“Try to Remember” a time before THE FANTASTICKS. Lyric Stage, Dallas County’s only locally produced professional musical theater, opens its 2005-2006 season with a celebration of the musicals of Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, September 16-October 15, 2005. THE FANTASTICKS and 110 IN THE SHADE will run in repertory September 16-October 15, 2005. Lyric Stage will also present staged readings of the duo’s CELEBRATION October 3 & 4, and PHILEMON October 10 & 11.

Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt met as students at The University of Texas in 1950. They were working on a musical revue entitled HIPSY-BOO for which Tom wrote comedy sketches and Harvey served as musical director. Neither of the two was planning to become a writer. Jones was a drama student, majoring in play production and Schmidt was studying art, planning to become a commercial artist.

However, HIPSY-BOO, directed by fellow student Word Baker, was successful. So successful, in fact, that Jones and Schmidt followed it almost immediately with their second project, an original book musical, TIME STAGGERS ON, and after that, they began writing songs together on a more or less regular basis.

After graduation and the Army, both moved to New York City where they continued writing together, contributing revue material for Julius Monk's UPSTAIRS-DOWNSTAIRS shows and Ben Bagley's SHOESTRING REVUES. In their spare time, they worked on a full-scale musical based on a little-known Rostand play called "LES ROMANESQUES." The plot, which spoofs "ROMEO AND JULIET" by having the parents invent a feud in order to make their children fall in love, was envisioned by the young writers as a big Broadway show involving two ranches in the southwest, one Anglo and one Spanish.

"We worked on it, very haphazardly, over a period of several years," says Jones, "trying to take the story and force it into a Rodgers and Hammerstein mold, which is what everybody did in those days." "I always imagined everybody on real horses on the stage of the Winter Garden," adds composer Schmidt. "Eventually," says Jones, "the whole project just collapsed, our treatment was too heavy, too inflated for the simple little Rostand piece. It seemed hopeless."

It was at that point, in the summer of 1959, that Word Baker again played a key role in the collaboration. He had been offered a job directing three one-act plays at Barnard College. Baker wanted one of them to be a musical and he told his friends that if they could give him a one-act musical version of the Rostand play in three weeks, he would give them a production of it three weeks later. And that is what happened. After years of struggling unsuccessfully with the material, the two writers threw out everything (except a song "Try to Remember") and, starting from scratch, completed the basis of what is now THE FANTASTICKS in less than three weeks time.

We went back to Rostand for inspiration," says Jones, "because it was smaller and simpler. And yet we used it only as a guidepost, as a map to refer to whenever we got lost. For years we had wanted to try a lot of experiments mixing presentational forms with musical theatre. And since we were no longer aiming for Broadway, we decided to go ahead and attempt all the things we had been dreaming of doing for years. After all, we had nothing to lose."

The original Off-Broadway production of THE FANTASTICKS played 42 years and 17,162 performances at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, the attractive little Greenwich Village theatre where the show opened to rather mixed notices on the night of May 3rd, 1960.

Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt attribute much of the record-making long run of THE FANTASTICKS to producer Lore Noto. "Lore believed in the show when nobody else did," says Schmidt. "He had total faith in it and it paid off."

Apart from launching the longest run in the history of the American Theatre, THE FANTASTICKS marked the official New York start of that rich and diverse Jones/Schmidt partnership, a collaboration that until then had been limited to a handful of revue songs.

In his book MAKING MUSICALS, Tom Jones recalls the beginnings of the first Schmidt and Jones Broadway musical, 110 IN THE SHADE. “A year or so after THE FANTASTICKS opened, we were approached by N. Richard Nash to see, first, if we were interested in working on a musical of his play THE RAINMAKER and second, if we had ever written anything in a “Western” mode. The answer to both questions was yes. I had been a fan of the play ever since I saw it on television the night before I was discharged from the Army, and Harvey knew the piece from the excellent movie starring Katherine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster. As for the “Western” part, we are both from Texas and felt we knew this world and these people.” Wanting to get everything just right for their first Broadway outing, Tom and Harvey wrote 117 songs for 110 IN THE SHADE, but only 16 were used in the final score.

110 IN THE SHADE opened at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre on October 24, 1963 to wonderful notices and played 330 performances. Although the show was very well received by audiences and critics alike, it was overshadowed by producer David Merrick’s other musical that season, HELLO, DOLLY!. The show’s national tour played through May of 1965, making the show a financial winner.

In addition to 110 IN THE SHADE, for Broadway Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt have written I DO! I DO!, adapted from Jan de Hartog's long-run comedy smash, THE FOURPOSTER. For the Jones/Schmidt telling of the famous marital tale, Mary Martin and Robert Preston appeared in the roles originally done in New York by Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn.

For several years Jones and Schmidt worked privately at Portfolio, their theatre workshop, concentrating on small-scale musicals in new and often un-tried forms. The most notable of these efforts were CELEBRATION, which moved to Broadway, and PHILEMON, which won an Outer Critics Circle Award

In addition to the Outer Critics Circle Award, an Obie Award and the prestigious ASCAP-Richard Rodgers Award, Schmidt and Jones are the recipients of the 1992 Special Tony Award for THE FANTASTICKS. In February of 1999 they were inducted into the Broadway Hall of Fame at the Gershwin Theatre, and on May 3rd, 1999, their "stars" were added to the Off-Broadway Walk of Fame outside the Lucille Lortel theatre.

Lyric Stage has previously produced four musicals by Schmidt and Jones, including the world premiere of ROADSIDE, based on the Lynn Riggs play, in February of 2001 and the second production of the team’s MIRETTE, based on the Caldecott Award winning children’s book MIRETTE ON THE HIGH WIRE.

THE FANTASTICKS will play September 16, 17, 29, 30 and October 8 at 8:00 PM and September 18 and October 1 & 9 at 2:30 PM. 110 IN THE SHADE will play September 23, 24 and October 1, 6, 7, 13, 14 & 15 at 8:00 PM and September 25 and October 2 at 2:30 PM. Tickets are $23-$30, with discounts available for students and groups, and are available by calling the box office at 972-252-2787 or CLICK HERE TO ORDER ONLINE. CELEBRATION will play October 3 & 4 at 8:00 PM and PHILEMON will play October 10 & 11 at 8:00 PM. All tickets to these readings are $10.00. All performances are in the Irving Arts Center’s Dupree Theater, 3333 N. MacArthur Blvd. Irving, Texas, 75062.

REFERENCES
Thefantasticks.com

THE FANTASTICKS

110 IN THE SHADE