The Fantasticks

The Fantasticks begins with two fathers building a wall between their houses so that their children will fall in love across it. The scheme works. Matt and Luisa meet at the wall by moonlight, believe themselves to be defying everyone, and never suspect that the feud was invented for exactly this purpose.

A narrator called El Gallo runs the evening, steps into it when required, and is hired by the fathers to stage an abduction dramatic enough to end the quarrel and seal the match. The first act closes in triumph. The second act is about what happens after a happy ending, when moonlight gives way to daylight and both young people decide the world beyond the wall is worth finding out about.

Tom Jones wrote the book and lyrics and Harvey Schmidt the music, taking their premise from Edmond Rostand's Les Romanesques. Their version opened in 1960 and ran in the same small room for forty-two years, closing in 2002. It has been staged continuously somewhere ever since.

The staging is deliberately bare: a platform, a wooden box of props, a cardboard moon, a mute who hands out what is needed. The score is written for a handful of players, and songs including "Try to Remember," "Soon It's Gonna Rain" and "They Were You" carry most of the storytelling. The audience is asked to supply the scenery.

What keeps it alive is that the second act refuses to be sentimental. The wall comes down, the children get hurt, and they return in September to something plainer and more durable than what they had in the moonlight.