Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✭✩
music by Harvey Schmidt, book and lyrics by Tom Jones
directed by Joseph Ziegler
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
February 14-June 18, 2011
"Oh, so mellow"
The Fantasticks holds the record for the world’s longest-running musical--42 years beginning in 1960. Soulpepper’s new production provides a glimpse of why it should have been so successful. It’s an intimate, small-scale show with a big heart--funny, melancholy and poetic--and director Joseph Ziegler captures its mood of whimsy perfectly.
Based on a play, Les Romanesques (1894), by Edmond Rostand, author of Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), The Fantasticks is a kind of symbolic fairy-tale governed by theatrical magic. It’s like a musical version of Our Town that focusses on the young lovers of that play. Indeed, when Albert Schultz as the narrator/bandit El Gallo introduces the action, he functions exactly like the Stage Manager in Wilder’s play and uses the same knowing tone of voice he did in Soulpepper’s production of it.
Two feuding fathers, Huckleby (Michael Hanrahan) and Bellamy (William Webster), have built a wall between their adjoining properties supposedly to prevent their children from falling in love. Inevitably, Huckleby’s 20-year-old son Matt (Jeff Lillico) and Bellamy’s 16-year-old daughter Luisa (Krystin Pellerin) do just that and, when alone, frequently speak of their love to each other over the wall. Shades of Pyramus and Thisbe! Shades of Romeo and Juliet! Unlike Shakespeare, however, it is soon revealed that the fathers are, in fact, best friends, and have built the wall in order to encourage their children to fall in love, knowing that children will always do what is forbidden. Now that Luisa has come of age, the fathers’ problem is how to bring their stratagem to a conclusion. Their solution is to hire the bandit El Gallo to stage a kidnapping of Luisa, whom Matt will save while also winning faith in himself and her undying admiration. To aid in his plan El Gallo enlists the help of two ancient actors Henry (Oliver Dennis) and Mortimer (Michael Simpson) to act as his retinue of villains. While Act 1 focusses on the comedy of self-delusion in young love, Act 2 focusses on the discarding of illusion for reality. As “Try to Remember”, the show’s first song warns, “Without a hurt the heart is hollow”.
What characterizes the whole work is a sense of innocence and playfulness. This sense is reinforced by the utter simplicity of the staging. The piece has an orchestra of only two--piano (Lily Ling, on the night I attended) and harp (Erica Goodman). Christina Podubbiuk’s set consists of a patched front curtain that doesn’t quite cover the stage opening, a second worn curtain mid-stage, two towers of the three ladders each and various boxes and crates. The wall itself is played by a Mute actor (Derek Boyes), clad like a 19th-century circus member, who also plays a number of other object and weather phenomena. The effect is of a travelling theatre troupe putting on a play aimed at the young person inside each adult when he or she first experienced the joy and pain of love. It is utterly charming.
The show is well cast although the actors’ singing ability is variable. Albert Schultz reminds us with his fine rendition of “Try to Remember” what a fine singer he is and emphasizes the meaning of a song that can seem like a jumble of feminine rhymes. As El Gallo--masked, caped, bolero hatted--he shows a gleeful flair for physical comedy we haven’t seen for a long while. Jeff Lillico has proved his ability as a singer many times, most recently in the near-operatic role of Fabrizio in The Light in the Piazza last year. The role of Matt is not as difficult except for long-held notes which Lillico has fully mastered. He brings a youthful wonder to all his dialogue and songs, especially in the show’s other hit, “Soon It’s Gonna Rain”, which he makes sound brand new. Krystin Pellerin has a small, sweet voice, perfect for a 16-year-old girl, but she needs more volume and a more bell-like tone to carry off the coloratura figuration that Schmidt gives her. As a actor she makes the dreamy, impressionable Luisa completely believable.
William Webster and Michael Hanrahan are well-matched as the two fathers, with Webster commanding the more resonant voice. But the real show-stopper is Oliver Dennis. He’s absolutely hilarious as an antique actor brimful of self-satisfaction but who can’t remember any of his lines. He delivers a wonderful mishmash of Shakespeare’s greatest lines as if they were one speech. The physical humour of his awkward attempts to get out of and then back into the trunk is priceless. His companion is Michael Simpson who says little but whose speciality is “dying”. Their humour has an unpleasant side when they become Matt’s dubious companions, rather like Pinocchio’s Cat and Fox, when he seeks to know a world beyond the safety of his father’s garden. If you are in a the mood for a charming musical with a strong melancholy undertone, Soulpepper’s production of The Fantasticks will suit you perfectly.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: William Webster, Krystin pellerin, Jeff Lillico and Michael Hanrahan.
©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2011-03-11
The Fantasticks