Review: Fantasticks

Between fun and alvar

Fantasticks. Music: Harvey Schmidt. Libretto and lyrics: Tom Jones. Translation: Esko Elstelä. Director: Neil Hardwick. Conductor: Lasse Hirvi. Set design and costumes: J-P Kiljunen. Choreographer: Anneli Rautiainen. Cast: Sami Hokkanen, Mia Hafrén, Antti Timonen, Jarkko Rantanen, Markku Huhtammo, Mika Eirtovaara, Helena Haaranen. Preview at Studio Pasila 6.10.


Fantasticks is a puzzling concoction of genres and stylistic devices. It is called an integration musical in the program leaflet, which undeniably sounds apt. Elements have been picked from e.g. Ancient dramas, commedia dell’arte, vaudeville, buskis and circus clownery, and the performance moves in an equally fascinating and, at times, annoying way in the borderland between fun and seriousness.
Or at least something that resembles seriousness. It’s not good to know where you have the characters in Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s hit from 1960, which ran for a full 42 years at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in New York. If anything, it is a testament to the local audience’s ability to break with the Rodgers & Hammerstein style and embrace a musical theatre that is both intelligent and unconventional.
Here, of course, we find the loving young people à la Ovid or Shakespeare, who are separated by the wall erected by the vegetable gardening fathers. In this slightly twisted alloy, however, nothing is what it looks like. The schism is just one of the play’s many sets, intended to get the kids married off to each other.
As a ladle in the soup, master of ceremonies and world-wise archvillain, we have El Gallo – a superb Sami Hokkanen – who, with the willing help of actor Henry/The Man Who Dies (Mortimer) – a hilarious Mika Eirtovaara – stages both one or two small plays in the play on the primitive stage on stage and, unsurprisingly, draws at least one of the long straws of the ending.



Satirical anti-musical

Fantasticks could actually be called an anti-musical in that it constantly tests, and transcends, the boundaries of the traditional musical, while it doesn’t really even try to be a musical in the true sense of the word. Sometimes they borrow from improvisational theatre, sometimes from the sweat-thinking vocabulary of physical theatre, sometimes they recite slightly absurd lyrics in an unabashedly pastiching way.
It goes without saying that this is a material that fits the driven satirist Neil Hardwick like a glove. Hardwick has taken the plunge with a vengeance, but may also have lost something along the way. The archetypes are festively caricatured, but become quite one-dimensional, and the contrast between running and giggling on the one hand and static posing on the other feels a bit tiring in the long run.
Harvey Schmidt’s intimately stripped-down and exemplary versatile music – tastefully adapted by Lasse Hirvi for the original quartet of piano-harp-bass-percussion – also has something of ironic pastiche about it and the truly durable hits are put on the cards, even if the closing song, Try to Remember, is undeniably one of the more unforgettable in the genre.

Charismatic Hafrén

Mia Hafrén and Antti Timonen are real finds in the lead roles. Both are driven singers, the personal chemistry is on point and especially Hafrén possesses a lot of the theatrical quality that we call charisma. Old foxes Jarkko Rantanen and Markku Huhtamo are like founders in their fatherly roles, and it was only the hats and sticks that were missing in their festive little garden couplet.

Fantasticks is a musical that, in its intertextuality and conscious distancing, does not easily let the listener away. All forms of romantic entertainment are conspicuous by their absence throughout and you are forced to think and reflect both once and twice on what has been said and shown.
At the same time, I find myself sitting and yawning more than once and I’m not quite sure where the shortcomings lie. Since hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers can hardly be wrong, it is likely that Hardwick’s staging has not yet found its definitive form. Its optimal balance between parody and honesty, fun and reflection.