“The Fantasticks” is theatrical magic. Eight actors, a piano and a harp and a room full of imagination. The simple sets and costuming of the musical's long running success contributes to the success of this long running musical. The lack of a specific time or place for the action allows audiences to relate to the story without interference. It is a time and place experienced by each of us.

“The Fantasticks ” based on Edmond Rostand's 1894 play “Les Romanesques”, tells an age-old tale of young love. Its ingredients are simple: a boy, a girl, two fathers, and a wall. Its stage is a wooden platform, its scenery a tattered cardboard moon. Using only these bare essentials, the author and composer have managed to bring to life a funny and quite touching story of innocence - and of knowledge.

The musical tells a simple story of a boy, a girl and their fathers who plot to get them together by keeping them apart. The boy and the girl, who are neighbors, are in love as long as a wall separates them and they believe their fathers disapprove. Actually, their fathers, both avid gardeners, are best friends who fondly hope their children will marry! Their duets “Plant a Radish” and “Never Say No” are showstoppers.

One of the eight actors who bring the story to life in the Mute, silent accomplice to the audience's imagination, alternately playing the wall, a tree, and gracefully dropping tiny glittering raindrops - a scene that accompanies the song “Soon It's Gonna Rain”.

Matt and Luisa think their fathers are against the romance, but it turns out that these wily gentlemen have set out to engineer the whole affair. The fathers, Hucklebee and Bellamy, the two fathers, decide to instigate a mock feud amongst themselves in order to help the boy and girl fall in love. They figure that this feud will give them the excuse to say no to the relationship, which of course will simply encourage the children's love even more.

The fathers go as far as to hire a roving bandit called El Gallo to stage a mock abduction of Luisa, in which Matt can become a hero and save her. El Gallo's assistants in the abduction include Henry an ancient actor who specializes in reciting passages from Shakespeare's plays, and Mortimer, an actor who specializes in dying. The mute, an observer and mime, holds up a stick representing the wall which divides the families.

The narrator, El Gallo slyly walks through the show letting the focus fall at the proper times on the young lovers who have been manipulated into marriage by their fathers. Act I ends happily under a bright full moon with Luisa and Matt deeply in love. Soon though the children realize their parents staged the feud and their love fades. What seems mgic by the moonlight “may seem cynic by day” as the sweethearts find that “without a hurt, the heart is hollow.”

The universal theme of “The Fantasticks” is the clash between romantic notions of the world and the reality of the world. The happy moonlit first act, with Luisa and Matt deeply in love gives way, in the second act, to the harsh reality of the bright sun. They yearn for the dangerous attractions of the world outside. Love fades away as the disillusioned naive romantics discover they have to take off the rose-colored glasses to see the world as it is. After learning some painful lessons while seeking their fortunes they come to appreciate a real, more mature kind of love at the end. As the lovers mature, love conquers all.