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 accordance with Dan Shaheen, a co-producer of The Fantasticks, who labored with Jones because the Nineteen Eighties. The trigger was most cancers.
Jones, who teamed up with composer Harvey Schmidt on The Fantasticks and the Broadway reveals 110 within the Shade and I Do! I Do!, was inducted into the American Theatre Hall 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 picket field.
The story, a mock model of Romeo and Juliet, issues a younger woman 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 (*95*) Gardner, to stars reminiscent of Ricardo Montalban and Kristin Chenoweth, to Frozen star Santino Fontana. The present was awarded 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 practically 42 years the present chugged alongside at the 153-seat Sullivan Street 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 Center — later The Theater Center — an off-Broadway complicated within the coronary heart of Times Square. In 2013, the present celebrated reaching 20,000 performances. It closed in 2017, ending because the longest-running manufacturing of any variety within the historical past of American theater with a complete of an astonishing 21,552 performances.
“My mind doesn’t grasp it, in a way,” Jones mentioned. “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 finest recognized track, “Try To Remember,” has been recorded by a whole bunch of artists over the a long time, together with Ed Ames, Harry Belafonte, Barbra Streisand and Placido Domingo. “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” and “They Were You” are additionally among the many musical’s most acknowledged songs.
The lyrics 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 longevity got here regardless of early critiques that weren’t too variety. The New York Herald Tribune critic solely preferred Act 2, and The New York Times’ critic sniffed that the present was “the sort of thing 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 finest composer and lyricist. I Do! I Do!, their two-character Broadway musical, adopted in 1967, additionally incomes them a Tony nomination for finest composer and lyricist.
Jones is survived by two sons, Michael and Sam.
“Such a good guy. I truly adored him,” wrote Broadway veteran Danny Burstein on Facebook.
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