W E S T O N P L A Y H O U S E T H E A T R E C O M P A N Y 9 1 S H O W N O T E S 0 2 The Fantasticks 3 Synopsis A boy. A girl. The fathers that try to keep them apart. The Fantasticks follows Matt and Luisa, a young couple who fall in love despite the wall built between them. What they don’t know is that their fathers have orchestrated their love story—they've even hired El Gallo, an alluring bandit, to set the scene. El Gallo attempts to capture Luisa, but is defeated by Matt. His heroism unites the two houses, but what seemed romantic in the moonlight becomes far less charming the next day. Reality collides with romance as the young couple falls in love, grows apart, and finds their way back to each other after the September rains. About the Authors Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt Composer Harvey Schmidt and lyricist Tom Jones are the legendary writing team best known for shaping the American musical landscape with their 1960 hit, The Fantasticks. After its Off-Broadway opening in May 1960, it went on to become the longest-running production in the history of the American stage and one of the most frequently produced musicals in the world. Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt Their first Broadway show, 110 in the Shade, was revived on Broadway in a new production starring Audra MacDonald. I Do! I Do!, their two-character musical starring Mary Martin and Robert Preston, was a success on Broadway and is frequently done around the country. For several years Jones and Schmidt worked privately at their theatre workshop, concentrating on small-scale musicals in new and often untried forms. The most notable of these efforts were Celebration, which moved to Broadway, and Philemon, which won an Outer Critics Circle Award. They contributed incidental music and lyrics to the Off-Broadway play Colette starring Zoe Caldwell, then later did a full-scale musical version under the title Colette Collage. The Show Goes On, a musical revue featuring their theatre songs and starring Jones and Schmidt, was presented at the York Theatre, and Mirette, their musical based on the award-winning children's book, was premiered at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut. In addition to an Obie Award and the 1992 Special Tony Award for The Fantasticks, Jones and Schmidt were inducted into the Broadway Hall of Fame at the Gershwin Theatre, and on May 3, 1999 their 'stars' were added to the Off- Broadway Walk of Fame outside the Lucille Lortel Theatre. Then in 2012, Jones & Schmidt were honored by being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Harvey Schmidt died on February 28, 2018 at the age of 88. Tom Jones currently lives in Texas with his family. Biography provided by Music Theatre International The Fantasticks 4 A Love Story for the Ages The Life of The Fantasticks “There was a chink in the wall between the houses / A flaw the careless builder had never noticed / Nor anyone else, for many years, detected / But the lovers found it—love is a finder, always— / Used it to talk through, and the loving whispers / Went back and forth in safety.” Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (translated by Rolfe Humphries) For over 1000 years, humanity has been telling the same story over and over again; two young lovers, separated by fate or family or politics, fall in love. Against all odds, they find each other only to be separated once again by death—or, in the case of The Fantasticks, the passing of time. Ovid, Shakespeare, Rostand, and Schmidt and Jones, centuries apart, all tapped into the same bittersweet tale. Along with West Side Story, The Fantasticks is one of the most famous musical adaptations of this story. It wasn’t always clear, however, that it would be a hit. Tom Jones first encountered Rostand’s Les Romanesques, the source material for The Fantasticks, in college. “I did not think of it as a possible source for a musical,” he wrote in a 1990 introduction to The Fantasticks, “because I did not think of anything as a possible source for a musical.” Schmidt and Jones met while in graduate school at the University of Texas, where Jones was pursuing an MFA in directing. At first, he did not consider himself a writer: “It was only later, when I was in graduate school doing extracurricular work in an organization called the Curtain Club...[that] we began to discover the exhilaration of musical theatre.” Jones' first attempt to adapt Les Romanesques was in the early 1950s with collaborator John Donald Robb. They created a Western called Joy Comes to Deadhorse. The plot was inspired by both Les Romanesques and Romeo and Juliet, centering around two quarreling ranchers, one English and one Spanish. The production premiered in 1956 at the University of New Mexico. “Despite the respectful response from the academic audience and the generally warm reception from the local press,” wrote Jones, “I felt the whole thing was a mess, a totally hopeless mix of style and intentions, with melodrama mixing queasily with whimsy and romanticism.” Robb on the other hand perceived the piece as successful. So, the two split, but gave each other their respective blessing to pursue the project with other collaborators. The Fantasticks 5 Fast forward three years and Jones was in the thick of revising Joy Comes to Deadhorse with Harvey Schmidt. They struggled to make it work in its current form until, finally, the musical collapsed. “We floundered. Never did it occur to us to question the basic premise,” he wrote, “...’can a charming little whimsical play be made into a big cowboy musical, written for Broadway in the Rodgers and Hammerstein manner?’” The two writers then made a bold choice—to throw out the conventions molded by Rogers and Hammerstein in favor for something riskier. “We threw out the R&H model. We gratefully let go of out adjoining ranches and our chorus of cowboys. We threw away the entire script and score, except for a couple of songs. We decided to break all the rules. We didn’t understand them anyway.” Jones and Schmidt returned to study their source material, Les Romanesques, and emerged with The Fantasticks. It relied on a presentational style of theatre, a bare stage, and the boundless imagination of the actors and audience. Most importantly, the point of the new version was “that one must give up one’s youthful illusions and romanticism and move into the season of maturity and reality.” They returned to the source with each revision as well as the dramatic techniques of Shakespeare, Thornton Wilder, and commedia dell’arte. The first version of The Fantasticks was a one act musical that premiered at the Barnard Summer Theatre. While the production received generally positive feedback, one man saw its full potential. Lore Noto, who would eventually produce the celebrated Off-Broadway production, attended the final dress. Despite a few bumps, including the lead actress losing her voice, he was enraptured by what Jones and Schmidt had created. He convinced them to expand the piece into a full-length musical as he pursed backers and a theatre. Unbeknownst to Jones and Schmidt, Noto quit his job and sunk his entire life savings into the production. They all, quite literally, risked everything they had to get the musical on its feet at the Sullivan Street Playhouse. The production opened on May 3, 1960 to mixed reviews. It was charming, but not enduring. Praiseworthy, but not worth sending readers to the box office. For weeks the audiences dwindled, and the fate of The Fantasticks looked grim. But later that summer, Broadway actors went on strike, sending audiences to off-Broadway theatres. Slowly, the audiences grew, the acclaim started to pour in, and suddenly The Fantasticks was a hit. “That is what we wanted,” said Jones, “to celebrate romanticism and mock it at the same time. To touch people, and then to make them laugh at the very thing that touched them. To make people laugh, and then turn the laugh around, find the other side of it. To put two emotions side by side, as close together as possible, like a chord in music.” Little did they know that they created the most enduring musical chord in theatre history. The Fantasticks ran at the Sullivan Street Playhouse until 2002, then from 2006-2017 at The Theater Center. It has been produced all around the United States and internationally in at least 67 countries. “It was a miracle.” wrote Jones. “We had survived.” The Fantasticks 6 Interview with Actress Julie Benko Compiled by Drewe Goldstein, Education Fellow DREWE GOLDSTEIN: When did you first encounter The Fantasticks? What did you think of it? JULIE BENKO: I’ve been singing “Much More” since I was 13 years old! When I was in high school, I listened to The Fantasticks original cast album so many times that I eventually wrote all of my own personalized harmony lines for every song. Then, when I was 18 and still a senior in high school, I received one of my first professional auditions ever: for Luisa in the off-Broadway revival of the show in the Jerry Orbach Theater. I had never seen it live, so after my school day was over, I snuck into a performance at intermission and watched the second act. I fell in love with the show, and, furthermore, knew that I was right for the role and would both nail the audition and book the job.