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The Fantasticks is a 1960 musical with music by Harvey Schmidt and book and lyrics by Tom Jones. It tells an allegorical story, loosely based on the 1894 play The Romancers (Les Romanesques) by Edmond Rostand, concerning two neighboring fathers who trick their children, Luisa and Matt, into falling in love by pretending to feud. The show's original off-Broadway production ran a total of 42 years (until 2002) and 17,162 performances, making it the world's longest-running musical. The musical was produced by Lore Noto. It was awarded Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre in 1991. The poetic book and breezy, inventive score, including such memorable songs as "Try to Remember", helped make the show durable. Many productions followed, as well as television and film versions. The Fantasticks has become a staple of regional, community and high school productions since its premiere, with approximately 250 new productions each year. It is played with a small cast, two- to three-person orchestra and minimalist set design. The show was revived off-Broadway from 2006 to 2017. As of 2010, its original investors had earned 240 times their original investments. The musical has played throughout the US and in at least 67 foreign countries. Background The 1954 Marc Blitzstein adaptation of The Threepenny Opera, which ran for six years, showed that musicals could be profitable off-Broadway in a small-scale, small orchestra format. This was confirmed in 1959 when a revival of Jerome Kern and P. G. Wodehouse's Leave It to Jane ran for more than two years. The 1959–1960 off-Broadway season included a dozen musicals and revues including Little Mary Sunshine, The Fantasticks, and Ernest in Love, a musicalization of Oscar Wilde's 1895 hit The Importance of Being Earnest. The musical is based loosely on The Romancers (Les Romanesques) by Edmond Rostand, which draws elements from the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore. Productions Early productions Jones, together with John Donald Robb of the University of New Mexico, first adapted the Rostand play as a Western titled Joy Comes to Deadhorse. The play premiered at the University of New Mexico in the spring of 1956. It was set in the American West, and featured a "half-breed Apache" as the show's antagonist. Jones was not happy with this instantiation and subsequently teamed with Schmidt. The script was substantially rewritten by Jones and Schmidt, with the character of Mortimer now "not really an Indian" but playing one during the "Rape Ballet" sequence. The Wild West setting was abandoned, as was most of the script. All but a few songs in the score were also jettisoned, and the staging of the play was changed to a thrust stage. Tom Jones says that the name of the play came from George Fleming's 1900 adaptation of the Rostand play, which used the name The Fantasticks. Harley Granville-Barker's book, On Dramatic Method, provided the idea of using a series of images to help weave a unifying theme to the play. Thornton Wilder's Our Town gave Jones the idea of using a narrator, the staging of Carlo Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters provided the concept of having actors sit stage-side when not acting, and John Houseman's production of The Winter's Tale and Leonard Bernstein's Candide suggested the use of sun, moon, frozen action, and incidental music. The song "Try to Remember" was added at this time. Harvey Schmidt says he wrote it in a single afternoon, after it emerged in almost complete form after a fruitless afternoon attempting to compose other songs. The revamped play appeared on a bill of new one-act plays at Barnard College for one week in August 1959. Original off-Broadway production The Fantasticks premiered at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, a small off-Broadway theatre in New York City's Greenwich Village, on May 3, 1960, with Jerry Orbach as El Gallo, Rita Gardner as Luisa, Kenneth Nelson as Matt, and librettist Tom Jones (under a pseudonym) as the Old Actor, among the cast members. The sparse set and semicircular stage created an intimate and immediate effect. The play is highly stylized and combines old-fashioned showmanship, classic musical theatre, commedia dell'arte and Noh theatrical traditions. The original production was directed by Word Baker and was produced on a very low budget. The producer spent $900 on the set and $541 on costumes, at a time when major Broadway shows would cost $250,000. The original set designer, costumer, prop master, and lighting designer was Ed Wittstein, who performed all four jobs for a total of only $480 plus $24.48 a week. The set was similar to that for Our Town; Wittstein designed a raised stationary platform anchored by six poles. It resembled a traveling players' wagon, like a pageant wagon. For a curtain, he hung various small false curtains across the platform at various times during the play. He also made a sun/moon out of cardboard. One side was painted bright yellow (the sun) and the other was black with a crescent of white (the moon). The sun/moon was hung from a nail in one of the poles and is referred to in the libretto. The orchestra consists of a piano and sometimes also a harp, with the harpist also sometimes playing some percussion instruments. The production closed on January 13, 2002, after 17,162 performances. It is the world's longest-running musical and the longest-running uninterrupted show of any kind in the United States. Other notable actors who appeared in the off-Broadway and touring production throughout its long run included Liza Minnelli, Elliott Gould, F. Murray Abraham, Glenn Close, Keith Charles, Carole Demas, Kristin Chenoweth, Bert Convy, Eileen Fulton, Lore Noto (the show's longtime producer), Dick Latessa, and Martin Vidnovic. 1961, 1969 and 1990 productions The musical ran at London's Apollo Theatre from September 7, 1961, and ran for 44 performances. In 1990, another production was given in London's Regent's Park at the Open Air Theatre there. It toured in Vietnam in 1969–70, presented by the Command Military Touring Shows, a unit of Army Special Entertainment branch of the US Army Special Services. The company was made up of military personnel. Off-Broadway revival On August 23, 2006, a revival of The Fantasticks opened at the off-Broadway The Theater Center, New York City where it closed on June 4, 2017 after an additional run of 4,390 performances. It was directed by lyricist Jones, who also appeared in the role of Henry, The Old Actor, under the stage name Thomas Bruce. The original cast of the revival also included Burke Moses (El Gallo), Leo Burmester (Hucklebee), Martin Vidnovic (Bellomy), Santino Fontana (Matt), Sara Jean Ford (Luisa), Robert R. Oliver (Mortimer), and Douglas Ullman, Jr. (the Mute). A cast recording of this production was released by Ghostlight Records. Anthony Fedorov played the role of Matt in 2007. Margaret Anne Florence played Luisa .... Discover the Matt Farwell Michael Ames popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Matt Farwell Michael Ames books.