The Rep overthinks — but really, really means — its Fantasticks revival

Try to remember a time when a production of The Fantasticks, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s romantic chamber musical, wasn’t a day trip away.

The show opened Off Broadway in 1960 and ran for 42 years and some 17,000 performances. Its popularity hasn’t dwindled since. The Kansas City Repertory Theatre — known then as the Missouri Rep — performed it in the 1990s. Spinning Tree Theatre brought it back in 2012. I opened my linen closet to grab a towel yesterday and found a small theater troupe in there rehearsing the second act. If an infinite number of monkeys hit keys at random on an infinite number of MacBooks over an infinite length of time, all of those monkeys would eventually abandon their posts to sing El Gallo at cabaret night.

Against such potentially grating ubiquity, then, the Rep’s Jerry Genochio, directing The Fantasticks at the newly renovated Spencer Theatre, has a tall order: Make it fresh.

Instead, he has made it earnest — more earnest than even the Narrator/El Gallo’s opening entreaty that we Try to remember the kind of September/When you were a tender and callow fellow.

For the most part, the sincerity serves the script well. The Fantasticks turns cavity-sweet when the young lovers play like ingénue archetypes instead of being real, flawed adolescents. Emily Shackelford strikes the right balance as the Girl, fanciful and flighty but never bubbly or naïve. Shackelford is a standout vocally as well: Her rendition of “They Were You” is restrained, wistful and sharply felt. Zane Phillips is sensitive and believable as her counterpart, the Boy, though he struggled to keep pace with the orchestra on opening night.

The lovers’ fathers, played by Gary Neal Johnson and Larry Marshall, imbue sillier songs such as “Plant a Radish” with authentic charm and crank. But choreographer Richard J. Hinds gives them little to do beyond plodding jazz squares, making the two spry actors seem lethargic. Andrew Varela had a rocky start as El Gallo on opening night — his consonants disappeared into the ether in “It Depends on What You Pay” — but soon recovered to embody the role’s requisite vocal chops and flair. And veteran actresses Peggy Friesen and Merle Moores lend their consummate crispness to the Actor/Henry and the Man Who Dies/Mortimer, respectively, though they skew a bit toony in a way that doesn’t mesh with the rest of the cast.

Part of The Fantasticks‘ popularity with theater companies is undoubtedly its technical simplicity. Traditionally, a character called the Mute (played here by Chip Miller) suggests scenery (like a Trump-lite dividing wall) with only his body and his cane. Genochio keeps some of that meta-theatrical flair with an in-the-round-staging that places a small seating unit onstage in clear view. But euphemism more often gives way to something more literal. The painted stage floor is an intricate, photorealistic approximation of tile. (The program credits two scenic artists — Alice Bracken-Carroll and assistant Jessica Secrest.) Scenic designer Martin Andrew supplies dazzling, practical rain effects, glimmering café lights and trap doors that yawn like mouths. Four enormous street lamps pin down stage corners; a fifth juts up from center stage like a hard, throbbing metaphor (even listing a little to one side).

The center lamp becomes the production’s flawed focal point, towering over actors and slicing through sight lines. Although Genochio mostly makes the in-the-round staging work, he too often positions actors directly downstage of the lamp. I sat in the on-stage unit opening night (upstage of the lamp) and often wished for a periscope. It’s one thing to see actors’ backs now and then. It’s quite another to see nothing at all.

A bigger problem is that the show’s tempo seems to ebb and flow at the whims of Actor Time. Music director Anthony T. Edwards does his best to keep the songs in sync, but on opening night the cast insistently dragged down the tempo. Genochio has positioned four video monitors at the stage corners to keep the conductor in view, but no one seems to be glancing at them.

Ultimately, that tension — between authentic expression and bombastic drive, between bare-bones suggestion and jaw-dropping pageantry — is never satisfactorily resolved. Shackelford comes closest to coupling candor and pep.

But if you’re a musical lover or a Fantasticks first-timer, don’t let these quibbles keep you away. As revivals go, the Rep’s might not be especially novel or modern, but it has enough spectacle to sway crowds and enough sincerity to stifle cynics.
Plus, the music’s catchier than chicken pox. Try to remember? You’re not likely to forget.