‘Fantasticks’ Lyricist Tom Jones Was Sanguine About Show’s Tangled History With Hollywood, Including a Barbra Streisand Near-Miss
variety.comChris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic “Try to Remember,” the most famous song to have come out of the stage musical “The Fantasticks,” was noted for its autumnal feel, sung by someone reflecting back on youthful days.
The happy irony is that Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt wrote that song prior to the show’s original 1960 staging when they were both still relatively young men of about 30, fellows who still had about two-thirds of their lives ahead of them.
Schmidt, who wrote the music, died in 2018 at age 88, and Jones, who penned the show’s lyrics and book, died Friday at 95. Here’s to it having been a heck of a long way from September to December.
When the movie version of the show came out in the fall of 2000, I wrote about it for Entertainment Weekly and said that “for my money, ‘The Fantasticks’ is the best pure live–action movie musical since ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show.’” Now, if you’re familiar with the stage show but didn’t even know there was a film adaptation, you are not alone in that.
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