Sweet, simple and astonishingly durable — that's The Fantasticks.

The show recently re-opened off-Broadway, where its original 1960-2002 run made it the longest-running musical in stage history.

This oft-produced show also is back on the local front, as the season opener at the Texas Repertory Theatre Co. Despite a few drawbacks, Texas Rep serves up a pleasant, ultimately affecting rendition.

Tom Jones' book is simplicity itself: a boy, a girl, two fathers and a wall.

Innocents Matt and Luisa fall in love despite their feuding fathers — so they think. Actually, the fathers have contrived the feud to bring their offspring together. They hire bandit El Gallo to stage an abduction, so Matt can play the hero and rescue Luisa, thus ending the feud and providing a Happy Ending.

Act 2 shows Matt and Luisa's disillusionment at realizing they've been pawns in their fathers' game. Matt sets out to see the world. Luisa gives her heart to the bandit. When the lovers reunite at the close, they've both been hurt, but they've grown up a bit in the process: "Without a hurt / the heart is hollow."

Despite occasional preciousness, the spare tale unfolds with freshness and novel touches acknowledging the artifice of putting on a show.

Yet if you want to know the real secret of the show's inexhaustible appeal, look no further than its enchanting score. Jones' poetic lyrics are perfectly matched with Harvey Schmidt's beguiling melodies, with their folklike plaintiveness and subtle stirrings of jazz in the bluesier passages of Act 2. From the haunting opening Try to Remember through such highlights as Much More, Soon It's Gonna Rain, I Can See It, and especially, the lovers' gorgeous final duet, They Were You, these timeless songs express the tale's gentle, wistful, poignant moods.

The strength of Texas Rep's rendition is that it has the voices to do the songs justice, backed by the strong musical direction of Patricia Rabaza. Alison Luff sings with radiance and lilt as Luisa, her eager exuberance and romantic fancy making her an ideal ingenue. Joshua Estrada is her vocal equal as the naively earnest Matt, truly a "tender and callow fellow."

Steven Fenley exudes husky bravado as narrator El Gallo, wry and worldly in his philosophical musings. His credibility is something of a feat, given the wrong-headed "Ringmaster" costume and makeup choices too reminiscent of Jackie Gleason's "Reginald Van Gleason III" character. David Devaney Jr. and Mark X. Laskowski are hokey fun as the chuckleheaded dads. Michael Steinbach and Jeffrey S. Lane provide mild amusement as the tatty players who assist El Gallo.

Director Craig A. Miller could give the overall rendition greater drive and bite. Yet he does right by the love story, conveying its pathos with gentle sincerity.

Miller's most misguided choice is opening each act with a pantomime routine by the Mute (Steven Piechocki, otherwise capable as the silent prop man). Not all that funny and just unnecessary, the mime routines delay each act's start when all we want is to get to the love story and songs as fast as possible. That's where The Fantasticks flies.