The Fantasticks holds the record for the longest-running musical off-Broadway, which, if you think about it, is a bit of a backhanded boast: like claiming to be the world's tallest dwarf. Why did the show, which premiered in 1960, spend 40 years on the fringe without making it to the bright lights proper? Why, for that matter, may you never have heard of its creators, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt?
It turns out that there's a reason for things. Harrogate Theatre's enterprising and talented young artistic director, Hannah Chissick, deserves credit for scouring the forgotten corners of the musical repertoire. But she must have a pretty impervious sense of smell to dig up such a stinker.
The Fantasticks survives - just about - due to its association with one memorable tune, the cloyingly nostalgic Try to Remember (in which lyricist Jones rhymes ad infinitum with September, November and December - a good job he didn't set it in June). Unfortunately it comes right at the beginning, and it's downhill from there.
The piece is derived, very loosely, from a 19th-century play by Edmond Rostand, which rather confirms the theory that he wrote nothing worth staging other than Cyrano de Bergerac.
Still it comes with a panoply of Cyrano-ish trappings - thwarted lovers, feuding fathers, mysterious men in cloaks and so forth. Except that the huge wall erected to keep this particular Pyramus and Thisbe apart is actually a ruse to bring them closer together. How's that for irony?
There's little wrong with Chissick's adept, if slightly over-industrious staging, yet with only pasteboard Commedia-derived stereotypes to play with, the actors have precious little to develop. As a measure of the show's banality, the two fathers break into a ditty in praise of vegetables that goes: "Plant a radish, get a radish." Well, if you stage a turkey, you get a turkey.
· Until April 23. Box office: 01423 502 116.
