‘Simon, Garfunkel’ back home

Concert-style show on famed duo hits NYC, with stars from ‘Fame’ HS

“The Simon and Garfunkel Story” is an internationally acclaimed concert-style theater show traversing the U.S. and it has finally made its way to the East Coast starring two locals.

Two LaGuardia High School graduates and New York natives, Jonah Bobo (Paul Simon) and Brendan Jacob Smith (Art Garfunkel), are making their homecoming at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre Friday after a stop at Newark’s NJPAC Thursday night.

The show tells the story of the folk-rock duo Simon and Garfunkel, from their humble beginnings as teenagers in New York City to their best-selling musical success and ultimate falling out.

Oddly enough, it was back in 2012 that Bobo (photo right) and Smith (photo left) first played these roles opposite each other as teenagers in NYC, when they performed a Simon and

Garfunkel medley as freshmen at LaGuardia High School’s “Rising Stars” talent show.

In addition to being the only freshmen to have their act in the talent show, they also performed in the same lineup as then-student Timothée Chalamet.

But who would’ve thought they would be performing the same songs a decade later, in a tour that spans 50 cities across the U.S. and Canada? Certainly not them, as Bobo describes it.

“I didn’t even know that there was a platform like this,” Bobo told the Daily News. “When Brendan sent me the audition for [‘The Simon and Garfunkel Story’] a couple years ago, I didn’t know that such tribute shows existed. But when I found out, I felt like it was a match made in heaven,” he added.

Smith talks about discovering the show and asking Bobo to get his agent to submit them for an audition as a duo, which he says, at first, was difficult for the producers to grasp.

“It’s normally one person that goes in and auditions,” Smith explained. “But we were like, ‘Hey, we’re us. We do this already.’ They were a little confused by that, they were like ‘Oh no, one at a time please.’ ”

But the package deal worked, and now they’re just about halfway through their tour, which started in January and is set to finish this April in Toronto.

While it’s not the first tour of this kind for either performer, when they hit Brooklyn on Friday it will be the first time they return to their home city to perform.

“I feel like most people I know are gonna be there,” said Smith. “I couldn’t be more excited to have my family and friends see this come full circle. Because a lot of the people that are gonna be there were those who saw us sing this music when we were 15 years old. So it’s going to be really cool for them to see us now.”

In the decade since that first performance, the music hasn’t changed, but their relationship with it has.

“It definitely means something different now,” said Bobo. “We’re both 25 now, and that was the age they were at when they were recording this music. So it feels appropriate to be stepping into their shoes at this time.”

“People who have grown up with this music are gonna find that the show is a nostalgic rush,” Smith says. “But I think for other people, it’s really important music to hear and experience because it’s so seminal to what harmonies sound like now, and if you listen to the music, you can really hear the influence they had to music that’s made now.”

“Simon and Garfunkel are still alive, but they’re not performing together,” Smith added. “This music needs to live on.”