday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Tickets $22. Call 866-388-4849.
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Copyright (c) 2007, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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