Published: 17 June 2010
by ROISIN GADELRAB

IT'S not often that you find yourself apologising to your companion before the interval is out, especially when presented with a cast of more than competent singers and actors. 

But this was the unfortunate effect of the ill-advised decision to bring Off-Broadway’s longest-running and possibly most irritating musical – The Fantasticks – to the West End. 

It was announced this week – barely two weeks after the show opened – that its run would end at the end of this month.

Such was the precautious nature of  this musical’s horror  that there was little to warm to. 

Dated without being classic, vintage or retro, this is a story of two neighbouring fathers plotting to bring their children together through a basic bit of reverse psychology – ban them from seeing each other and cement it with a big, divisive wall.

A premise you can work with, if only the teens were slightly likeable or compatible, the songs memorable (bar, unsurprisingly, the show’s only hit, Try To Remember), the message less pointless (life is better if you don’t stray beyond the garden gate) and the slapstick slightly less silly.

If part one dragged, part two – where the young boy’s experience of the big bad world is a rightly paranoid Alice in Wonderland trip down the rabbit hole, where everyone’s out to get him – made the show’s 42 years in existence feel short in comparison.

The few saving  graces came with some lovely veggie song and dance combos from the two dads, the odd 

laugh raised from the knowing asides made by narrator/ bandit Hadley Fraser, some smooth physical theatre and stage direction as conceived by Japanese director Amon Miyamoto and a genius turn from Edward Petherbridge as the crumpled ageing Shakespearean luvvie whose every gesture, word or weary sigh was pure comedic gold.

The best way to ensure a shred of this production lives on is to give Petherbridge a one-man show and scrap the rest.

Until June 26 • 0844 209 0382