FIVE QUESTIONS
Great musical, Moliere classic open today

By Derek Paiva
Advertiser Entertainment Writer

Buz Tennent, left, is El Gallo, Katie Beth Hicks is The Girl (Luisa), and Keith Anderson is The Boy (Matt) in Diamond Head Theatre's production of the off-Broadway hit "The Fantasticks." Brad Goda 'THE FANTASTICKS' Premieres at 8 p.m. today; repeats at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 4 p.m. Sundays, through April 10 Diamond Head Theatre $12-$42 733-0274, diamondheadtheatre.com.

Will it be a musical or Moliere kind of weekend?

The long-running off-Broadway musical "The Fantasticks" is a dreamlike tale of young love found, lost and found again. Moliere's "The Miser" offers its own brand of lovers and one of the funniest despicable tightwads written for the stage.

Both open tonight.

We gave the director of each production the Five Questions treatment.

EDEN-LEE MURRAY ON 'THE FANTASTICKS'

High school drama departments just love "The Fantasticks," don't they?

Yes. They do it because it's deceptively simple. It's an eight-person musical play and you can do it on a high school level and be pretty safe about it.

But ("The Fantasticks") resonates on a far more profound level than that. It's the story of a boy and girl who fall in love and find it too easy. They don't appreciate what they have with each other. They go off and have adventures in two different directions. ... (In the end) they come back seasoned.

It's not until you've been hurt by being in love that you really appreciate what being in love means. ... The song everybody knows from the show — even if they don't know the show — is "Try To Remember." And the most memorable line in that song is, "Without a hurt, the heart is hollow." And how can high schoolers get that? Some of them haven't fallen in love once. It's also hard to get a high schooler to play a parent.

The thing that sets the story in motion is two fathers trying so hard to keep their children from being hurt. ... As a parent, it's the hardest thing in the world to be able to step back and watch somebody trip and fall.

You can do (the musical) in high school, but you can't do it in high school and get that kind of resonance.

Why is it ideal for Diamond Head Theatre?

It's a very smart show to produce. It's very low-budget. And it was an incredible success. It played for 42 years (at the off-Broadway Sullivan Street Playhouse in New York). It's the longest running musical in American theater, if not in world theater. And it works. It works on so many levels in so many different versions. ... Like Shakespeare, in a sense, people have put all kinds of slants and tilts and twists on it.

The challenge is telling the story of "The Fantasticks" as clearly and from the heart as possible.

Those 42 years at Sullivan Street Playhouse — 1960 to 2002 — encompassed more than 17,000 performances. Why do you think the show's popularity with audiences endured?

It's absolutely universal. Everybody sitting in those chairs in the theater either has been or is going to be the boy or the girl. And if they're not the boy or the girl, they're the parents. Then there are just the universal values of life passages. Everybody's interested in love and the different aspects of it, and there's a fairy-tale quality to (the show).

But better than fairy tales, it's true. It resonates on almost any life lesson level you can think of.

In spite of its many accolades, "The Fantasticks" has never been Lloyd-Webber- or Rogers-and-Hammerstein-huge. It's considered something of an underdog of musical theater.

I think that's sort of the beauty of it. ... It's a wonderful pastiche. It has almost every musical style — ballads, vaudeville, tangos. ... It's almost like a patchwork quilt, and that makes it absolutely charming. ... It's possible a lot of theaters don't do it because it's not big and splashy. There isn't a massive set or cast of thousands that brings in lots of people and their friends to see the cast of thousands. It's very spare.

I think that might be the real beauty of it.

In it's spareness, it is incredibly honest.

JOYCE MALTBY ON 'THE MISER'

Mitchell Milan plays Harpagon, the title character in HPU Theatre's "The Miser." Director Joyce Maltby says Milan is perfect for the role. Andrew Meader 'THE MISER' Premieres at 8 p.m. today; repeats at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 4 p.m. Sundays, through April 24 Hawai'i Pacific University Theatre, windward campus $20 ($14 Thursdays) general; $14 ($10 Thursdays) seniors, military, students, HPU faculty; $3, HPU students 375-1282

Not only is Moliere's work classic, but he was a man of the theater. His plays are still extremely funny. There's a silliness. Many of them are pure farce; I think "The Miser" is certainly high comedy. ... When I read several Moliere plays last year, I found myself laughing out loud (reading "The Miser"). I just figured if it could make me do that, maybe an audience would laugh, too.

It's a play ripe for fans of dark, satirical comedy, isn't it?

It really is. ... It has elements of taking situations to a ludicrous extreme. (But) I think it's extremely important to do it as if the characters don't realize that they are taking anything to ridiculous extremes. When you play comedy or farce that way, the audience isn't laughing at actors trying to make an audience laugh, but laughing at the genius of Moliere. There's a difference between trying to farce-up comedy and just doing a play as it was written.

The lead character, Harpagon, is one nasty, greedy man. He's basically demanding that his children marry for money, and his only real lust in life is for money. But he's crazy funny just the same. How is Mitchell Milan so right to play a guy like that?

He walked into auditions on the last day, and as soon as he got up and read I knew he was the man to play the part. He's just wonderfully funny. And when you have a character (like Harpagon) with qualities that could make people dislike him, you need (an actor) you can't really dislike.

Mitchell knows how to do comedy. His timing, his facial expression and body language are just all flawless.

He's a superb actor. And not only is he nothing like Harpagon, he's also one of the nicest actors I've ever worked with.

Moliere created the role of Harpagon — a man so cheap he steals oats from his starving horses and hopes to marry his daughter off to an old man to avoid paying a dowry — for himself.

I believe Moliere created a lot of these roles for himself, which is, of course, another reason why Moliere is a great playwright for even (the modern era). He was an actor.

He was able to find the foibles and flaws of human beings and make fun of them.

What's still great about "The Miser" now that you're directing it?

I'm still delighted by the humor. We're still finding things that are just so right about it in rehearsals. At some point, that becomes it.

Reach Derek Paiva at dpaiva@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8005.