Timeless - and of its time - The Fantasticks

Our regular trips to the theater world of Harvard Square continued last night with tix (thanx AW) to the very enjoyable and ageless The Fantasticks, at the Cabot Theater Company - a highly influential play back in the day and a perfect show for a small venue and a college-aged cast, as the story is of course about youth - and it requires only a very small cast and crew and simple, minimalist set and costumes, and very crisp direction. The fine production at Cabot had all of this. Of course we always love seeing fam-friend Susanna Wolk, and have watched her performances mature and deepen over the years - she's still cast often as the ingenue, but she brings more than that to the show - the whole package, in fact, of lively stage presence, warm voice, graceful dance - great for a lead in a musical. Won't single out others in the fine cast though was pleased to see a student from my town, Karl Aspelund, do a star turn in the comic role of Boy's Father. Two-person orchestra was right on, and much of credit has to go to directors Reed Silverman and Kent Toland and music dir Isaac Alter (also pianist). Very interesting for parents to come watch this show, as so much of it is about kids breaking free from over-bearing parents. Also v. interesting to come back to this show after who knows how many years, too many to count; as noted, it was a hugely influential play in its day, one of the first to show how a musical can be simple, minimalist, elemental - and all the more moving for that. It seems, strange as this may sound, that the play is both universal and extremely dated. Obviously the whole beauty of the play is its light-hearted attempt to portray universal truths, that is, true for every generation, about youth moving from innocence to experience - the children doing exactly what their parents don't want them to do, the relationship falling apart once parents approve, the journey off into the world for experience, the painful realizations about the hardships of the world when outside of the family orbit, the return to one another, wiser and not all that much older. Early viewers id'd with so many of the sentiments in the show - please don't let me grow up to be normal, etc. In some ways, it's a very 1960s show: emphasis on freedom, on the "new generation," on "discovery" that there's suffering and injustice in the world, which others (elders?) can't or won't "see"- later transformed into the Age of Aquarius etc. But also a very 1050s show - very stereotyped about gender (the girl wants to stay at home and pose like a statue, waiting to be "ravished," while the boy wants to go off and see the world ... ), and I have to say I was surprised that a Harvard production left in the "Indian" scenes - these could so easily have been made less potentially offensive. I wondered about a contemporary twist: have the couple be two guys, or two girls?, and have the parents be a mom and a dad (the absence of mothers in the original is a very peculiar matter, isn't it?). Though the sentiments may seem quaint and naive today, 50 years after JFK assassination, more than 10 after 9/11, there is definitely something still appealing about the Fantasticks, right down to the improvisational spelling and the unique font, and in particular the simple but very clever and memorable music and lyrics.