The City Theatre Co.'s The Fantasticks (Photo by Andy Berkovsky) "The Fantasticks ... attracts you, settles back a bit limply, wakes you up again and averages out a little less than satisfactory," concluded Walter Kerr in his New York Herald Tribune review after the show's 1960 off-Broadway premiere. "Perhaps," said Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times, "[it] is by nature the sort of thing that loses magic the longer it endures." Sure, after watching grand and glamorous musicals like My Fair Lady, The Music Man, and Gypsy (all on Broadway at the time), Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt's minimalistic, melancholic, commedia dell'arte-style parable about two neighboring parents tricking their children into falling in love with one another must have seemed underwhelming to critics.

https://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2022-09-09/review-the-city-theatres-the-fantasticks/

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