The Fantasticks

Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt's metatheatrical fable—in which a group of players stages the tale of young lovers devided by a wall, with echoes of the Rude Mechanicals’ take on Pyramus and Thisby in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—opened Off Broadway in 1960 and went on to run for some 42 years. Second Stage brings it to Broadway for the first time in a version that recasts the plot as a modern gay love story. The imaginative Christopher Gattelli (Schmigadoon!) directs and choreographs the revisal, whose cast includes TV hunk Zane Phillips as the narrator, Maxim Chlumecky and Nathan Levy as the youngsters, and a bevy of Broadway pros—Kevin del Aguila, David Patrick Kelly, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, Ruthie Ann Miles and Ahmad Simmons—rounding out the cast.