THE FANTASTICKS Confirmed to Replace CHESS at Reprise

Reprise Theatre Company announced today that "The Fantasticks" will replace the previously announced production of "Chess," May 5-17 at the Freud Playhouse. With music by Harvey Schmidt and book and lyrics by Tom Jones, "The Fantasticks" is the world's longest-running musical and will be performed in Los Angeles as its current New York revival continues running off-Broadway.

Jason Alexander, artistic director of Reprise, said, "I am saddened to report the reason why. Our world premiere production of "Chess" was commissioned and brokered by Gerald Schoenfeld, President of the Shubert Organization. Just before the end of last year, Gerry passed away unexpectedly. Without his support our production of 'Chess' simply is not possible at this time. I am disappointed, both for the loss of this wonderful opportunity and for the loss of an old and good friend."

Alexander continued, "We had already decided to perform 'The Fantasticks' for our next season. We had begun to consider how we would bring this classic musical to the Freud Playhouse, so it made a lot of sense to us just to move the schedule forward.

Tickets held by season subscribers for "Chess" will be honored at performances of "The Fantasticks" for the same dates and times. Single tickets for "The Fantasticks" will be on sale beginning February 24, 2009.

About "The Fantasticks"

"The Fantasticks" with music by Harvey Schmidt and lyrics by Tom Jones, opened at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in New York's Greenwich Village on May 3, 1960, and went on to become the world's longest-running musical, running for nearly 42 years. In addition to an Obie Award and the 1992 Special Tony Award for "The Fantasticks," Jones and Schmidt are the recipients of the prestigious ASCAP-Richard Rogers Award for 1993. On February 1, 1999, they were inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame at the Gershwin Theatre on Broadway, and on May 3 that year, their "stars" were added to the Off-Broadway Walk of Fame outside the Lucille Lortel theatre.

The current revival of "The Fantasticks" opened August 23, 2006, at the Snapple Theatre Center, where it continues.

The show's original production ran off-Broadway ran for 17,162 performances. Schmidt and Jones' score boasts some of musical theater's most unforgettable standards, such as "Try to Remember," and "Soon It's Gonna Rain" which have attributed to the show's lasting endurance. Many productions have followed the original, including a current off-Broadway revival as well as television and film versions.

In 1964, "Fantasticks" producer Lore Noto broke an unwritten theatrical rule by allowing a still-running show to be broadcast on TV - the prestigious Hallmark Hall of Fame, no less. The televised production featured among its stellar cast Bert Lahr and Stanley Holloway, and rather than damage the box office revenue at Sullivan Street Playhouse, the broadcast only increased the show's popularity. The film version, directed by Michael Ritchie and starring Joel Grey, Barnard Hughes, Jean Louisa Kelly, Joey McIntyre and Jonathon Morris was released in 1995.

"The Fantasticks" has played in every state, in more than 11,103 U.S. productions in over 2,000 cities and towns. It has played at the White House, the Ford Theatre, the Shawnee Mission in Kansas, Yellowstone National Park and in America's more exotic locales from Carefree, Arizona to Mouth of Wilson, Virginia. Internationally, more than 700 productions have been staged in 67 nations from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Scandinavia has seen more than 45 productions including at least one each year since 1962, when it won an award there as the year's Outstanding New Theatrical Piece. Japan, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Czechoslovakia, have all seen multiple productions as have such newsworthy locales as Kabul, Afghanistan and Teheran, Iran. Recently, "The Fantasticks" has also been seen in Dublin, Milan, Budapest, Zimbabwe, Bangkok, and Beijing.

"The Fantasticks" tells an allegorical story, loosely based on the play "The Romancers" ("Les Romanesques") by Edmond Rostand, concerning two fathers who put up a wall between their houses to ensure that their children fall in love, because they know that children always do what their parents forbid. Elements of the play are ultimately drawn from the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, its story winding its way through Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as well as Donizetti's "L'Elisir d'Amore" and Rostand's play.

Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt wrote ""The Fantasticks" for a summer theatre production at Barnard College in 1959. Fellow University of Texas alum Word Baker had been offered a job directing three one-act plays at a summer theatre, which the actress Mildred Dunnock was producing 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 Rostand 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. They even returned to the original title. The English version of the Rostand play, which they had used as a guide, was an obscure one called "The Fantasticks", written by a woman under the pseudonym George Fleming. It had been introduced to them by one of their college professors, B. Iden Payne, who had directed it in London in 1909 with Mrs. Patrick Campbell as "The Boy" in a breeches part.

Harvey Schmidt in particular, found himself drawn to this title. "We couldn't come up with a new title," he admits, "and we liked the way this one looked, with that "k" adding the extra kick."
When their one-act version was produced at Barnard, it attracted enough attention from the world of the professional theatre that Jones and Schmidt were soon placed in the position of having to choose one off-Broadway producer from a field of several viable candidates.

Their choice was Lore Noto who had first encountered fragments of Jones's script when director Word Baker used it in an acting class. Having heard the brief opening speeches Jones had written for The Boy and The Girl, Noto was drawn to Barnard, where he saw a very early dress rehearsal and determined to mount "The Fantasticks" for a commercial run.

It is to producer Lore Noto that Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt attribute much of the record-making long run of "The Fantasticks." "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 and Schmidt partnership, a collaboration that until then had been limited to a handful of revue songs.

For Broadway, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt have written "110 In the Shade" as well as" I Do! I Do!"

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.

Along the way they contributed incidental music and lyrics to the off-Broadway play, "Colette," written by Elinor Jones and starring Zoe Caldwell. Later, their full-scale musical based on the same subject toured the western states with Diana Rigg. And later still, it was produced in New York under the title "Colette Collage," where it was recorded by Varese Sarabande with Judy Blazer and Judy Kaye playing the younger and older Colette.

In the 1997-98 season, Jones and Schmidt appeared off-Broadway in "The Show Goes On" a new revue based on their theatre songs. Winning unanimous rave notices and hailed by the New York Times as "lighthearted, loving and sad, laced with nostalgia but also with laughter," the show extended its run several times and was subsequently released as a CD.