Dennis Parlato Headed Off-Broadway in The Fantasticks

Broadway veteran Dennis Parlato will join the cast of off-Broadway’s The Fantasticks as narrating lead El Gallo beginning July 13. Parlato temporarily replaces cast member Lewis Cleale, who will depart the production to appear in Camelot at The Muny Theatre. Parlato will play a limited engagement at the show’s Snapple Theatre through August 2.

Parlato has appeared on Broadway in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Sound of Music, Salome, Chess, Annie and The Graduate. Off-Broadway, he has been seen in Cyrano de Bergerac, The Master Builder, The Tempest, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Christmas Carol and How I Learned to Drive. TV and film credits include One Life to Live, Loving, Law and Order, Johnny Suede, Starting Out in the Evening and Bride Wars.

The Fantasticks currently features Tom Flagg, Gene Jones, Addi McDaniel, Michael Nostrand, Evy Ortiz, Richard Roland, Steve Routman, Jonathan Schwartz, Douglas Ullman, Jr. and John Thomas Waite.

The Fantasticks (music by Harvey Schmidt, book/lyrics/direction by Tom Jones) is a captivating and simple romantic comedy about a boy and girl who fall in and out of love at the hands of their meddling fathers. The audience uses its imagination to follow the narrator, El Gallo, as he creates a world of moonlight and magic until the boy and girl find their way back to one other. The score, which includes the hit songs “Try To Remember,” “They Were You” and “Soon It’s Gonna Rain,” is as timeless as the story itself.

Having played a record-breaking 17,162 performances in its original run at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, The Fantasticks is now playing in the heart of Times Square at the Snapple Theater Center. It is the longest-running musical in the world.