THE FANTASTICKS
Reviewed by Harvey Karten United Artists Director: Michael Ritchie Writer: Tom Jones, Harvey Schmidt Cast: Joel Grey, Barnard Hughes, Jean Louisa Kelly, Joseph McIntyre, Jonathon Morris, Brad Sullivan, Teller
When "The Fantasticks" opened off-Broadway on May 3, 1960 the two-act musical by Tom Jones, music by Harvey Schmidt (suggested by Edmond Rostand's play "Les Romanesques") was not yet dated. Broadway productions like "South Pacific" were already over the hill, but "The Fantasticks" was perhaps considered timeless--a benefit helped by its simple staging in the tiny Sullivan Street Playhouse in New York's Greenwich Village where it is still playing. The staged work got a nice boost from Jerry Orbach's position in the principal role of El Gallo, the handsome would-be bandit who creates a fairy-tale world for two teenagers to show them that you're best off looking for love and romance in your own back yard.
You'd think that once the Vietnam War dragged on, leading to increasing cynicism in the country, that such a fragile work would die out as hopelessly dated. Nonetheless the mood created by this gossamer show hooked the crowds, which, we are told, often remained in their seats several minutes after the final curtain, the middle-aged members of the audience remembering their youth and their first loves through rose-tinted spectacles.
Michael Ritchie's movie version opens up the play, still keeping the fairy-tale motif, with its Arizona setting reminding us of the vast reaches of farmland in the U.S. and helping to make the characters stand out as isolated individuals in a self-enclosed world. What Ritchie does not ultimately succeed in doing is re-creating the ambience that we felt in the small theater in the Village because, after all, this is not a grand and glorious celebration of life that made "Oklahoma" even better on the big screen than on the stage.
Ritchie re-arranged the songs, leaving the most famous yearning song of nostalgia, "Try to Remember," for last, perhaps because this is the one song recalled by anyone who had seen the play forty years ago. This is the strain that moviegoers today probably wait to hear in fond anticipation. While the term "rape" is mentioned only once or twice--its meaning in this play being the primary one of abduction and seizure--the Rape Ballet no longer has that name and there is no mention of the "First Class Rape" ordered by the fathers in a roundabout way to help persuade their two children to marry each other.
The story is of two fathers, Bellamy (Joel Grey) and Hucklebee (Brad Sullivan), who build a wall between the adjoining homes and pretend to feud so that their children, Luisa (Jean Louisa Lelly) and Matt (Joseph McIntyre) would act as teens always do--to defy their allegedly hostile parents and bond happily with each other. To further their plan, they pay El Gallo (Jonathon Morris)--who is the leader of a traveling carnival act--to kidnap the girl so that the boy could come to her rescue and be deemed a hero. But Luisa becomes infatuated with the handsome would-be bandit--who takes her on a smoke-and-mirrors trip around the world--while Matt, made to drink a bitter, magic solution, thinks like Judy Garland's Dorothy that he is traveling way outside his neighborhood. Realizing that the world is not as glamorous as they thought, the two young lovers are happily reunited.
What saves the movie from terminal obsolescence is the magical voice of Jean Louisa Kelly who can dance almost as well as she can vocalize and whose intense and lovely adolescent expressiveness should win most in the audience. Jonathon Morris makes a charming El Gallo but the two guys playing the fathers, Joel Grey and Brad Sullivan, are so irritating in the story that they become annoying for us in the audience to watch.
The movie does have innovations worthy of note. For one, thanks to digital technology, the actors sang live during the shooting rather than lip-synching with recorded tracks. For another, this sugary musical is an antidote to the overkill of vulgarity of the last two or three seasons. Even the kisses are innocent ones, over the eyes, on the hand and on the wrist. Also, the two performers playing the lovebirds are teens themselves, not the twenty-somethings usually cast in stories involving high-school kids. In the final analysis the movie could make one wonder about the longevity of the play, but then, "Cats" has already proved that box office is usually not directly related to quality.
Rated PG. Running time: 85 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews