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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Tuesday, March 29, 2005

STAGE REVIEW
Off-Broadway smash fails to fully deliver

By Joseph T. Rozmiarek
Advertiser Drama Critic

Almost from its start in a tiny off-Broadway theater 45 years ago, "The Fantasticks," by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, gained a foothold in high school and community productions. It's cheap to produce, with its small orchestra and cast and minimal stage requirements, but it's filled with memorable music based on the timeless theme of the eternal pull between youth and maturity.

'The Fantasticks'

8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 4 p.m. Sundays, through April 10

Diamond Head Theatre

$12-$42, discounts available for students, seniors 62 and older and military

733-0274, diamondheadtheatre.com.

While the show played 42 continuous years in New York before closing in 2002, the production team never scored the same way again. Although they had some success with big musicals — "110 In the Shade" and "I Do, I Do" — their subsequent small musicals "Celebration" and "Philemon" (produced last season in the UH Lab Theatre) never caught on commercially.

Despite its staying power, "The Fantasticks," with its poetic, metaphoric and bittersweet minimalist tone, can be puzzling to an audience unfamiliar with the show and expecting something else. That, and some production shortfalls, resulted in a somewhat sluggish audience reaction during the show's opening weekend at Diamond Head Theatre.

Director Eden Lee Murray is true to the show's original spirit and its roots in the Italian commedia dell'arte, in which small traveling troupes of players developed stock characters and improvised plots.

She also does a great deal to help the small play, designed for an intimate space, reach out to an audience in an auditorium that is too big for it. The cast enters and exits through the audience and bits of scenes occur in the aisles.

While we see the intent behind the production and the staging choices make sense, it's not until the finale that the show fully grasps the poignancy and lovely longing that make the material work.

The difficulty comes from performances from the central characters.

The Girl and The Boy are correctly, and painfully, young. But Keith Anderson as Matt doesn't have enough voice to fill out the songs, and the coaching he's been given to help with breath support breaks up the lyrics and draws attention to his pushing for volume. Katie Beth Hicks as Luisa has less trouble with the songs, but delivers them in a soprano that occasionally turns sharp and shrill.

Consequently, we find ourselves leaning into the music to help pull it forward when we should be bathing in it as it washes over us. "Soon It's Gonna Rain" and "They Were You" are still beautiful, but we work too hard for them to happen.

Buz Tennent has the right training, maturity and seismic vibrato in his deep baritone to conquer the music, but his performance lacks the romantic and dangerous edge that makes the narrator role of El Gallo pivotal to the action. His "Try to Remember" hits the notes, but misses the emotional nerves.

With the leads busy coloring within the lines, our attention shifts to the supporting roles. Richard Maheu and Peter Clark are fun as the Fathers as they soft-shoe vaudeville-style through "Never Say No" and "Plant A Radish." Jim Hesse and Michael De Ycaza bring delightful comic relief as The Old Actor and Mortimer (The Man Who Dies). Chesley Cannon is appropriately unobtrusive as The Mute.

The entire cast neatly delivers the abduction ballet, "It Depends on What You Pay," without a hitch. You might remember that some years ago a women's group cowed the director of a production at the University of Hawai'i to change the lyric from "rape" to "raid." Diamond Head Theatre restores the original without giving obvious insult.

Musical Director Roslyn Catracchia heads up the small musical combo of piano, harp, bass, and drums.

People who love "The Fantasticks" will see the values in this production, but may long for it to be smaller, crisper, and more deeply felt.