Tom Jones, the lyricist, director and author of The Fantasticks, the longest-running musical in historical past, has died. He was 95.
Jones died Friday (Aug. 11) at his residence in Sharon, Connecticut, in line with Dan Shaheen, a co-producer of The Fantasticks, who labored with Jones because the Eighties. The trigger was most cancers.
Jones, who teamed up with composer Harvey Schmidt on The Fantasticks and the Broadway exhibits 110 within the Shade and I Do! I Do!, was inducted into the American Theatre Corridor of Fame in 1998.
The Fantasticks, based mostly on an obscure play by Edmond Rostand, doesn’t essentially have the makings of a success. The set is only a platform with poles, a curtain and a wood field.
The story, a mock model of Romeo and Juliet, considerations a younger lady and boy, secretly introduced collectively by their fathers, and an assortment of strange characters.
Scores of actors have appeared within the present, from the opening forged in 1960 that included Jerry Orbach and Rita Gardner, to stars resembling Ricardo Montalban and Kristin Chenoweth, to Frozen star Santino Fontana. The present was awarded Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre in 1991.
“So many individuals have come, and this factor stays the identical — the platform, the wood field, the cardboard moon,” Jones advised The Related Press in 2013. “We simply come and do our little factor after which we go on.”
For almost 42 years the present chugged alongside on the 153-seat Sullivan Road Playhouse in Greenwich Village, lastly closing in 2002 after 17,162 performances — a sufferer each of a destroyed downtown after 9/11 and a brand new post-terrorism, edgy temper.
In 2006, The Fantasticks discovered a brand new residence in The Snapple Theater Middle — later The Theater Middle — an off-Broadway advanced within the coronary heart of Occasions Sq.. In 2013, the present celebrated reaching 20,000 performances. It closed in 2017, ending because the longest-running manufacturing of any form within the historical past of American theater with a complete of an astonishing 21,552 performances.
“My thoughts doesn’t grasp it, in a approach,” Jones stated. “It’s like life itself — you get used to it and also you don’t discover how extraordinary it’s. I’m grateful for it and I’m astonished by it.”
Its greatest identified music, “Strive To Bear in mind,” has been recorded by lots of of artists over the a long time, together with Ed Ames, Harry Belafonte, Barbra Streisand and Placido Domingo. “Quickly It’s Gonna Rain” and “They Have been You” are additionally among the many musical’s most acknowledged songs.
The lyrics for “Attempt to Bear in mind” go: “Attempt to bear in mind the type of September/ When life was gradual and oh, so mellow/ Attempt to bear in mind the type of September/ When grass was inexperienced and grain was yellow.”
Its longevity got here regardless of early opinions that weren’t too form. The New York Herald Tribune critic solely favored Act 2, and The New York Occasions’ critic sniffed that the present was “the form of factor that loses magic the longer it endures.”
In 1963, Jones and Schmidt wrote the Broadway present 110 within the Shade, which earned the duo a Tony Award nomination for greatest composer and lyricist. I Do! I Do!, their two-character Broadway musical, adopted in 1967, additionally incomes them a Tony nomination for greatest composer and lyricist.
Jones is survived by two sons, Michael and Sam.
“Such a very good man. I really adored him,” wrote Broadway veteran Danny Burstein on Fb.
