It was so minimal and then it turned into this confetti cannon of emotion.” “It was phenomenal,” said Emily Stokes, another audience member having her first Fantasticks experience. And Shane Cinal’s scenic design is a commanding all-white set with a single bench and porcelain bathtub on wheels, which became the backdrop for creative use of confetti as well as Chelsie McPhilimy’s dramatic lighting. As it was Off-Broadway, accompaniment for the new production is provided by a single pianist, in this case music director Brian E. Lluberes’s team remained true to the show’s original bare-bones vision. They’re lucky it got picked up and taken care of the way it did, with just the right people behind it.” “I always have more trouble connecting with the second act, and somehow this floated me along better. “I’ll admit I have a personal connection, but I thought it was well done,” Smalley said. “I would have just thought it had been written like this.” “I would have never even known if I hadn’t read in the program that it wasn’t originally two guys,” Beckley-Amaya said. She was pleased that her favorite songs had not been cut. Jane Smalley, who now lives in Flint, said she came to the show because she is a cousin of Harvey Schmidt, the show’s composer, whom she recalls as a great storyteller at family reunions. Theresa Beckley-Amaya, a Detroit resident, admitted that she had never seen The Fantasticks, but thought the new version worked “perfectly.” Had he been able to attend opening night, he would have seen how well it went over with an enthusiastic and responsive audience. “The most fun is anticipating and not having a clue how it’s going to go over.” “It’s been all long-distance work, but it’s been a give-and-take creative experience,” Jones said. Jones and Lluberes collaborated on other details up to a few weeks before opening, though they did so remotely. He basically went through it over a couple of months and did all this work on it-little detailed work on the lyrics and the scenes.”Īmong the changes Jones made: He changed the gender of the parents who secretly conspire to keep their children apart, all the better to whet their appetites for each other, from fathers into mothers. “He said, ‘Actually, I think this is a great idea-I’m going to do it,’” Lluberes recalled. Lluberes said he had planned simply to change pronouns-make Luisa “Lewis” but otherwise leave the show pretty much the same-while Jones said he wanted to tinker a bit more with the 60-year-old show. So intrigued, in fact, that he wanted to take the idea further than Lluberes had imagined.
“I wanted to see if the idea would fly, if he would be up for it,” Lluberes said. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, he approached Tom Jones (the show’s composer, Harvey Schmidt, died in 2018) to ask for the rights to do the whole show that way. In college, he experimented with a few scenes to see how it might work with gay lovers. The project, which runs through June 19, is the brainchild of Flint Rep’s artistic director, Michael Lluberes, who said he fell in love with The Fantasticks in middle school. The world is very different now, and what a brave retelling.”
“I think the story lands more effectively. “I have to say, the story works better this way,” said Paul Molnar, a Kansas theatre artist who traveled to see the show. On June 3, the word most often on the lips of people pouring out of Flint Repertory Theatre in Michigan was “stunning.” They had just witnessed the premiere of a new version of The Fantasticks, the 1960 musical charmer, newly rewritten by its original lyricist/librettist Tom Jones to tell the story of two young men falling in love rather than the original’s boy and girl.