Sayville High School's drama club the Sayville Players will present The Fantasticks (the longest running musical ever) January 9 and 10 at 7:00 P.M., January 11 and 12 at 8:00 P.M., and January 13 at 3:00 P.M. in SHS's 90-seat Little Theatre along with the one act play "An Actor's Life for Me!" as their 30th annual Theatre Laboratory production. There is no admission charge

The Fantasticks is a 1960's musical with music by Harvey Schmidt and lyrics by Tom Jones. It tells an allegorical story, loosely based on the play The Romancers (Les Romanesques) by Edmond Rostand, concerning two fathers who put up a wall between their houses to ensure that their children fall in love, because they know that children always do what their parents forbid. After the children do fall in love, they discover their fathers' plot and they each go off and experience things in the world. They return to each other and the love they had, having learned from the world and made an informed decision. Elements of the play are ultimately drawn from the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, winding through Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream as well as Rostand's play on the way.

The original production of The Fantasticks opened on May 3, 1960, at the 150-seat Sullivan Street Playhouse in New York's Greenwich Village - where it played 17,162 performances! It started as a one-act staging at Barnard College in the summer of 1959. When it opened in New York, the press was so tepid that producer Lore Noto almost was forced to closed it after a week. But due primarily to Noto's persistence, it took off and has become the longest-running musical in history. The original cast included actor Jerry Orbach ("Julian Marsh" 42nd Street, "Billy Flynn" Chicago, "Lumiere" (voice) Disney's Beauty and the Beast, "Lennie Briscoe" TV's Law and Order) as "El Gallo". Other performers in the show have included author Tom Jones (the author, not the pop singer), Liza Minnelli, John Davidson, Bert Convy, Bert Lahr, Stanley Holloway, Ricardo Montalban, David Cryer, Richard Chamberlain, John Carradine, Elliott Gould, F. Murray Abraham and Robert Goulet. Upstairs at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, a The Fantasticks museum has been installed. There have been over fifteen touring companies in America and more than 66 foreign countries. By the time it closed on January 13, 2002, the original investors had received a 9,620% return. It re-opened on August 16, 2006, at the Snapple Theatre (which was renamed the Jerry Orbach Theatre on June 21, 2007) where it is currently still running.