Ojai Performing Arts Theater’s twinkling new manufacturing The Fantasticks is a magic field of a play; a musical parody about love in all its seasons.
The opening quantity shall be acquainted to many: “Attempt to keep in mind the sort of September…” The narrator, a Spanish bandit referred to as El Gallo (celebrated Broadway singer, Douglas Ladnier bringing a unprecedented, goose-pimpling baritone), invitations us to think about ourselves again to our old flame and what that felt like.
The backdrop is the swirling, liminal house the place fairytale meets actuality and is thus ripe for comedy each tender and broad. El Gallo presents us with two fathers, Hucklebee (Richard Kuhlman) together with his 20-year-old son, Matt (Brooks Hope); and Bellomy (Marcus Kettles) together with his 16-year-old daughter, Luisa (Abigail Rose Christensen)
The younger individuals have each not too long ago grow to be fairly mad, as adolescents are wont to do when their frontal lobes are nonetheless scrambled they usually fall in first breathless love. Naturally, no one has ever recognized a love like theirs. Up to now, so dreamy, so candy. The couple dream and sigh and lengthy for one another however between their fathers’ beloved gardens there’s a wall, constructed, they imagine, to maintain them away from one another. Anyone who has handed via the chalk-dust of a highschool English class will acknowledge the “Romeo and Juliet” in all this, and the entire play glances up towards a few of Shakespeare’s well-known traces in all method of hilarious nod-and-wink methods, together with some iambic tetrameter.
Enter the fathers. We be taught that their feud is an act they usually keenly need their youngsters to marry. However, deploying the reverse psychology that, since time immemorial, dad and mom have used on their offspring, they deduce the quickest option to obtain that’s to say an enormous, fats “no” to Matt and Luisa’s love. Therefore the wall, and cue among the finest songs within the present, “By no means Say No.” Kuhlman and Kettles slay it, trying like they’ve been performing this collectively their entire lives, completely accountable for themselves and the stage.
After a lot snooping they decide the time is correct to additional issues alongside. However the best way to set the ruse? An abduction! Whereby Matt rescues Luisa, sees off the ruffian, and is the swoon-some hero and so on.! However who to do the abducting?
In one of many intelligent subterfuges of the play, the narrator subverts his function, without delay commenting on the motion and in addition a part of it. Enter, then, El Gallo because the organizer of the kidnapping and a wonderful track about getting what you pay for. (Cate Caplin’s choreography is a great deal of enjoyable and performs to the appreciable bodily comedy expertise of the forged.) He enlists Henry (Michael McCarthy) and Mortimer (James Baker) and the “abduction” proceeds as deliberate. Luisa is carried off screaming and, with some assist from El Gallo, Matt wounds Ell Gallo. Blood and dying and gurgling.
“Glad Ending!” reads the banner because the fathers faux they’ve been received over by Matt’s gallantry and now imagine the younger lovers are really star-crossed.
However love, as we all know, isn’t that straightforward. The pair haven’t been examined of their fantasy moonlit, secretive love. Evening turns to day and “scenic turns to cynic.” Quickly the 2 quarrel and really feel trapped and the fathers are none too pleased about being in-laws. El Gallo recruits Henry and Mortimer to whisk Matt away and present him the wild world of playing, ingesting, and carousing that he thinks he needs to make him a person of the world. El Gallo himself turns to seducing Luisa to show her the teachings in love she must be taught.
How will issues resolve? Can something be made proper once more after all of the harm and mayhem? Nothing is soft-peddled and the season turns to chilly, laborious actuality.
It’s genuinely troublesome to say which is the extra hilarious double act, Kuhlman and Kettle or McCarthy and Baker. However it hardly issues, the viewers wins. Silliness guidelines however it’s simply finished so adroitly and so very effectively. The comedy performances and the unbelievable voices are ripe to be seen and heard. There are nice massive plums of songs to sink your enamel into. Andy Road on the piano accompanied stage-side by harpist Laurie Rasmussen present the musical romance. There’s even a well-placed, wry joke about paying common union charges, a nod to present affairs.
Director, Rosie Gordon, realizes a beautiful present and does a splendid job protecting all of the plates spinning with an ideal manufacturing staff beneath her. The Fantasticks runs yet another weekend solely (September 1-3) at Matilija Auditorium, 703 El Paseo Rd., Ojai. ojaitheater.org
