Tom Jones, half of record-setting ‘Fantasticks’ team, dies at 95

NEW YORK - Tom Jones, who wrote the book and lyrics for a modest musical called The Fantasticks that opened in 1960 in New York’s Greenwich Village neighbourhood and ran for an astonishing 42 years, propelled in part by its wistful opening song, Try To Remember, died on Friday at his home in Sharon, Connecticut. He was 95.

His son Michael said the cause was cancer.

Jones and his frequent collaborator, Harvey Schmidt, first worked together when they were students at the University of Texas, Jones in the drama department’s directing program, Schmidt studying art but indulging his musical inclinations on the side.

They kept in touch after graduating, writing songs together by mail after they were drafted during the Korean War.

Jones got out first and tried his luck in New York, failing to find work as a director but writing for the revues being staged by impresario Julius Monk and fiddling with a musical with another composer, John Donald Robb.

Jones and Robb called that show, which was loosely based on a comedy by French playwright Edmond Rostand, Joy Comes to Deadhorse, and in 1956 they staged it at the University of New Mexico, where Robb was a dean. It was a big-cast production that included a small squadron of dancers.

The two men had different reactions to their production. “I felt it was basically wrong,” Jones wrote in an unpublished memoir. “He felt it was basically right. So we split.”

Jones kept working on the piece, now with Schmidt, who had arrived in New York after leaving the military and was having some success as a commercial artist. They were still envisioning it as a big Broadway musical, but in 1959, when a friend was looking for a one-act musical for a summer festival at Barnard College, they did a radical revision. Instead of trying to imitate Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jones wrote, “we decided to break all the rules.”

“We didn’t understand them anyway,” he added.

Their pared-down musical, about two young lovers and their seemingly feuding fathers, used a narrator, minimalist staging and other touches that bucked the formula of a big Broadway musical.

Among those who saw it at Barnard was producer Lore Noto, who brought it to the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, where it opened in May 1960. The cast included Jerry Orbach, early in his storied career, as El Gallo, the narrator, who delivers Try To Remember.

It also included, in a smaller role, one Thomas Bruce – who was actually Jones. He said he didn’t use his own name because he wanted to head off accusations that The Fantasticks was a vanity production.

Jones wrote that the opening night performance, attended by critics, was rocky, and at the after-party all involved awaited the reviews with trepidation. They came in around midnight; Mr Word Baker, the director, related them to the assembled group, beginning with the mixed review from Mr Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times.

“All we could hear, any of us, were the bad parts,” Jones wrote.

Mr Walter Kerr in The New York Herald Tribune also said both positive and negative things, while some of the other New York papers raved.

In any case, the show had a resilience that no one back then could have predicted. It continued to run at Sullivan Street for more than 17,000 performances, finally closing in 2002 as the longest-running musical in history. (The Mousetrap, the Agatha Christie play, has been running longer in London, but not continuously in the same theatre.)

Jones and Schmidt, who died in 2018, went on to collaborate on other shows. Jones wrote the lyrics for Schmidt’s music for 110 In The Shade which opened on Broadway in 1963 and ran for 330 performances, and he wrote the book and lyrics for I Do! I Do! another collaboration with Schmidt, which ran for a year and a half on Broadway in the mid-1960s.

Each of those shows earned the men Tony Award nominations. Ed Ames’ version of My Cup Runneth Over, a song from I Do! I Do! peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1967 and received Grammy Award nominations.

But The Fantasticks overshadowed everything else. After its initial long run, a revival that opened in 2006 in midtown Manhattan ran for more than 4,300 performances, with Jones again in the opening night cast in the same secondary role. As in the original production, actors cycled through the various roles in the revival, which continued for more than a decade. In 2010, Jones, then 82, returned to the cast briefly to mark the 50th anniversary of the original show’s opening.

In 2006, an interviewer for American Theater Wing, introducing Jones, described The Fantasticks as “the longest-running musical in the universe.”

“I don’t know about Saturn,” Jones replied.

Thomas Collins Jones was born Feb 17, 1928, in Littlefield, Texas. His father, William, was a turkey farmer, and his mother, Jessie, was a housewife.

He grew up in Coleman, Texas, where he got a job as an usher at a movie theater, which morphed into a role as master of ceremonies for a weekly talent show held on Wednesday nights between features.

In the American Theater Wing interview, Jones recounted the story of Try To Remember, the signature song from The Fantasticks. Schmidt had come up with the music in just a few minutes during an idle moment in a rehearsal hall. Jones heard an opportunity.

“I thought, well, it would be fun to take this simple, long-line song and then play with lots of assonance and near sounds and near rhymes and inner rhymes and sort of encrust it verbally on top of this flowing, basically folklike, simple melody,” he said. “That took me weeks to do. It took him 20 seconds and me three weeks.”

His lyrics still echo across the decades:

Try to remember the kind of September

When life was slow and oh, so mellow.

Try to remember the kind of September

When grass was green and grain was yellow.

Try to remember the kind of September

When you were a tender and callow fellow.

Try to remember and if you remember

Then follow, follow.

Jones’ first marriage, to Eleanor Wright, ended in divorce. His second marriage was to choreographer Janet Watson, who died in 2016. Mr Michael Jones and another son from that marriage, Sam, survive him. NYTIMES