Collaborating with lyricist Tom Jones, Harvey Schmidt created several well-regarded stage productions that attained notable recognition. Their longest-lasting joint achievement, however, remains The Fantasticks, ensuring that Schmidt and Jones will be remembered whenever singers and listeners continue to respond to selections including “Try to Remember,” “Much More,” “Soon It’s Gonna Rain,” and “They Were You.” Across more than four decades, artists from Barbra Streisand and Ed Ames to Jerry Orbach, along with groups such as the Kingston Trio and the Serendipity Singers, have performed material from that score.
Born in the Houston vicinity of Texas to a Methodist minister, Harvey Schmidt grew up immersed in radio, cinema, and theater, forms that early on demonstrated their capacity to stir strong audience responses. As a teenager attending films, he found himself especially struck by Vincente Minnelli’s early Hollywood pictures and by their inventive spatial designs. His mother, a piano instructor, nurtured his musical interests; although he possessed an innate ability to play anything by ear, a mild dyslectic condition prevented him from learning to read music. During his youth, artistic talent stood out most prominently and drew praise from both instructors and peers. At the University of Texas at Austin, membership in the campus Curtain Club brought him into contact with fellow Texan Tom Jones, a writer, frustrated actor, and childhood movie enthusiast.
Through fellow student Word Baker, who envisioned a theatrical pastiche drawn from early-twentieth-century songs, Schmidt and Jones first united on a project ultimately titled after Schmidt’s solo piece “Hipsy-Boo.” Their initial successful partnership produced Time Staggers On, a musical depicting a freshman’s opening day at college and modeled on On the Town; the work proved highly popular on the Austin campus. They separated in the early 1950s yet reconvened in New York by 1955, sharing an apartment.
In 1956 Jones brought Schmidt an idea he had pursued since graduate school. While at Austin he had discovered Edmond Rostand’s 1890 play Les Romanesques, a work both parodying and honoring Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Jones proposed converting Les Romanesques into a musical, relocating the action to a Western setting populated by Mexicans and cowboys under the working title Joy Comes to Dead Horse. They continued developing that project for years while also composing songs and sketches in hopes of advancing their careers; meanwhile Schmidt established a national reputation as an illustrator and graphic artist.
Through their mutual friend Word Baker, now also based in New York, Schmidt and Jones received an offer in 1959 to present the long-gestating musical at Columbia University’s Barnard College summer program under actress Mildred Dunnock, provided the piece could be reduced to one act. The Western locale was discarded, Mexican characters were eliminated except for lingering Spanish musical influences, and all elements extraneous to Rostand’s original narrative were removed. Returning to the source, they adopted the title of one English translation of Les Romanesques, The Fantasticks.
Months of further refinement under Baker’s direction and Lore Noto’s production were still required before the work opened at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village. Schmidt and Jones later acknowledged influences from Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, the 1949 film A Double Life, and Lynn Riggs’s play Green Grow the Lilacs. Schmidt’s music featured straightforward yet memorable melodies, while Jones’s lyrics conveyed an appealing innocence. Once established, The Fantasticks became their breakthrough and a singular landmark in theater history, embarking on a run exceeding forty years. Initial audiences were modest yet receptive; decisive steps—an MGM cast album, a week of performances in the Hamptons, the 1964 Hallmark Hall of Fame telecast starring Ricardo Montalban, Bert Lahr, Stanley Holloway, and John Davidson, plus sustained advocacy by everyone involved—sustained the production. Barbra Streisand incorporated two songs, notably “Much More,” into her repertoire, and Ed Ames, the Kingston Trio, the Serendipity Singers, and numerous others, including original cast member Jerry Orbach, transformed “Try to Remember” and “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” into ubiquitous 1960s standards and the most commercially successful numbers to emerge from off-Broadway.
By the 1980s and 1990s, the Texas-born admirers of Hollywood spectacles such as the Ziegfeld Follies and On the Town had accomplished something beyond the achievements of Florenz Ziegfeld or the On the Town team of Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green, securing not only theatrical success but also a permanent place in New York’s cultural landscape alongside the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty.
During 1964 Schmidt and Jones stood as the sole composers simultaneously represented on Broadway and off-Broadway with 110 in the Shade, which drew on their Texas background, and The Fantasticks. They staged I Do! I Do! and Celebration in the mid-to-late 1960s, presented Philemon in 1974, and collaborated on an adaptation of Our Town titled Grover’s Corners. Schmidt’s standing as a graphic designer sustained that work into the 1970s, yet he also scored films, including Robert Benton’s 1972 feature Bad Company and A Texas Romance. He never acquired the ability to read music, nor did the absence impede him; he composed at the piano while an assistant notated the results.
In 1995 director Michael Ritchie finally brought The Fantasticks to the screen, expanding the setting and incorporating new script material by Schmidt and Jones; the cast included Jean Louisa Kelly, Joe McIntyre, Joel Grey, Brad Sullivan, Barnard Hughes, and Jonathon Morris. Release was postponed until fall 2000, when, after re-editing supervised by Francis Ford Coppola, the film received a limited November engagement and appeared on home video the following spring. Between completion and release, Schmidt and Jones contributed to The Show Goes On, a York Theater Company revue in New York, and advanced Roadside, a 1950s project based on a Lynn Riggs play, which received a work-in-progress presentation at Southwest Texas State University in November 2000.
