Musicals West

Try to remember the names Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt. The team that created “The Fantasticks” will own some prime Orange County marquee space in the near future, with two different West Coast premiere productions on local stages.

First comes “Mirette,” a new musical opening Friday at Plummer Auditorium in a production by the Fullerton Civic Light Opera. It is based on “Mirette on the High Wire,” a Caldecott Award-winning children’s book about a 10-year-old girl and her troubled mentor, a former tightrope great who has lost his nerve and retreated to the oblivion of the 1890s Parisian rooming house run by Mirette’s mother.

Then, on July 5, the still very active septuagenarians will arrive not just as creators, but as performers, at the Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theatre for a 3 1/2-week run of “The Show Goes On.” The revue, first done off Broadway in 1997, covers some two dozen of their songs, including “Try to Remember” and “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” from “The Fantasticks” and “My Cup Runneth Over” from “I Do! I Do!” Composer Schmidt sings and plays the piano, lyricist-librettist Jones sings (or, he says, tries to) and serves as raconteur. Joining them are three singer-actors who take most of the lead vocals.

Speaking over the phone last Wednesday from his Manhattan home, Jones, 72, clearly had many current events to talk about. Still, it seemed appropriate to ask him to try to remember a day precisely 40 years in his past: May 3, 1960, opening night for “The Fantasticks.”

He didn’t have to try hard.

Jones said he spent part of that evening crouched in a coffin-like box from which he would make his onstage entrance as the Old Actor--a part he originated. After the show, which starred Jerry Orbach as El Gallo, the cast repaired to a party at the scenic designer’s home, where Jones consumed large quantities of Mexican food and more than a few drinks. In the early morning hours, somebody phoned in with the first two hot-off-the-presses reviews. They were mixed, at best, hardly the “money reviews” the creators were hoping for.

Jones and his girlfriend were riding home in a taxi when the combination of food, drink and “horrible, horrible anxiety, the feeling of just being crushed,” got to him. He stopped the cab in Central Park, got out, and vomited.

“I picked my spot very carefully,” Jones said.

The Show Went On and On

On the 40th anniversary night, Jones said he would be eating in with his wife and their sons, ages 12 and 15, before heading to the same 150-seat off-Broadway theater, the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, where he had crouched nervously in that coffin.

Talk about the show going on: “The Fantasticks” never stopped running at the Sullivan.

The anniversary performance, where Jones and Schmidt were to receive a special achievement award from ASCAP, would be the 16,562nd showing there, a world record for longest run by a play in a single theater. The Sullivan Street production alone has grossed $22 million on an initial $16,500 investment, according to the show’s producers. There have been more than 11,100 other productions elsewhere in the United States, and more than 700 in 67 foreign countries.

Jones thinks a large part of the charm is its minimalism: the moon is made of cardboard, a sprinkle of confetti stands for rain, and a stick serves as the fence crucial to the fable-like plot of two young lovers getting together and drifting apart. In asking audiences to invest their imaginations, he says, they invest loyally in the show: “They sense they’ve been a part of the creation.”

The other key virtue, he says, is that “The Fantasticks” operates on more than one level.

“It attempts to be a celebration of young love and romanticism while at the same time mocking it. Most productions tend to concentrate on the mockery, but it’s also meant to be a genuine, heartfelt appreciation of what it is to be young and insane.” Jones based his script on “Les Romanesques,” an 1894 play by Edmond Rostand, and borrowed the title from an early 20th century English adaptation.

When “Mirette” was first staged in 1996, Jones voted for a similar sort of symbolic minimalism: given his druthers, he said, there would be no real tightropes in the production, just emblematic platforms on which actors could dance freely and give the illusion of cavorting on high.

The musical so far has been produced in a developmental version at the Sundance Institute in Utah in 1996, the official premiere at the Goodspeed Opera House, a small theater in Connecticut (known as the birthplace of “Annie”) in 1998, and a run in Irving, Texas, last fall. The director and choreographer of the Fullerton production is Sha Newman, who directed at Sundance.

Like the other productions, this one uses real tightropes at practice levels--one and five feet--and a realistic stage illusion for the climactic high-wire act, Newman said.

“I know it was [Jones and Schmidt’s] original concept” to use a stylized device instead of stage realism for the tightropes, the director said in a separate interview from her home in Los Angeles. “I said, ‘Don’t underestimate what your actors as athletes are able to do. You have this lovely idea of a show, why not fulfill it and take the journey?”’

Newman said that Alyson Fainbarg, a young musical theater veteran from Orange County, learned to walk the tightrope in two days; James Mellon, who plays her mentor, the Great Bellini, took some rope-walking lessons to brush up on the role he created at Goodspeed. Bellini has a dark, mysterious edge, but Newman says Mellon is happy that friendlier, warmer shades of the character are being emphasized in this production.

Friendship drew Jones and Schmidt to “Mirette.” Playwright Elizabeth Diggs had adapted and expanded the original short picture book by Emily Arnold McCully. Diggs wanted Jones to recommend a composer and a lyricist (they are old friends; Diggs knew Jones’s choreographer wife, Janet Watson--they grew up together in Oklahoma). Jones and Schmidt liked the story and volunteered.

Jones said they were drawn to the idea of a young, protected girl finding a risky calling and having the gumption to follow it despite a loving mother’s resistance, and its theme of a worn-out, defeated adult being brought back to life by the talent and enthusiasm of a youngster.

That same thematic strand, in reverse, is at play in one of Jones’ current projects, writing the lyrics and libretto for a stage adaptation of “Harold & Maude.” The cult-film classic, which featured soundtrack songs by Cat Stevens, followed an elderly bon vivant played by Ruth Gordon teaching a suicide-obsessed 21-year-old about the joy of being alive. In a rare departure from his nearly 50-year collaboration with Schmidt, Jones is working with another composer, Billy Goldenberg.

But the Texas-raised Jones and Schmidt are by no means through. They met in 1950 as students at the University of Texas. The following year they wrote and staged their first musical, a topical, campus revue called “Time Staggers On” (after the newsreel series, “Time Marches On”).

Shortly after “The Fantasticks” took off, Jones says, Richard Rodgers asked him to write lyrics in place of Rodgers’ recently deceased partner, Oscar Hammerstein II.

“It was flattering, but terrifying too,” Jones said. “I said, ‘I have a partner.’ He said, ‘I know what that’s like. I’m not going to try to tempt you away.’ ”

The Jones-Schmidt team had Broadway hits with “110 in the Shade” (1963) and “I Do! I Do!” (1966). They have known their share of frustrations since.

“Colette Collage,” a more recent work based on the life of the French writer, has been produced only once, in Seattle, even though Jones places it among their finest work. “Grovers Corners,” a musical adaptation of “Our Town,” remains on the shelf, a planned Broadway run with Mary Martin having been abandoned when she became ill with cancer.

Film’s Future Up in the Air

A film version of “The Fantasticks” shot in 1995 with Joel Grey, Teller (of Penn & Teller fame) and former New Kid on the Block Joe McIntyre remains unreleased. The studio that produced it doesn’t think its box office potential merits the cost of advertising and distribution, and wants to put it out direct-to-video, Jones said. Its creators disagree and are negotiating for at least a limited art-house release. Jones said Francis Ford Coppola became interested and last year edited the film into a tighter, improved version.

“Part of it is terrific, part doesn’t work at all,” Jones said. “When it really works it’s like a mixture of Fellini and an old MGM musical.”

Jones said these frustrations don’t gall him. “I’m sort of a fatalist about it. I like to believe that these things, if they’re good, will find life. I just keep working, that’s all.”

Which means, of course, another musical with Schmidt, a work in progress called “Roadside” based on the same source material as “Oklahoma!” It focuses on the transformation of Western frontier into homesteads, telling the tale from the viewpoint of “misfits and ne’er-do-wells holding out to the end against the fences and civilization and what they call ‘being housebroke.’ ” Plans call for a trial run in Texas in the fall, followed by an off-Broadway opening.

Jones also hopes that “The Show Goes On” will gain momentum with the Laguna run and attain a wide-ranging theatrical life. But not necessarily with him and Schmidt on stage.

The revue grew out of a series of AIDS benefits the partners did in New York.

“It was something we could do and be reasonably assured audiences would enjoy themselves,” Jones said--as well as a chance to show off unknown gems such as “The Room Is Filled With You,” a heartbreakingly beautiful ballad from “Colette Collage.”

Part of their mission in Southern California, Jones said, will be to persuade producers and actors that “The Show Goes On” can work without their involvement as performers.

“We’ve tried to persuade our licensing agency to set up productions around the country. They said, ‘It needs you guys in it.’ I can’t afford to take the time to do it more than once a year,” Jones continued. “It’s tempting to go from place to place, talking about how wonderful your material is and signing autographs and pretending you’re some sort of big celebrity. But that’s a dangerous thing. I have a lot of things I want to write before I’m too old.”

* “Mirette,” with songs by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt and book by Elizabeth Diggs, at Plummer Auditorium, 201 E. Chapman Ave., Fullerton. Presented by the Fullerton Civic Light Opera. Opens Friday. Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m., and May 21, 7 p.m. Ends May 28. $15 to $36. (714) 879-1732 or (714) 526-3832.

* “The Show Goes On,” a revue of songs by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, at the Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theatre, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. July 5-July 30. Tickets: $30 to $45. Schedule: Tuesdays through Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. (949) 497-2787.