Tom Jone’s Death — Last Friday, at his home in Sharon, Connecticut, Tom Jones, author of the book and lyrics for the long-running musical The Fantasticks, passed away. His son reported cancer took his life at age 95. The opening number “Try to Remember” from The Fantasticks is what people usually think of when they think of the 1960 Greenwich Village premiere of the musical. With fellow composer John Donald Robb, Jones got his start on the New York theater scene by contributing to revues produced by impresario Julius Monk. Jones and Robb put on a play in 1956 called “Joy Comes to Deadhorse,” and they performed it at the University of New Mexico, where Robb served as a dean. Jones eventually began working with his friend Harvey Schmidt after he and Schmidt disagreed over the production’s success or failure.
Jones and Schmidt continued developing the concept they had developed with Robb. They sent their unused musical about teenage lovers with fighting families to a friend in 1959 who was looking for a one-act musical for a summer festival at Barnard College. The play deviated from the standard format of a major Broadway musical by employing a narrator and a minimalist staging style.
After seeing the performance at Barnard College, producer Lore Noto transferred the piece to the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, where it premiered in May of 1960. Jerry Orbach was among the cast members, playing the role of El Gallo, the narrator who opens the show by singing “Try to Remember.” Some early critics praised it while others were less than impressed. But the audience didn’t care, and after more than 17,000 performances at Sullivan Street, the longest-running musical in American history closed in 2002.
Later, Jones and Schmidt worked together on another series. Jones composed the lyrics to “110 in the Shade,” a musical by Schmidt that played for 330 performances on Broadway beginning in 1963. Another collaboration, “I Do! I Do!,” played for a year and a half on Broadway in the mid-1960s, and he created the book and lyrics for it. All three of those productions netted the guys nominations for Tony Awards. In 1967, Ed Ames’ rendition of “My Cup Runneth Over,” a song from “I Do! I Do!,” reached No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was nominated for a Grammy.
There was, of course, absolutely no comparison to “The Fantasticks.” After closing in 2004, the show returned to New York City in 2006 for over 4,300 performances. Jones’s first marriage was to Eleanor Wright, and it eventually failed. After he divorced from his first wife, he wed choreographer Janet Watson, who passed away in 2016. Jones’s sons Michael and Sam, from a previous marriage, are still alive and well.
