Lombardo is sort of the straight man to Gerstel, but is supremely vaudevillian as an Indian and a pirate.Īctually, this show has more layers than a Dagwood sandwich. Gerstel, the former Channel 12 news anchor who’s gone back to his acting roots, is hilarious in ragged manner, ragged clothes and rubber bald pate pasted over a festoon of white hair. While it fails, it brings to the fore Henry and Mortimer (Alan Gerstel, Sebastian Lombardo), the hired actors who are both comic foils and comic relief. The abduction scene is a double-edged sword. The conclusion isn’t easily predictable, nor are the events that take us there. But the comically transparent ruse fails and the kids see they’ve been duped.Īs day breaks, the potential lovers go their separate ways. They hire traveling actors to abduct Luisa to give Matt a chance to rescue her. Unlike the battling Montagues and Capulets of R&J, two fathers = Hucklebee (Larry Bramble) and Bellomy (Michael Small) entice their children, Matt (Alexander Zenoz) and Luisa (Molly Anne Ross), to fall in love by faking their own feud. Steeped in allegory and metaphor, The Fantasticks, penned by lyricist Tom Jones and composer Harvey Schmidt, turns the old Romeo and Juliet tale on its head. Long before becoming Detective Lenny Briscoe on Law and Order, the late song-and-dance man Jerry Orbach portrayed the lead character, El Gallo, in the original show. The Fantasticks opened off-Broadway in 1960 and was performed 17,162 times before closing in January 2002, making it the world’s longest-running musical.
What the show is best known for isn’t the script or songs, but history. Loosely based on Les Romanesques, written by 19 th-century French playwright Edmond Rostand three years before he penned Cyrano de Bergerac, the show smacks of touches from several literary classics. They seem to revel in the occasional silliness and a scene of mystical reverie that precedes the serious ending. Overall, the show is fun and entertaining, featuring talented players with excellent voices. Broward Stage Door Theatre in Margate opens its 2015-2016 season with the musical, The Fantasticks, a touching and tender tale mixed with comic touches and some whimsical characters.
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