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July 27, 2008: BestofOffBroadway.com talks to Tom Jones, co-creator of The Fantasticks.
Question: Where did you grow up?
 Answer: I was born in the Panhandle of Texas in a small town called Littlefield. My birth was soon followed by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, at which point, my family, reeling from the general desolation, moved south to west-central Texas to Coleman, which was larger (population six thousand). I started school there and stayed until I finished high school and went off to the University of Texas in Austin, where I stayed for six years, earning two degrees in drama. (BFA and MFA)
Q: Did your family encourage you to pursue theater?
A: My family did not encourage me to pursue theatre. There was no theatre to be pursued in Coleman, Texas - other than what I managed to put together in my desire to somehow make real life more like the movies. I was a spindly awkward boy, but I had a mimetic gift and I was able to make some sort of place for myself in this cowboy world by telling stories and jokes and re- enacting things I had heard on the radio or seen in the movies. Though I had never really seen any theatre, I had decided, by the age of twelve, that this was what I wanted to do and I tried to prepare myself as best as I could on my own. Since I never wavered in my determination, my parents decided to let me study drama when I went to the university. Then, when I did well there, they just decided to go along with it. One of my deepest regrets is that my father never lived to see me have any kind of recognition or success professionally. He would have been pleased and astonished (as I am) that I have actually been able to make a living.
Q: What artists inspired you to pursue theater?
A: As I said, I never saw any theatre when I was growing up, but I was enthralled by the movies (as we all were). When I went to Texas University to study drama, I was deeply influenced by several professors - most especially a great man named B. Iden Payne, who had a long, illustrious past - and to whom THE FANTASTICKS is dedicated. I wrote about him at length in TRYING TO REMEMBER, my introduction to the 30th Anniversary Edition of THE FANTASTICKS, published by Applause Books. Most of all, Mr. Payne introduced me to Shakespeare and that introduction has been the most significant thing I have encountered in my life as an artist.
Q: How did you meet Harvey Schmidt?
A: I met Harvey Schmidt when we were both students at the University. He was studying art and I was studying stage directing. Neither of us were particularly interested in musicals, but he was a gifted pianist and occasional composer and I got a job directing the annual college musical. Finding the scripts and scores submitted were terrible, I contacted Harvey and together we wrote our first musical in a little less than a month. The experience changed my life. As I have written in [my book], MAKING MUSICALS, I loved the "hot" contact with the audience. I also loved the presentational nature of the whole thing. It reminded me of Shakespeare.
Q: What makes for a successful collaboration?
A: For a successful collaboration, you must have, first of all, a deep personal respect (and even awe) of the other partner. It is essential that you enjoy the same kind of theatre experiences, but I think it is also an advantage if your lives and tastes in other things are quite different.
Q: What did you work on when you first moved to New York?
A: When we first arrived in New York (actually, I arrived a year before Harvey) we wrote revue material for Ben Bagley's SHOESTRING REVUES and Julius Monk's UPSTAIRS/DOWNSTAIRS shows. Harvey began a fabulous (and fabled) career as a commercial artist and I struggled along trying to get work as a director. For several years we tried to write a big Broadway musical based on a very slight Rostand piece called LES ROMANESQUE, but it would never pull together.
Q: Where did the name "The Fantasticks" come from?
A: When we gave up on the lifeless Broadway show (entitled JOY COMES TO DEAD HORSE), we decided to do a simpler, smaller version of the Rostand play. It was given to me by Mr. Payne, who had done it in London in 1911, and it was titled THE FANTASTICKS.
Q: You're a writer, actor and director - is there one role you prefer?
A: I started off those many years ago as an actor. Then I studied to be a director. And eventually, by chance, I became a writer. I don't think of myself as one of those things or another. I am a theatre person. I love the theatre. I love to help create things for the theatre. But I am old now and my time is limited, and I have decided that in the time remaining to me I will not act or direct, but will try to leave some sort of legacy in writing.
Q: What did you love about working Off-Broadway?
A: I love Off-Broadway because it is so un-corporate. It is still human scale and personal. It is still like doing those shows in college. And in my heart of hearts, I still think I am in college.
Click here to purchase Tom Jones' book, Making Musicals: An Informal Introduction to the World of Musical Theater.
More about Tom Jones:
TOM JONES (Book, Lyrics, Director) and HARVEY SCHMIDT (Music), wrote The Fantasticks for a summer theater production at Barnard College. After its Off-Broadway opening in May 1960, it went on to become the longest-running production in this history of the American stage and one of the most frequently produced musicals in the world. Their first Broadway show, 110 In The Shade, was nominated for a Tony Award and was successfully revived by the New York City Opera and later produced on Broadway by the Roundabout Theatre Company starring Audra MacDonald and John Cullum. I Do! I Do!, their two-character musical starring Mary Martin and Robert Preston, was a success on Broadway and on tour and is frequently done around the country and the world. (One production, in Minneapolis, played for 22 continuous years with the same two actors in leading roles.)
For several years Jones and Schmidt worked privately in Portfolio, their theater workshop, concentrating on small-scale musicals in new and often untried forms. The most notable of these efforts were Celebration, which moved to Broadway, and Philemon, which won an Outer Critics Circle Award. They contributed incidental music and lyrics to the Off-Broadway play Collette starring Zoe Caldwell, and later did a full scale musical version under the title Colette Collage. The Show Goes On, a musical revue featuring their theater songs and starring Jones and Schmidt, was presented at the York Theatre to great acclaim and Mirette, their musical based on the award-winning children's book, was presented at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut.
In addition to an Obie Award and a special Tony Award for The Fantasticks, Jones and Schmidt were inducted into the Broadway Hall Of Fame at the Gershwin Theater, and their "stars" were added to the Off-Broadway Walk Of Fame outside the Lucille Lortel Theater.
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