Sonoma Arts Live’s ‘Fantasticks’ opens this weekend

“All I knew about ‘The Fantasticks,’ when I was asked to maybe direct it, was that it had run forever on Broadway, that it supposedly had really great songs, and that a lot of people I know absolutely loved it,” says Trevor Hoffman, who is indeed directing Sonoma Arts Live’s upcoming production of the classic musical by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt.

“So I said yes,” says Hoffman, who recently won the Stage One Theater Arts award for co-directing Sonoma Arts Live’s 2016 production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins,” which also took the award for Best Overall Production. “Just based on what I knew about it, that it was a story of a family and young couple in love, that appealed to me.”

Very loosely adapted from “Les Romanesques” (“The Romancers”), an allegorical fable by Edmond Rostond – best known for “Cyrano De Bergerac” – “The Fantasticks” begins as a gentle tale of two fathers, longtime best friends and next-door neighbors, who launch a plot to cause their children to fall in love. The scheme involves building a wall to separate the houses, and forbidding the young man and woman from speaking. Trusting that children will always disobey their parents, the fathers then wait for the kids to defy them, fall in love and live happily ever after. But things soon go wrong, and the story, “narrated” by a mysterious actor known as El Gallo, becomes something richer and sadder and wiser, and everyone learns a lesson or two about disappointments of life and love, and the necessity of kindness and hope in a chaotic world.

“We have a great cast,” says Hoffman, “some of whom were in ‘Assassins,’ Tim Setzer and Ryan Whitlock. I’ve got the same musical director, Sherrill Peterson. So that feels very familiar.”

The show run from Thursday, Aug. 25 to Sunday, Sept. 11. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. and the Sunday shows at 2 p.m. Tickets can be purchased online, by phone or in person. sonomartslive.com.

Email david.templeton@sonomanews.com.