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[0:00] Paul Lazarus: Hi, this is Paul Lazarus. In the 1980s, I produced and hosted a radio series called Anything Goes, a celebration of the American musical theater. Now the Broadway Podcast Network is bringing back these shows. This is the first of a two-part program we call The Fantasticks Un-Original Cast Album. In 1984, Jeff Lunden and I gathered performers who had been in various productions of The Fantasticks over the years and produced these recordings. Creators Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt also took part.

[0:38] Paul Lazarus: In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was a look on something shocking, but now God knows, anything goes. Good offers...

[0:53] Paul Lazarus: Last Sunday, Jeff Lunden and I assembled a group of people together to record what we call The Fantasticks Un-Original Cast Album to help celebrate the 25th anniversary of The Fantasticks. There are many, many people to thank, and I want to do that before we play anything. First and foremost, I want to thank Jeff Lunden, my associate producer, who helped assemble and schedule everyone, and it was not a small task. Jeff Saver, who really played a big part in this project, who is the current musical director of The Fantasticks Off-Broadway, and who took part in the recording session as both the musical director and the piano player, and also Winifred Starks, who accompanied on harp and schlepped her harp all the way up to my house on the Upper West Side, and Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones, who helped us out not only as performers, but moral support, and the performers themselves.

I'm going to list them in alphabetical order and also tell you when they took part in the show. George Lee Andrews was El Gallo in 1979. Judith Blaser was Louisa in 1980. Ralph Bruno played Matt the Boy in 1974. Craig Carnia was another boy in 1969. Carolyn Minini played the girl Louisa in 1969. Marty Morris was Louisa in 1979. And finally, Christopher Seppi was a boy in 1979. And as we go through this Fantasticks Un-Original Cast Album, I will be telling you who is performing what, because there were quite a few variations. We had a couple of boys even play the fathers occasionally, and El Gallo, I think, took part as a father one time as well. So we're going now to begin the playing of the Fantasticks Un-Original Cast Album, which is an assemblage of various performers who've taken part in the show in the last 15 years. First, The Overture, featuring Jeff Saver and Winifred Starks at the harp.

[4:49] Paul Lazarus: Jeff Saver at the piano, Winifred Starks at the harp, performing The Overture to The Fantasticks, a score written by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones. And before we continue with the score, I wanted to play an excerpt of an interview with Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt explaining how The Fantasticks came to be written.

[5:15] Tom Jones: When we first came to New York and were writing these reviews, we were working on a book musical, which was like a spoof of Romeo and Juliet, or a spinoff of Romeo and Juliet. And the book musical that we were working on had as the device in this thing that the boy was Anglo and the girl was Spanish. And the girl's name was Maria, right? And we even had a song called Maria, which, as I said before, we subsequently abandoned. And at the time, the show was set in two ranches in the southwest, and it was a big show.

[5:57] Paul Lazarus: How did you discover that the Sondheim, Lawrence, Jerome Robbins piece was being done?

[6:04] Tom Jones: I don't recall now the sequence of that, exactly when it happened. Because I'm assuming that that's what terminated that. We worked on it as a big musical for several years. And then it wasn't until one day Ward Baker said, I'm directing three one-act plays up in Barnard, and I'd like to do a musical for one of them. If you can give me something in two weeks that I can direct for that, I'd love to do it. So we decided, we were getting nowhere with this thing. It was so huge and just collapsing. And it was heavy, too. It was pretty serious, a lot of serious elements, you know. We decided to throw all that out and just do it as light, in as simple a way as we could. And we did a total reversal on it, and wrote in those two weeks mostly the bulk of what is now in the first act of The Fantasticks.

And so we put it on, that's where Laurie Noto saw it, and commissioned us to turn it into two acts, which we fought then after having finally thrown out all this stuff and done it as one act. We thought, God, no, we don't want to do it as two acts. We wanted to do a review with the first act, and of course that probably wouldn't have run. I mean, not to the extent that it has today, or become the thing that it has. Laurie absolutely insisted that we do it as two acts, and we fought that for quite a long time.

[7:16] Paul Lazarus: When did Edmund Rostand's play, The Romantics, enter into the picture?

[7:19] Tom Jones: Well, it was always based upon the Rostand piece.

[7:22] Paul Lazarus: I see. So that really was in the background all the time.

[7:25] Tom Jones: All the time. At the University of Texas, a professor, a drama professor of mine, a wonderful man named B. Iden Payne, who had an extraordinary, distinguished career, had given Helen Hayes her first Broadway show in Dear Brutus, and had given John Barrymore his first serious role. But among his many things that he'd done, in London in 1904, he had done an English version of this Rostand, little Rostand comedy, under the title The Fantasticks, with Mrs. Patrick Campbell playing the boy, a Bridges part. So we used to do scenes from that in one of his period play production classes. Therefore I knew the play from that. And it was based on the Rostand piece. It's very loosely based upon it. I mean, there is no narrator in that, and there's no old actors, and the point of it is, in fact, quite different.

In fact, it's the opposite point, really. At the end of the Rostand play, she comes forward, Sylvette or whatever her name is, and says, you know, let's do away with, let's have a world of gossamer, and let's do away with realistic things, and have a world of dreams. And it was part of the romantic movement in France, really, as Cyrano was a later, more mature version of that.

[8:52] Tom Jones: Well, I just want to re-congratulate you on the event upcoming, and thank you for all your time.

[8:58] Paul Lazarus: Thank you. I'll just add one other last thing. One thing about, you know, Jerry, Arbach, and those people and so forth, they were wonderful. It's been terrific over all these years. We've worked almost exclusively with new people arriving in New York, and we've had a really a chance to work with some incredibly talented young people, which has been one of the major pleasures of The Fantasticks.

[9:20] Paul Lazarus: Tom Jones speaking in 1980. Back to the Un-Original Cast Album of The Fantasticks. First number is Try to Remember, and all of the songs will feature Jeff Saver at the piano, and Winifred Starks at the harp. Try to Remember, with George Lee Andrews as El Gallo, Marty Morris as Louisa, Craig Carnelia as Matt, the boy, and Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt as the fathers.

[9:59] ♪ Musical number: "Try to Remember" — performed by George Lee Andrews, Marty Morris, Craig Carnelia, Tom Jones, and Harvey Schmidt ♪

[10:38] ♪ Musical number: "Try to Remember" — performed by George Lee Andrews ♪

[12:41] Paul Lazarus: George Lee Andrews, leading the company in "Try to Remember." George Lee Andrews' recent Broadway credits include "Merlin," "On the 20th Century," and he is also well-known for his performance in "A Little Night Music." Beautiful voice for that song. Judith Blaser next sang "Much More" and also recorded the monologue that precedes that song in the show, once again with Jeff Saver and Winifred Starks as accompaniment.

[13:03] Paul Lazarus: This morning, a bird woke me up. It was a lark or a peacock or something like that. Some strange sort of bird that I'd never heard. And I said, hello! And it vanished. Flew away the very minute that I said hello. It was mysterious. So do you know what I did? I went over to my mirror and brushed my hair 200 times without stopping. And as I was brushing it, my hair turned mauve. No, honestly, mauve. And then red. And then sort of a deep blue when the sun hit it. I'm 16 years old, and every day something happens to me. I don't know what to make of it. When I get up in the morning to get dressed, I can tell something's different. I like to touch my eyelids because they're never quite the same. Oh, oh, oh, I hug myself till my arms...

[14:08] ♪ Musical number: "Metaphor" — performed by Judith Glaser and Ralph Bruno ♪

[21:01] Paul Lazarus: You're listening to The Fantasticks Un-Original Cast Album. I'm your host, Paul Lazarus. Ralph Bruno most recently played the title role in Doonesbury, and is currently appearing in a show called Brownstone at the Hudson Guildhouse.

[21:16] Paul Lazarus: You are listening to a recording made exclusively for this program entitled The Un-Original Cast Album of The Fantasticks, a recording of various cast members who've played the show between 1969 and the present, all by way of celebrating the 25th anniversary of Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt's wonderful show, The Fantasticks. Here are the authors themselves singing the roles of the fathers in a song called Never Say No.

[22:12] ♪ Musical number: "Never Say No" — performed by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt ♪

[24:08] Paul Lazarus: Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt themselves performing their own song, written for The Fantasticks, Never Say No. A standard that emerged from the score was a song called Soon It's Gonna Rain, and here it's performed by Christopher Seppi and Marty Morris, who took part in the 20th anniversary production of The Fantasticks together, also along with Marty's husband, George Lee Andrews. Christopher Seppi, you may remember, also from Charlotte Suite.

[24:38] ♪ Musical number: "Soon It's Gonna Rain" — performed by Christopher Seppi and Marty Morris ♪

[26:27] ♪ Musical number: "Soon It's Gonna Rain" — performed by Christopher Seppi and Marty Morris ♪

[30:40] Tom Jones: And prior to that, I'm sorry, I neglected to mention, that was Tom Jones, the words writer himself, introducing "Soon It's Gonna Rain" with the speech, "You Wonder How These Things Begin."

[30:59] Paul Lazarus: You've been listening to part one of a program we call the Fantasticks Un-Original Cast Album. Associate Producer Jeff Lunden. Anything Goes Backstage with Broadway's Best is produced and hosted by Paul Lazarus. For more information, visit anythinggospl.com. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and follow us. Thanks for listening.