Harvey Schmidt, Co-Creator of ‘The Fantasticks,’ Is Dead at 88
By Richard Sandomir
March 2, 2018
Harvey Schmidt, whose career as a commercial artist took a long, lucrative, and unexpected detour when he teamed with a former college pal to create “The Fantasticks,” the Off-Broadway romance that became the world’s longest-running musical, died on Wednesday in Tomball, Tex., near Houston. He was 88.
Rachel Scholl, a niece, said the cause was complications of congestive heart failure. He had no immediate survivors.
A love story about a boy and a girl and their feuding fathers, “The Fantasticks,” with music by Mr. Schmidt and book and lyrics by Tom Jones, opened in 1960 at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village and ran for 17,162 performances.
A revival that began in 2006 ran 4,390 more times at the Jerry Orbach Theater in Midtown Manhattan, named for the actor who originated the role of El Gallo, the show’s narrator.
Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jones became nearly inseparable collaborators on a host of shows for more than 50 years.
Mr. Schmidt was the quiet one; Mr. Jones, was the more gregarious.
“I wasn’t planning on having a career in the theater, but Tom was so bright, and any time he asked me to do something I was stunned,” Mr. Schmidt told Evanston Now, an online news website, in 2015.
“The Fantasticks” was by far their most successful show in a partnership that produced the Broadway musicals “110 in the Shade” (1963) and “I Do! I Do!” (1966), each of which earned them Tony Award nominations for best composer and lyricist.
A revival of the show opened in 2006 at a theater named after Jerry Orbach, who played El Gallo in the original production.
Most of the original cast of “The Fantasticks,” which opened in 1960.
They received a special Tony for theatrical excellence — for “The Fantasticks” — in 1992.
“The Fantasticks” is an adaptation of “Les Romanesques,” a comedy by the French playwright Edmond Rostand.
With Mr. Schmidt in the Army, stationed in El Paso, Tex., Mr. Jones initially set to work on it with another composer, John Donald Robb, on what was tentatively titled “Joy Comes to Deadhorse,” a western version of the Rostand story.
When that did not pan out, Mr. Jones turned to Mr. Schmidt, who had been discharged from the service and was working as a commercial artist for various NBC television programs and magazines like Esquire and Life.
Mr. Schmidt agreed to work with Mr. Jones and pared “Joy” down to a lighter, one-act musical that debuted at Barnard College as the precursor to “The Fantasticks.”
Mr. Schmidt said he wrote the melody to “Try to Remember,” the signature song of the show, in a rehearsal hall in five minutes.
“It was a hot day, there was no air-conditioning, and I was tired,” he said in “Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway” (2015),
by Michael Riedel. “I had a few minutes’ rehearsal time left and I didn’t want to waste them.
So I just put my hands on the piano and thought I’ll just play a simple song. I played ‘Try to Remember’ from start to finish without changing a note.”
In a telephone interview, Mr. Jones said: “Harvey was not a trained musician, but he could always do it, from the time he was a child. And playing music for him was a very direct emotional release. He was just extraordinarily full of music of all kinds.”
The opening of “The Fantasticks,” on May 3, 1960, was met with mixed reviews. In an article they wrote for The New York Times four years later, Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jones recalled that their producer, Lore Noto, had kept the show running despite the criticism.
But with success came moments like the one they described in the article: After the show’s 1,863rd performance, on Oct. 18, 1964, three television sets were to be wheeled onto the stage for the audience to watch an NBC production of “The Fantasticks,” with Ricardo Montalban, Bert Lahr and Stanley Holloway.
“No one can tell what the effect will be,” the men wrote. “Some say it will hurt us; others, that it will help.”
It certainly did not hurt. The show would play continuously at the same theater for another 38 years — and around the world.
Harvey Lester Schmidt was born in Dallas on Sept. 12, 1929, to Emmanuel Schmidt, a Methodist minister, and the former Edna Wieting, a homemaker and music teacher. Growing up in Texas, Harvey played piano — but never learned to read or write music — and could draw, inspired by Sunday comic strip characters like Flash Gordon.
He studied art at the University of Texas, Austin, planning to be a commercial artist, but his musical skills were evident.
He had worked on a student revue that impressed Mr. Jones, a graduate student in theater directing.
He asked Mr. Schmidt to collaborate with him on a new show and split the fee that he was to be paid.
Mr. Schmidt could not resist working in the theater, even as he expected to continue his art career.
“The experience was a revelation to me,” Mr. Jones said of their college-days collaboration. “It was immediate and hot; it was the openness of a direct engagement with the audience, and ‘The Fantasticks’ was very much a continuation of that experience.”
Liz Smith, their classmate, who would become a prominent syndicated gossip columnist, recalled in the New York newspaper The World Journal Tribune in 1966 that Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jones were a “pair so different, so independent yet eventually so melded together that one doesn’t know whether they are Damon and Pythias or Lum and Abner,” a reference to a radio comedy about small-town Arkansas.
In Ms. Smith’s article — written when “I Do! I Do!” opened on Broadway — she quoted Mr. Jones’s description of Mr. Schmidt.
Natasha Harper and Jeremy Ellison-Gladstone in “The Fantasticks” in 2001 at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, where the musical ran for a record 17,162 performances.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Natasha Harper and Jeremy Ellison-Gladstone in “The Fantasticks” in 2001 at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, where the musical ran for a record 17,162 performances.
“Harvey is like a traveler from another planet,” he said. “When we shared an apartment, I put colored pencils and a pad by the phone and collected 300 fascinating doodles of his. They are always life as viewed in relationship to death. Incredible.”
Mr. Schmidt’s artistic skills are evident in the logo for “The Fantasticks”: its now-familiar spiky lettering is his.
“I just took a brush with purple paint and wrote ‘The Fantasticks’ in my handwriting, in five minutes,” he told Evanston Now.
In addition to their Broadway shows, Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jones continued to work Off-Broadway and developed musicals, including “The Bone Room” (1975), at their Portfolio Studio experimental workshop in Manhattan.
When they received the Oscar Hammerstein Award for lifetime achievement in musical theater last December from the York Theater Company at an event at the Asia Society in Manhattan, they performed a duet, a song about dying, from “The Bone Room.” From a wheelchair, Mr. Schmidt played the piano while Mr. Jones sang lead.
They sang: “I can see you lying there / Someone must have shampooed your hair / Isn’t that a wonderful way to die?”
Jim Morgan, the producing artistic director of the Off-Broadway York Theater, said in an interview that Mr. Jones had been concerned at first that the song might be in bad taste. “But they decided it was the perfect way to end the show, with a complete twinkle about themselves,” he said. “Their sense of showmanship came through.”
It was the last time they saw each other.
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