The cast and crew of the Vicksburg Theatre Guild’s upcoming musical, “The Fantasticks,” call it a perfect play.

If you go

Vicksburg Theatre Guild’s production of “The Fantasticks” will be at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday, April 25, April 30, May 1 and May 2 and at 2 p.m. April 26 and May 3 at Parkside Playhouse, 101 Iowa Ave. Tickets go on sale at the box office, one hour before curtain time. Prices are $12 for adults, $10 for seniors 55 and older, $7 for students ages 13 through college and $5 for children 12 and under. Seating is limited to 114. For information, call 601-636-0471 or visit www.e-vtg.com.

“From the simple story line and makeshift sets to the beautiful music, poignant script, strong characterizations and powerful life messages…there is only one ‘The Fantasticks,’” director Larry Gawronski says in his program notes.

“The Fantasticks” opens Wednesday at Parkside Playhouse at 7:30 p.m. and will run on selected dates through May 3. Gawronski said the cast is “all fired up.”

“We are going to be paying homage to the original concept of Commedia dell’arte,” Gawronski said. “There will be special on-stage seating to create an intimacy that Vicksburg theater has never seen before.”

Just 114 seats are available for each performance, compared to the playhouse’s usual seating of about 250. Tickets go on sale at the box office an hour before curtain time, and seating is first-come, first-served.

Originally performed off-Broadway in 1960 with Jerry Orbach as the mysterious hired professional and narrator, El Gallo, the play ran for 17,162 performances until it closed in 2002. It was the world’s longest-running musical and was so popular it couldn’t stay closed for long, a revival opening in 2006 at a New York theater renamed for Orbach. It has been performed countless times, all over the world, translated into many languages and produced for television and film. Its most famous musical number is “Try to Remember.”

VTG’s Web site describes “The Fantasticks” as “a simple fable that tells an allegorical story concerning two fathers who put a wall between their two houses to ensure that their children fall in love, because they know that children always do what their parents forbid.”

With its strong family theme, it’s appropriate that two Vicksburg families are participating both onstage and backstage.

Paul and Donna Ingram are stage manager and prop mistress, respectively. By day, Paul Ingram is an architect in the city and Donna is a CPA and Certified Fraud Examiner. Dural “Raggy” Ragsdale, minister at Porters Chapel United Methodist Church, plays Mortimer, while his 15-year-old son Chance, a sophomore at Warren Central High School, plays Matt. Ragsdale’s wife, Denise, plays piano for the musical numbers. She is accompanist to the Vicksburg Chamber Choir and pianist at Porters Chapel.

Paul Ingram said he first saw the play about 15 years ago. After Donna agreed to be prop mistress for the production, they flew to New York in January, grabbing dinner, seeing the play and flying home the next day. Both were eager to check out how their New York counterparts handled their roles.

He said the setting there, with a relatively low ceiling and stage that places the actors very close to the audience, was crucial to VTG’s staging concept.

“We’ll reproduce the intimacy of the original theater,” Ingram said. “The audience will be close enough to touch the actors — though, of course, we don’t want people grabbing them,” he laughed.

Other cast and crew members include Warren Central freshmen McKenzie Pollock playing Louisa and Haley Sellers as the Mute; David Crosby and the Rev. Michael Nation as the fathers of the young lovers; Vicksburg dentist Paul Ballard as El Gallo; and Vicksburg theater legend Buddy Hallberg as Henry. Dorothy Brasfield, organist and choir master at The Church of the Holy Trinity, Episcopal is musical director.

Gawronksi, otherwise known around Vicksburg as executive director of the Vicksburg Convention Center and Auditorium, calls “The Fantastics” his favorite musical of all time. He played the role of Matt while in high school and later reprised the role for summer stock theater in New London, N.H. The spare set encourages audience members to use their imaginations to fill in color and detail. Every person will see the play differently — “almost like reading a book,” he said. “It has romance, illusion, disillusionment, the promise of bright adventure and the understanding that commitment comes with a price.”

Gawronski might have added humor. The onstage antics of Hallberg and Raggy Ragsdale add a note of hilarity to balance the young love, parental scheming and ups and downs of family life.

As his son rehearsed a musical number with Pollock Wednesday night, Ragsdale looked on from a seat in the first row of the playhouse. Besides calling it “the perfect play,” Ragsdale said the family has worked together on many other productions.

Chance, a member of Warren Central’s award-winning Madrigals and show choir and a musician and songwriter, has been involved in the Mississippi State University Summer Scholars On Stage program. The program attracts gifted performing-arts students in grades seven through 12 who write, then act and sing in plays. Both Denise and Raggy Ragsdale have also been involved, as has the Ragsdales’ daughter Kimberly, a student at MSU.

While it’s hard to imagine Gawronski getting any more enthusiastic about the production, his receiving a personal message Tuesday from one of the writers of “The Fantasticks,” lyricist Tom Jones, had him marveling.

“I want to wish each of you a happy and successful run of ‘The Fantasticks’ at the Parkside Playhouse,” Jones wrote. “From what I can tell from reading Mr. Gawronski’s notes, it seems you are well on your way to doing a production I would be proud of. In the meantime, explore, enjoy, discover. Each production of ‘The Fantasticks’ is, in a very real sense, the first production, and you are creating it for the very first time. I know your journey will be an exciting one. Bon voyage.”

“Most every actor I know of has said they’ve been in the play or on the crew at some point in their career,” Gawronski said. “The bigger fact is that now there are another 15 people added to ‘The Fantasticks’ family worldwide.”

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Contact Pamela Hitchins at phitchins@vicksburgpost.com