The problem with staging a musical like The Fantasticks is that it’s been done so many times before—over 17,000 times, in fact, just from 1960 to 2002, during the show’s original off-Broadway run. Musical theater runs clean on its own nostalgia, though, and has a fetish for reaffirming its classics with such enthusiasm that if the already scant production of original musicals stopped tomorrow, a decade might pass before anyone noticed. Few shows are allowed to truly expire because so many are considered “timeless.”

All of this means that Spotlighters has a tall order to fill in staging The Fantasticks. The challenge is to make the show somehow responsive to itself—complementing the chocolate-box sentimentality of 1960 with a bit of irony from 2011. It happens that The Fantasticks is a near-perfect show to experiment with in this way, because its narrative already has a certain sly awareness of itself (“Metaphor,” one of the first songs, has our Romeo struggling to avoid cliché in calling out to his love). The show has enough elasticity, in other words, to accommodate the playfulness Spotlighters has brought to it.

Like so many love stories, The Fantasticks centers around two households, both alike in dignity, at each other’s throats. Star-crossed neighbors Matt (Eric Ritter) and Louisa (Sherry Benedek) live on either side of a high wall put up by their feuding fathers, Hucklebee (Amanda Kay Boundy) and Bellomy (Courtney Kalbacker). Quarantined and forbidden from speaking, Matt and Louisa only fall louder and more lyrically in love—which, we learn, was exactly the point all along. Hucklebee and Bellomy are really the best of friends, the bastards; they’ve been practicing a little reverse psychology in the knowledge that parents need only discourage their kids from doing something in order to make them do it. The manipulation gets altogether less wholesome when they hire El Gallo (Bart Debicki), the Zorro-like bandit who is also the narrator, to stage a mock abduction of Louisa so Matt can save the day.

Buckles are swashed, El Gallo throws the fight, and the scheme goes according to plan: The young lovers are joined in a picture of harmony with their psychotic fathers. But happy endings are never that easy, even in musicals. El Gallo asserts some extra-narrative authority by literally flipping the moon, which hangs from a string on stage, making visible the sun that is painted on the other side. He thereby replaces the moon’s romantic beams with the glare of veritas. The characters suddenly see each other in a different light as the second act takes form, and everything starts to look a lot less fantastic.

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