Production archive
The Fantasticks
2009 season · Production archive
Two teenagers on neighbouring farms steal glances and hide their romance from their feuding fathers. Little do these lovebirds know that their fathers are actually good friends who have hatched a plan — with the help of a mystical roving side-show and its equally mysterious ringmaster — to get the two of them down the aisle. But be careful what you wish for: to bring these families together, they must first be torn apart.
- Written by
- Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt
- Directed by
- Sarah Roshan
- Ran
- May 8 – June 27, 2009
- Cast
- Kelly Twedt · David Allan Howell
About the production
The Fantasticks ran off-Broadway for forty-two years, the longest continuous run of any musical anywhere, and it did so on a bare platform with a wooden box, a stick and a piano. The show was designed from the outset for rooms with no resources, which made it an almost perfect fit for a basement with a piano and seventy-five seats.
It was the Vic’s most successful musical. The production drew two of the theatre’s three The Denver Post Ovation Award finalist places for 2009 — for its leading performance and for its lighting design — which for a house of this size is an unusual return on a seven-week run.
What the press said
“Days later, I’m still moved by the breakthrough performance from Kelly Twedt as Luisa, an impeccable singer who captures the playful sexuality, tension, and heartbreak of a young girl coming of age. She and David Allan Howell (Matt) look good together — and they sound even better. Their duet “Metaphor” is proof even critics can have goosebumps.”
Where it sat in the season
It was production 3 of 7 in the Vic’s 2009 season. It followed Greater Tuna (Mar 6 – Apr 25, 2009) and was followed by London Suite (Jul 10 – Aug 29, 2009). The full year is set out on the season calendars page, and every production the theatre staged between 2005 and 2011 is indexed in the production archive.
The house’s standard pattern was Friday and Saturday evenings at 7.30 with a Sunday matinee, over a run of six to eight weeks. With seventy-five seats, a full eight-week run put roughly 1,800 people through the room — which a 500-seat theatre does in four nights, and which is the single fact that explains most of what the Vic chose to programme.
This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.