May 3, 1960– The Fantasticks opens Off-Broadway
The original production ran for 42 years, making it the world’s longest running musical and the longest-running show in American Theatre History. The original production was at the tiny Sullivan Street Playhouse. It closed January 13, 2002, after 17,162 performances. The show re-opened in 2006, and when it closed for good, the production had played a total of 21,552 performance.
Tom Jones, who wrote the book and lyrics is still with us at 90-years-old, Harvey Schmidt, who did the music, left this world a few months ago. The original production was directed by Word Baker and was produced on a very low budget. The producers spent $1500 on the set and costumes, during an era when Broadway shows would spend $250,000.
Jerry Orbach, Rita Gardner and Kenneth Nelson in the original production
The Fantasticks cast alumni include: Jerry Orbach (the original lead), Liza Minnelli, Elliott Gould, F. Murray Abraham, Glenn Close, Keith Charles, Lorenzo Lamas, Kristin Chenoweth, Bert Convy, David Canary, Santino Fontana, and Aaron Carter.
Young Barbra Streisand was dying to play the ingenue, and auditioned several times without being cast. She recorded several of the songs from the score including I Can See It, Soon It’s Gonna Rain, Much More, and the show’s most famous number Try To Remember.
The Fantasticks is one of the most widely produced musicals in the world, with more than 14,000 productions in 3,000 cities and towns, in all 50 states, as well as in 67 countries. On any given evening, it is playing somewhere on our pretty planet.
The Fantasticks has been seen in at least 67 countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. It has been translated into many languages including French, German, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Czech, Slovak, Persian, Dari, Pashto, Irish, Italian, Hungarian, Thai and Mandarin.
Despite a bright and inventive score, I just don’t care that much for this famous musical. I find it to be a bit twee. This is rather unfair to show because it has been very good to me. The Fantasticks is the show that I have been in the most productions, five so far in my life (let’s hope I am done, but you never know). I have played all the roles except for El Gallo, the romantic baritone lead, and the male and female ingénues. I am baffled how those roles eluded me.
The first time I appeared in The Fantasticks was in one of the thousands of yearly high school productions of the musical. In 1969, a Spokane Catholic girls’ school chose to do a production (an unusual choice, there is only one female role). The nuns changed the two fathers to two mothers and then cast females in all the roles except the male lead and the role of Mortimer-The Old Indian, which I was extended a special invitation to play. At 15-years-old, I already had a reputation for being able to convincingly play older, in this case, much older parts.
In The Fantasticks libretto, the mysterious male lead El Gallo offers to stage the phony kidnapping of the girl, Luisa. He refers to the proposed event as a “rape”, although he makes it clear that he uses the word only in its traditional literary sense (Latin “rapere”) of “abduction”, explaining that many classical works, including Alexander Pope‘s The Rape Of The Lock, use the word in this sense. In his song, It Depends On What You Pay, El Gallo describes different kidnapping scenarios, comic and outlandish, that he classifies as the “Venetian rape”, the “Gothic rape”, the “Drunken rape”, etc.
The Good Sisters Of The Holy Names were not keen on the use of word “rape”, and they deemed to change the word to “SNATCH”,which the nuns found a perfect single syllable replacement for the offending word. The cast had the thrill of singing: “So the kind of snatch depends on what you pay”. I was loved to sing out the new lyric; I was in a little bit of theatrical heaven. The play’s abduction is set to music and named in the program’s list of musical numbers as The Rape Ballet, which for this special production became, of course: The Snatch Ballet.
The above photograph is of me from Seattle’s Pioneer Square Theatre outdoor production in 1983. That is your World of Wonder writer on the right, along with the lovely Doug Marney. Talented Doug and I had a very special chemistry on stage. We adored each other off-stage. He was one of the first of many of my actor colleagues to be taken by that new plague. I wish with all my heart that he was still here.
