Review Round-up: Fantasticks One to Remember?
A reworked West End production of The Fantasticks opened to critics at the refurbished Duchess Theatre this week (9 June 2010, previews from 24 May).
The record-breaking Off-Broadway musical, which has been running for
more than 42 years in New York, has been re-envisioned by Japanese
collaborators – director and choreographer Amon Miyamoto and designer
Rumi Matsui – and is performed by an all-British cast – Clive Rowe,
David Burt, Hadley Fraser, Edward Petherbridge, Paul Hunter,
Lorna Want, Luke Brady and Carl Au.
Mail (no stars) – “Next time you find
yourself somewhere less than ideal – in a stifling nightmare, in a
traffic jam to the airport, in a trainee gynaecologist’s stirrups –
count your blessings. It could be worse. You could be stuck in the
surreal musical ‘comedy’ The Fantasticks, directed by a Japanese. With
the entire second half still to come…A version of this show has somehow
managed to notch up its half century in New York. Perhaps in 1960 it
all seemed wildly innovative: an ill-formed tale of romance, with two
lovers separated by an imaginary wall, and various escapades as they
are tested by their fathers and by a caped narrator. Today it is just
cheek-numbingly boring and desperately unfunny. A man dresses up as an
Indian mystic. ‘He’s a fake fakir!’ cries one of the ‘players’ (as they
are called). You need to be Kenneth Williams to get away with that sort
of line… The narrator (Hadley Fraser) sings opening song ‘Try To
Remember’ tunefully enough and there are perhaps two other numbers
worth the candle. Some of the audience sit on the stage and are to be
commended for stayingawake…The show is directed by one Amon Miyamoto.
There were a lot of Japanese in the house. They watched, motionless,
silent. They may well have found it killingly funny. Hard to say.”
Times (three stars) – “The plot is as mad
as a box of frogs. When it does start to make some sense, after the
interval, its moral is cloyingly smalltown: the wide world is
dangerous, foreigners cruel and violent, and true happiness is marrying
the boy or girl next door and watching your comedy dad grow more
radishes… This is at least an interesting production, since one lot of
foreigners – the Japanese – won round its co-creator Tom Jones. He fell
for an Amon Miyamoto production in Tokyo, with a weird lozenge-shaped
stage and a dozen confused audience members seated on it : so here it
is, an all-American burger with a wasabi twist … Is it fun? Sometimes.
The young lovers (Lorna Want and Luke Brady) are sweet, the music
elegant. In the long clowning sequences Edward Petherbridge as an
ancient actor effortlessly steals the scene every time he puts a foot
on stage or does a Sinden boom, proving that to portray a terrible old
ham you need a serious, un-hammy old pro.”
Daily Telegraph (two stars) – “If there
were ever proof that America and Britain are two countries divided by a
common language it must surely be found in the sticky, sugary depths of
this ghastly musical… Based on a romance by Edmond Rostand, and with
much borrowing from Romeo and Juliet and A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Fantasticks tells us once again
that the path of true love never did run smooth…There are endless
theatrical pastiches on offer, including cod Shakespearean acting,
vaudeville song-and-dance routines and a melodramatic abduction… With
better material Clive Rowe, as a plump old sea dog, and David Burt as a
whimsical button manufacturer, might be genuinely delightful as the
apparently stern but actually loving fathers…And Lorna Want (presumably
as in wants a better script) and Luke Brady have moments of genuine
charm amid the cheese as the young lovers… Hadley Fraser is a
charismatic narrator, while Edward Petherbridge and Paul Hunter achieve
moments of genuine humour as a pair of down-at-heel actor laddies… But
no amount of talent can redeem this terrible show.”
– Andrea Kleopa