BWW Reviews: Discover Love's Mysteries at TAP'S Magical THE FANTASTICKS

Live and love a little more after spending an enchanting evening at Sturgeon Bay's Third Avenue Playhouse this fall. The world's longest running musicalThe Fantasticks arrived at the Stage Door Theatre Company on October 1st. After more than 17,000 performances played in approximately 90 countries worldwide since the first production in 1960, The Fantasticks garnered mulitiple awards including 1991 Tony Award Honors for Theatrical Excellence, and still entrances audiences 60 years later.

In The Fantasticks, with the book and lyrics written by Tom Jones and music composed by Harvey Schmidt, the production recreates the perfect blend of ccmedy, poetic dialogue, Shakespearean rhyme, recognizable characters, romantic fantasy, and timeless wisdom in musical vignettes to tell the this quirky fairlytale like story. Jones and Schmidt married the Comedia Dell'Arte theatrical tradition to their production using a narrator, scant props and simple scenery which allows an audience's imagination to flow when listening to the memorable music: "Try to remember the kind of September when life was tender...love an ember about to billow."

Love indeed embodies this musical in its humorous, if loose twist to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Where the falseswearing parents intentionally separate their children Luisa and Matt by a wall built between their gardens so they will eventually marry each other. After the parent's devious plan works, all their lives uncouple with dire but redeemable circumstances, where kumquats, vegetables and nature find a prominent place in this imaginary tale.

Under James Valcq's inventive direction, lighting and scenic design, the seven member cast throughly bewitches the audience. Within the intimate Stage Door theatre walls, Valcq transports the audience to their own memories of love past and bruised hearts that heal. His sculptural, painted wood gazebo frames the narrative and houses a place where the girl, Louisa and the boy, Matt, run to after they sing "Soon It's Going to Rain." Where they naively improvise their desire to "live and love within their own four walls," a home they dream building in the future, to fulfill the secret desire of their parents to be cojoined.

Inhabiting "The Girl" in a vintage pink frock, the lumionous Madeline Bunke transformed from the French maid cameo last seen in TAP'S Private Lives. In the role of 16 year old Louisa, Bunke glows on stage, personifies innocence, while her voice stirs the heart of the audience and "the Boy," 20 year old Matt. Bunke coupled with TAP'S Edcuation Director Ryan Patrick Shaw, an accomplished and winsome Matt, create a night that fuses magic and mystery into the cardboard moonlight of The Fantasticks and billows those first embers of young love.

In the roles of the warring parents, Drew Brehl, Luisa's father, and Debra Babich, Matt's mother, make musical mayhem and a little magic of their own. Both avid gardeners in the musical, they commiserate when they sing "Plant a Radish"---Gardeners, they say, can depend on vegetables: they pull a radish after they plant a radish. Instead of the inevitable mystery experienced when an infant grows to become an unknown identitiy as their two impossible children have, now young adults who they barely recognize.

Artistic Director and Co-Founder Robert Boles invites a rather dashing "Narrator" to the musical, an opportunity to admire another side of his theatrical talents. Boles adds tenderness to El Gallo, who weaves the story line into the fairytale and touches Louisa with the realities of her worldly expectations in a carnival colored if disconcerting song, "Round and Round." Intern Luke MacMillan, The Wall who remains mute, delivers fairy dust for the rain or confetti to the stage as needed to make The Fantasticks, yes, fantastick, while Mark Moede fashions several great cameos as an actor who assists El Gallo and the parents with an abduction to bring their two children together.

While the company sings of a "Happy Ending," this play, similar to a Shakespeare romantic comedy, also delivers the callow and then captivating love to be earned so well learned memories can be remembered in December. In TAP'S Fantasticks, the audience revisits how a person, a place, a plan, sometimes needs to be lost before anyone understands how cherished this event or person truly will be.

TAP's enchanting production entices the audience to believe that when sitting in their seats, they, too, can still express love's rosy blush, envision what Louisa says and experience "My wildest dreams multiplied by two." What could be more wondrous in fall than to reminisce first love or wiser love, whether sixteen or sixty, and then intimately discover that wilder magic within one's own four walls when winter's snow flies? Enjoy The Fantasticks now, and then reach deep within the heart's emotional fires to warm the rest of this year.

Stage Door Theatre Company presents The Fantasticks at Third Avenue Playhouse in Sturgeon Bay, North Third Avenue. Please call 920.743.1760 or visit www.thirdavenueplayhouse.com

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