On May 3, 1960: Record-Breaking The Fantasticks Opens Off-Broadway

The Fantasticks, which broke record after record Off-Broadway at the 153-seat Sullivan Street Playhouse, originally opened May 3, 1960鈥�65 years ago today.

Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt's musical tells an allegorical story loosely based on Edmund Rostand's 1894 play The Romancers (Les Romanesques), concerning two neighboring parents who trick their children into falling in love by pretending to feud.

The original company was led by Jerry Orbach as Narrator El Gallo, Rita Gardner as Luisa, Kenneth Nelson as Matt, William Larsen as the Boy's Father, Hugh Thomas as the Girl's Father, and librettist Jones, using the pseudonym Thomas Bruce, as the Old Actor. Word Baker directed with musical direction and arrangements by Julian Stein鈥攚ho was featured at the piano with Beverly Mann on the harp鈥攁nd production design by Ed Wittstein.

The musical's history is an interesting one. It was at the University of Texas/Austin, where Jones and Schmidt first met in the late 1940s鈥攖hey were both students. It was also at UT that the young Jones came across Edmund Rostand鈥檚 short play, Les Romanesques, a parody of Romeo and Juliet, which he would develop into the musical Western Joy Comes to Dead Horse, and which eventually evolved into The Fantasticks.

Under the title Joy Comes to Dead Horse, their show was originally conceived as a Western in the style of Oklahoma!, with an Anglo boy in love with a Latin茅 girl named Maria. When West Side Story opened with a similar plot, the project seemed doomed for a time, but when director Baker came to Jones and Schmidt and offered them a spot on a no-budget summer theatre program he was scheduling at Barnard University in the summer of 1959, they stripped out the elaborate costumes, sets, and special effects鈥攅verything that might cost money鈥攁nd presented a one-act, bare-bones version of their show as The Fantasticks.

Expanded to two acts, the resulting minimalist musical opened at the Sullivan Street to mixed reviews in 1960. Song titles included "Much More," "They Were You," "Soon It's Gonna Rain," and the oft-recorded "Try to Remember."

In the New York Times Brooks Atkinson wrote, "Although the story is slight, the style is entrancing in Word Baker's staging鈥� But it seems to this theatregoer that the second act loses the skimming touch of the first."

Schmidt asked producer Lore Noto to try keeping it open until the weekend so his family could come up from Texas to see it. The show did stay open鈥攆or the next 42 years! In fact, the musical ran until January 13, 2002, playing 17,162 performances. When the original production closed in 2002, news of the closing made the front page of The New York Times.

In 2006, a revival opened at The Theater Center, directed by Jones that featured a young Santino Fontana as Matt. That production closed June 4, 2017, after playing 4,390 performances in the Jerry Orbach Theatre, for a combined total of 21,552 performances in New York鈥攕till the longest-running musical production worldwide.

After The Fantasticks, Jones and Schmidt would collaborate on 110 in the Shade, I Do! I Do!, Celebration, Mirette, The Show Goes On, and Roadside.

Librettist and lyricist Jones also penned a new version of The Fantasticks鈥攊n collaboration with Flint Repertory Producing Artistic Director Michael Lluberes鈥攖hat premiered in 2022 at the not-for-profit professional theatre company in Michigan. The LGBTQIA+ focused rewrite features two young gay men, Matt and Lewis, at the center of the story, instead of a young man and woman (the original characters were Matt and Luisa).

Learn what other theatre milestones happened on May 3 by visiting the 半岛体育 Vault.

Look back at some rarely-seen photos of The Fantasticks in the gallery below.