About This Show
The Fantasticks is a deceptively simple musical with a not so simple beginning. It began in 1969 when lyricist Tom Jones and composer Harvey Schmidt were asked to pare down their floundering, full-length western musical-in-progress, called “Joy Comes to Deadhorse,” into a single-act playlet for an evening of one-acts at Barnard College. Their show, based on an obscure romantic work entitled “Les Romanesques” by 19th century playwright Edmond Rostrand was dedicated to the proposition that love works best when it doesn’t come too easily. To Jones and Schmidt, trimming the production down meant eliminating such things as chorus line on horseback in favor of experimenting with minimal scenery, characters that directly addressed the audience, stage devices adapted from Asian theatre and dialogue in both rhymed and free verse.
