A Fantastick legacy
Composer helped take musical from tiny off-Broadway theatre to global hit
Composer Harvey Schmidt helped bring the longestrunning musical in history to the off-Broadway stage.
The Fantasticks made its debut in 1960, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was still U.S. president, and ran in its initial theatre until 2002. A 2006 revival at a different theatre closed in 2017 — for a combined total of 21,552 performances in New York alone.
The Fantasticks is also one of the most widely produced musicals in the rest of the world, with more than 11,000 productions in 3,000 cities and towns in all 50 U.S. states, as well as in 67 other countries, including Canada — and counting.
Schmidt, who died on Feb. 28 at age 88 at his home in Texas, teamed up with lyricist, director and story writer Tom Jones on The Fantasticks as well as on the Broadway shows 110 in the Shade and I Do! I Do! Both men were inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1998.
Try to Remember, the bestknown song of The Fantasticks, has been recorded by hundreds of artists over the decades including Harry Belafonte, Barbra Streisand and Placido Domingo. Soon It’s Gonna Rain and They Were You are also among the musical’s mostrecognized songs.
The musical, based on The Romancers (Les Romanesques), an English translation of lesserknown 19th-century play by Edmond Rostand (better known for his play Cyrano de Bergerac), doesn’t necessarily have the makings of a hit. The set is just a platform with poles, a curtain and a wooden box.
The tale, a mock version of Romeo and Juliet, concerns a young girl (Luisa) and boy (Matt) secretly brought together by their fathers and an assortment of odd characters, including a rakish narrator (El Gallo), an old actor, an Indian named Mortimer and a mute.
Despite its longevity and success, the show has not been free from controversy, especially in recent changing times.
The portrayal of an “Indian” has offended some Indigenous cultures. And in the musical’s song It Depends on What You Pay, where El Gallo outlines his plan to stage a fake abduction of the girl Luisa (to make the boy Matt look like a hero in her eyes), the original book has El Gallo refer to it as a “rape,” in theclassicalandliterarysense.(“I know you prefer ‘abduction,’ ” he says, “but the proper word is ‘rape.’ It’s short and businesslike.”)
Some productions outside New York have dropped that song entirely, or substituted the word as “raid.” In 1990, Jones and Schmidt wrote a piece called Abductions, adapting the music, lyrics and some dialogue, now offered as an optional replacement.
Schmidt, who came to New York from Dallas, wrote the melody of Try to Remember in five minutes. Schmidt told Michael Riedel in his book Razzle Dazzle that he had rented a rehearsal room in the Steinway Building because he couldn’t afford to own a piano.
“It was a hot day, there was no air conditioning, and I was tired,” he recalled. “I had a few minutes’ rehearsal time left, and I didn’t want to waste them. So I just put my hands on the piano and thought I’ll just play a simple song. I played Try to Remember from start to finish without changing a note. But I didn’t know it was my song. I’d been to Europe that summer and I just assumed it was a folk song I’d heard along the way.” A few days later, he played it for Jones, who thought it would work well in The Fantasticks.
Scores of actors appeared in The Fantasticks, from the opening cast that included Jerry Orbach as El Gallo and Rita Gardner as Luisa, to such stars as Ricardo Montalban, Robert Goulet, Richard Chamberlain, Kristin Chenoweth and Frozen star Santino Fontana. The show was awarded Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre in 1992, the only off-Broadway show ever to have won a Tony.
For nearly 42 years the show chugged along at the 153-seat Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, finally closing in 2002 — a victim both of a destroyed downtown after 9-11 and a new postterrorism, edgy mood.
In 2006, The Fantasticks found a new home in The Theater Center, an off-Broadway complex in the heart of Times Square. In 2015, it celebrated reaching 21,000 performances. It closed in 2017 after a total of 21,552 shows in the city since 1960.
Its longevity came despite early reviews that were not kind. The New York Herald Tribune’s critic liked only Act 2 and The New York Times critic sniffed that the show was “the sort of thing that loses magic the longer it endures.”
In 1963, Schmidt and Jones wrote the Broadway show 110 in the Shade, which earned the duo a Tony Award nomination for best composer and lyricist. Their twocharacter Broadway musical I Do! I Do! followed in 1967, also earning them a Tony nomination for best composer and lyricist.