‘The Fantasticks’ delicate theatricality captured in GLT production

 

Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics

 

“‘The Fantasticks’… attracts you, settles back a bit limply, wakes you up again and averages out a little less than satisfactory,” concluded Walter Kerr in his New York Herald Tribune review in 1960.

 

“Perhaps,” added Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times, “‘The Fantasticks’ is by nature the sort of thing that loses magic the longer it endures.”

 

And yet Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s commedia dell’arte-style musical parable endured, setting a record for the world’s longest-running musical with 17,162 Off-Broadway performances at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village.

 

The reasons why are in evidence in the Great Lakes Theater’s thoroughly delightful production, currently on stage at the Hanna Theatre.

 

For more of this review, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/.