The creative team behind Arena Stage's restaging of 'The Fantasticks'

It's safe to say that Eugene Lee wasn't intimidated by "The Fantasticks," the wee show etched in theatrical lore as the world's longest running musical. After all, the 70-year-old set designer had won Tony Awards for "Candide," "Sweeney Todd" and "Wicked" on Broadway. He was the original designer for "Saturday Night Live," a gig he still treks to each week from Rhode Island.

And so, it didn't seem strange to him that he and director Amanda Dehnert might reconceive "The Fantasticks" -- which originally played in a small off-Broadway playhouse with practically no set at all -- as taking place in an abandoned amusement park. In fact, he was only tangentially aware of the legend.

Says Lee, surprisingly, "I've never seen it anywhere."

He can't be the only one; still, as Arena Stage brings the Dehnert-Lee production to the Lincoln Theatre, just try to remember a time when "The Fantasticks" was not a staple of the theatrical landscape. You have to go back nearly 50 years: It opened on May 3, 1960, and didn't close until January 2002 -- 17,162 performances later.

Didn't manage to catch it in the Village during those four-plus decades? Maybe you saw a campus production, or Robert Goulet on tour. Perhaps you saw the "Tuna" guys, Joe Sears and Jaston Williams, doing a slightly expanded version at Ford's Theatre in 1996. Or maybe you've recently visited the Snapple Theater Center off-Broadway, where "Fantasticks" author-lyricist Tom Jones directed the slightly rewritten version that's been playing since 2006.

With about 250 professional productions licensed in North America since 1990, according to Music Theatre International, "The Fantasticks" continues to get around. It's an enticingly familiar title, and it's doable -- no small matter in a dicey economic climate. The show features a small cast: You need only eight actors. The score by Jones and composer Harvey Schmidt spawned two standards in "Try to Remember" and "Soon It's Gonna Rain," and you don't need an orchestra -- just a piano and harp. (To fill the Lincoln, Dehnert is adding bass and percussion.)

Perhaps most famously, this is a show about make-believe storytelling, with actors pulling props from a trunk to play the "Pyramus and Thisbe"-style love story. Its simplicity was always part of the charm; Lee, speaking from his home in Providence, was acutely aware of that.

"I knew everything came out of a box," the designer says of the show's commedia dell'arte style.

The tale, adapted from Edmond Rostand's "Les Romanesques," is pure stardust: Two matchmaking old men arrange for one's lad to meet the other's lass, with the cruel world tossing in some complications. Dehnert recalls seeing a high school production when she was a teenager: "I loved that it was aware of itself as a piece of theater," says the director, sitting in a coffee shop near Arena's rehearsal hall. "It talked to the audience; it didn't try to pretend it wasn't happening on a stage."

Her more scenically vivid production features genuine magic tricks and real artifacts from Rhode Island's defunct Rocky Point Amusement Park. The magic is courtesy of Jim Steinmeyer, author of "Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear" and other books on the illusion biz. Lee knew Steinmeyer from their days together on Broadway's "Ragtime"; Lee did the architecturally spectacular set, and Steinmeyer created tricks for the Harry Houdini character.

Not that this "Fantasticks" is chock full of Las Vegas-style sleight of hand. "A magic show is its own thing," says Dehnert, who fits directing jobs in around her teaching duties at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. "Magic is just part of how we're getting the story told."

Still, it's intriguing to hear Lee give hints about the deceptive vaudeville tricks underlying the design -- the way, for instance, magicians don't like people standing behind them, and how footlights can play tricks on an audience's eyes.