Tom Jones, designer of the longest-running music “The Fantasticks,” photographed in 2011. Walter McBride/Corbis using Getty Images
Tom Jones, the lyricist, supervisor and also author of The Fantasticks, the longest-running musical in background, has actually passed away. He was 95.
Jones passed away Friday (Aug. 11) at his residence in Sharon, Connecticut, according to Dan Shaheen, a co-producer of The Fantasticks, that dealt with Jones because the 1980s. The reason was cancer cells.
Jones, that partnered with author Harvey Schmidt on The Fantasticks and also the Broadway programs 110 in the Shade and also I Do! I Do!, was sworn in right into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1998.
The Fantasticks, based upon an odd play by Edmond Rostand, doesn’t always have the ingredients of a hit. The collection is simply a system with posts, a drape and also a wood box.
The story, a simulated variation of Romeo and also Juliet, worries a girl and also kid, covertly united by their daddies, and also a variety of strange personalities.
Scores of stars have actually shown up in the program, from the opening up actors in 1960 that consisted of Jerry Orbach and also Rita Gardner, to celebrities such as Ricardo Montalban and also Kristin Chenoweth, to Frozen celebrity Santino Fontana. The program was granted Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre in 1991.
“So many people have come, and this thing stays the same — the platform, the wooden box, the cardboard moon,” Jones informed The Associated Press in 2013. “We just come and do our little thing and then we pass on.”
For almost 42 years the program downed along at the 153-seat Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, ultimately enclosing 2002 after 17,162 efficiencies — a target both of a damaged midtown after 9/11 and also a brand-new post-terrorism, edgy state of mind.
In 2006, The Fantasticks discovered a brand-new residence in The Snapple Theater Center — later The Theater Center — an off-Broadway facility in the heart of Times Square. In 2013, the program commemorated getting to 20,000 efficiencies. It enclosed 2017, finishing as the longest-running manufacturing of any type of kind in the background of American cinema with an overall of an amazing 21,552 efficiencies.
“My mind doesn’t grasp it, in a way,” Jones stated. “It’s like life itself — you get used to it and you don’t notice how extraordinary it is. I’m grateful for it and I’m astonished by it.”
Its best recognized tune, “Try To Remember,” has actually been taped by numerous musicians over the years, consisting of Ed Ames, Harry Belafonte, Barbra Streisand and also Placido Domingo. “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” and also “They Were You” are likewise amongst the musical’s most acknowledged tunes.
The verses for “Try to Remember” go: “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.”
Its durability came regardless of very early testimonials that were not also type. The New York Herald Tribune doubter just suched as Act 2, and also The New York Times’ doubter smelled that the program was “the sort of thing that loses magic the longer it endures.”
In 1963, Jones and also Schmidt created the Broadway program 110 in the Shade, which gained the duo a Tony Award election for finest author and also lyricist. I Do! I Do!, their two-character Broadway music, complied with in 1967, likewise gaining them a Tony election for finest author and also lyricist.
Jones is made it through by 2 boys, Michael and also Sam.
“Such a good guy. I truly adored him,” created Broadway expert Danny Burstein on Facebook.
