Partners in Rhyme

Deep in the December of a creative partnership that has given the world the hit musicals “The Fantasticks” and “I Do! I Do!,” Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt vividly remember the September 50 years ago when they met.

Jones was a graduate theater student at the University of Texas who had been enlisted to write comedy sketches for a campus revue called “Hipsy-Boo!” Schmidt was the musical director and writer of the title song, which his partner still knows by heart.

“Hello fellas, we’re here to greet you with a song and a smile. . . . We love you boys,” Jones commenced in a reedy, upbeat voice as he and Schmidt, a white-bearded, bespectacled pair, sat side by side in an office at Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theater last week. Jones annotated his rendition with descriptions of the chorus girls who sang the lines, and evocations of the staging devised by Word Baker, who 10 years later would also direct “The Fantasticks.”

Singing and talking about their work will be the order of the evening starting this week as lyricist-librettist Jones and composer Schmidt offer “The Show Goes On,” a revue of their oeuvre at Moulton Theater. Jones plays the raconteur, Schmidt plays the piano, and a cast of three other singers joins them for a career-spanning tour through songs indelibly familiar and utterly unknown.

The show ends at the beginning, with “The Freshman,” the first song the two wrote together in November 1950 for another campus revue.

Jones, 72, is a slender man with a humorous but intellectual bearing and a voice that bears no hint of his small-town Texas upbringing. “One of the first things they do [in drama school] is take a stick and beat the accent out of you,” he said.

Schmidt, 70, is an earthier sort, a stocky man who has returned to his Texas roots (although he still spends lots of time in New York City, where Jones is based) and, as an art student rather than a theater major, retains a gentle, gravel-voiced twang.

If this is indeed the December of their creative years, frost shows no sign of setting in. Over the last four years the team has written two new musicals--”Mirette,” which had its West Coast premiere in May in a Fullerton Civic Light Opera production, and “Roadside,” a tale of wild Oklahoma frontier days that has shakedown productions scheduled in Texas in October and February, with hopes for an off-Broadway run next year.

And there is “The Show Goes On,” getting its first production since an off-Broadway premiere in December 1997.

The hits may have stopped for Jones and Schmidt after their hot streak in the 1960s, but their aim always was to keep at it as long as they were satisfied with their songwriting.

“The work goes on. They’re not hits, but they’re creative acts,” Jones said. “Some of the best work has been some of the later work.”

To get an overview of how they work, we asked Jones and Schmidt to comment on five songs in their retrospective show.

Our picks were “Try to Remember” from “The Fantasticks” (1960), “My Cup Runneth Over” from “I Do! I Do!” (1966) and “The Room Is Filled With You,” from “Colette Collage,” an obscure ‘80s-vintage show that had only two productions.

Jones and Schmidt each added a pick of their own--Jones choosing the pairing of “Melisande” and “Simple Little Things” from “110 in the Shade” (1963) and Schmidt offering “Under the Tree” from “Celebration” (1969).

“Try to Remember”: It was the summer of 1957 and Schmidt was sharing the rent with Jones and two others while working a New York day job as a graphic artist. There was no piano in their upper West Side apartment, so on his way home Schmidt would stop at a rehearsal studio and rent a room with a Steinway.

“I had almost dropped dead from the heat and humidity. I just sat there in a stupor, real depressed by this cacophonous jazzy thing I was composing. I thought, ‘I’m paying for this room, I’d better keep playing.’ Just for a change of pace I played this very simple melody. It just came out--the exact melody of “Try to Remember.” I never changed a note. I’ve always said I never wrote this thing--it was a gift.”

“For Harvey it came as a gift from heaven. For me it was a sweatshop kind of thing,” Jones said. It took him weeks to put words to a melody that had come to Schmidt in less than a minute. He did some of the writing on the Staten Island ferry. “I wanted to make it juicy lyrically,” Jones said, and he came up with a mellifluous flow of alliteration and internal rhyme. With its seasonal imagery, the song captures the show’s theme of innocence giving way to experience.

“Deep in December it’s nice to remember/Without a hurt, the heart is hollow” is the keynote line for Jones--capturing a philosophy of equanimity in the face of difficulties that informs much of the team’s work.

“To the exact degree you feel pleasure, to that exact same degree you will feel pain,” Jones said. “The point is whether you close down, as so many people do, and cut off the receptors, or whether you open yourself.”

One of the songs that nearly everybody knows, “Try to Remember” has been recorded hundreds of times, starting with Jerry Orbach’s rendition on the original cast album. Jones and Schmidt say Harry Belafonte’s 1960 recording, the first version released as a single, is their favorite; recent recordings by Placido Domingo and Kathie Lee Gifford are among the “nice surprises” Jones says they have reaped from their signature piece.

“My Cup Runneth Over”: Schmidt, who loves to travel, had rented a villa in Italy for a year; Jones, more of a homebody, joined him to work up songs for “I Do! I Do!,” a two-character show tracing a 50-year marriage. While brainstorming phrases and ideas about wedded bliss and strife, the newly married Jones jotted down the biblical phrase “my cup runneth over” and tagged on “. . . with love.” Jones headed back to the States, leaving that title phrase and a few other lines among a pile of lyrical fragments for Schmidt to develop into songs. A sweet melody flowed, culminating in a sustained concluding note on “with love.”

“There are notoriously few rhymes for ‘love’ that don’t stick out like a sore thumb,” Jones notes. “That’s probably the hardest song I ever worked on.”

During a preliminary run in Boston, the song, a duet, was dropped from the show because Mary Martin and Robert Preston were struggling to hold its “love” note long enough. Jones says that Martin suggested restoring it for the Broadway run: “She said, ‘That’s a sweet little song, why don’t we just do it and not hold the note that long.”’

Ed Ames’ recording of “My Cup Runneth Over” peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard singles chart in 1967--one of old Broadway’s last hurrahs on the hit parade.

“The Room Is Filled With You”: To write songs for a musical about the life of Colette, the French writer-entertainer-entrepreneur, Schmidt journeyed to her home village of Sauveur and rose at dawn to experience the early morning scenes of natural beauty she had detailed in her writings.

“I would just try to write music reflective of what I felt there,” said Jones, who never has learned to read or write musical notation. “I hum into a tape recorder. I actually prefer to work in my head because I’ll come up with something fresher. If I sit at the piano, I’ll always do the same chords. You tend to [repeat] your own tricks. But I’ll hear things in my head that I don’t know how to [play] ‘till I get to the piano and work them out. You hear things in expansive ways, like big symphony orchestras, things you don’t get in real life.”

The music is gorgeous and haunting, steeped in hushed then swelling melancholy; Jones says he cribbed the title phrase from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, an enlightened theft that guided him toward his detailed portrait of a soul in profound grief over a lover who has died or otherwise been taken away.

“Under the Tree”: Jones says “Celebration” grew from an ancient Sumerian myth that envisioned the old year giving way to the new after the two had battled over a maiden. The show traced an old man’s attempt to regain his youthful ardor. Its climax was a New Year’s Eve pageant of mythic scenes, culminating in this dramatization of Adam and Eve declaring their love as they prepare to get to know each other in the biblical sense.

Schmidt cites it as one of his favorites because “It has a largess to it. It’s very soaring, especially the midsection, “flesh of my flesh,” which is quoting right out of the Bible. “It’s hard to write really rich, soaring music. I think it’s beautiful music, if I do say so myself.”

“Melisande”/”Simple Little Things”: Jones says “Old Maid” is his favorite song from “110 in the Shade,” but it isn’t in the current show. So he chose this pairing as the first example of a device he and Jones have used since: connected songs that balance each other to round out a story. The show is the musical version of “The Rainmaker.” Starbuck, a con man and a dreamer, courts the down-to-earth farm woman Lizzy by spinning grandly romantic visions in “Melisande.” She answers with a ballad about her own dreams of love, in which “simple little things will do.”

The Spanish-flavored tune to “Melisande” had been sitting around for years; Schmidt composed it while stationed in El Paso during his post-collegiate hitch in the U.S. Army. Much of the rest of the music for “110 in the Shade” came from a trip he took to Salt Lake City to soak up the arid atmosphere for a musical set on the Great Plains during an epic drought.

“Every day I’d drive out to the salt flats, take off all my clothes and sing and dance,” he said. “Back then I was young and you were supposed to have a tan.”

Schmidt traces his habit of free-form dancing and singing during the act of composition to his college days, when he worked his way through school playing improvisational piano for a modern dance class whose enrollees included Jayne Mansfield, Rip Torn and Kathyrn Grant, future wife of Bing Crosby. “It was a great, freeing thing for me, just pouring out emotions nonstop,” he says.

“Now that I’m ancient and aged it’s not as evocative as it might once have been,” Schmidt said of his unorthodox, sometimes nude composing sessions. “People would be mortified to see me at work. I’d be mortified to have anybody see me at work. But it does help.”

Jones’ methods are less flamboyant. “I sit there at my desk with a thesaurus on one side and a rhyming dictionary on the other.”

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“The Show Goes On: A Portfolio of Theater Songs by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt” begins Wednesday at the Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theater, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Previews through Sunday’s matinee, opens Sunday evening. Tuesdays through Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 2 p.m. Through July 30. $30 to $35 for previews, $40-$45 for regular performances. (949) 497-2787.