‘Fantasticks’ Won’t Close After All

FLORIDA, UNITED STATES – 1999: (L-R) Portrait of Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, creators of the musical “The Fantasticks.” (Photo by Ray Fisher/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

America’s longest-ever play is being saved by a couple of fans.

Two donors have stepped up and pledged to keep the stalwart, low-tech show open, producer Catherine Russell said Saturday. Plans had been made for the show to close May 3, the 55th anniversary of its opening, after some 20,000 performances.

“Neither donor knows the other and both want to remain anonymous,” Russell wrote in an e-mail. “They both just have loved the show for many years and were heartbroken and furious at me for deciding to close it without discussing it with them.”

For nearly 42 years the show chugged along at the 153-seat Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, finally closing in 2002 after 17,162 performances — a victim both of a destroyed downtown after 9/11 and a new post-terrorism, edgy mood. It reopened four years later at The Snapple Theater Center, an off-Broadway complex near Times Square.

The tale, a mock version of “Romeo and Juliet,” concerns a young girl and boy, secretly brought together by their fathers, and an assortment of odd characters, including a rakish narrator, an old actor, an Indian named Mortimer and a mute.

It long ago won the title of world’s longest-running musical. “The Phantom of the Opera,” by comparison, is Broadway’s longest-running show with some 11,000 shows.

Click here for reuse options!
Copyright 2015 Liberaland