Entertainment

Last Bow For 'Fantasticks'

January 13, 2002 / 2:29 PM EST / CBS

"The Fantasticks," which on Sunday ended a nearly 42-year run at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in New York's Greenwich Village, became the longest-running musical in the world by surviving some close brushes with death.

The first came almost as soon as the show opened on May 3, 1960, when producer Lore Noto was advised by his ad agency to shut because the newspaper reviews were tepid.

He ignored the advice, and the show went on.

Then, in 1986, with attendance down and the second-floor bathroom about to crash through the ceiling into the 153-seat Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, Noto announced the play's closing.

A co-producer, Donald V. Thompson, came along with some money to shore up the ceiling and drum up attendance, and the show went on.

Last year, when the 41st anniversary of "The Fantasticks" passed without the usual spike in ticket sales, Noto - who is 78 and in poor health - began to think of closing. By the first week of September, he had decided that there was no way that the show could go on forever.

Sunday night was the last of 17,162 performances.

"It's been 42 years of hard labor," said Noto, who says he has "four major medical problems, any one of which has the potential to be fatal."

Only the Agatha Christie play, "The Mousetrap," now in its 50th year in London, has been around longer.

"The Mousetrap" has moved theaters since its opening, leaving "The Fantasticks" as the holder of the record for the longest-running live theater performance at a single location.

A new owner on Sullivan Street seeking a better return on high-priced Manhattan real estate and dwindling revenues also helped paved the way for Sunday's closing.

"All hope and promise of continuing the run evaporated and we were being strangled with red ink," Noto said.

The sweet, simple, two-act musical has spawned more than 11,000 productions in some 2,000 U.S. cities and towns and has been staged in 67 nations from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, according to the play's official Internet Web site, www.thefantasticks.com.

The show's theme is the timeless story of a young boy and girl thrown together by scheming fathers, then torn apart by a yearning for an adventurous wider world only to find that life was better at home with the love next door.

It was adapted from Edmond Rostand's "Les Romanesques" by composer Harvey Schmidt and lyricist Tom Jones. A better-known Rostand work is "Cyrano de Bergerac."

A version of "The Fantasticks" was first performed as a summer production at Barnard College north of New York City. Noto saw it and convinced Schmidt and Jones to expand the work to 14 songs and bring it to The Sullivan Street Playhouse.

That was in 1960, a year before the first manned space flight. Dwight Eisenhower was president, the first of nine U.S. presidents to be outlasted by "The Fantasticks."

The Sullivan Street Theater is about three miles south of the center of Broadway where the big-time Broadway shos like "The Producers" and "42nd Street" run, and where the long-running show "Cats" lived to 18. Even community theaters across America where the show has played are larger.

Still, from this small space in the middle of a low-rise block, "The Fantasticks" has helped nurture the careers of future stars. Jerry Orbach, F. Murray Abraham, Liza Minnelli, and Glenn Close are just a few of the many who have performed in various productions of "The Fantasticks" over the years, reports CBS News Sunday Morning Anchor Charles Osgood.

For Abraham, it was his first professional part in New York. It was 1966 and he was up from his homestate of Texas.

Abraham played Hucklebee, the boy's father, and then took over as The Old Actor, and filled in the other male roles as vacations came around for the seven-man, one-woman cast. The show has only two musicians, playing piano and harp.

"It was the best thing that ever happened to me because I was home. I started to feel like I belonged," said Abraham, who still lives in New York, within a mile of the playhouse.

"The material is so great and so eternal," said Elliot Gould, who played the narrator and swashbuckling lead El Gallo in a 1966 road show opposite Minnelli.

"These songs have resonance in terms of American musical theater. 'The Fantasticks' deserves an eternal place," said Gould, now 63 and currently on movie screens as a casino owner in "Oceans 11."

The character El Gallo opens each performance with "Try to Remember," a song that became popular in the 1960s and has taken on added significance since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center just a mile or so south of the show's home.

The show has been performed eight times a week with only Mondays dark for almost 42 years. That's taken its toll on Noto, who also played Hucklebee for what the "Guinness Book of World Records" called a record of 6,348 performances (from 1970 to 1986).

Noto said he and his son Tony are tired of running the show that hasn't been making money for years and feel too much pressure from outsiders who want it to continue just for the sake of longevity.

"My job as producer was to try to keep the show running," said Noto. He did - using word-of-mouth, aggressively getting items placed with newspaper columnists and even corralling people off the streets near the theater to see the musical.

At the end of the rapturously received evening performance, Noto appeared on stage and slowly lowered the show's fabled white curtain which has the words "The Fantasticks" printed in purple letters across its width.

"Sort of like the New Year's Eve ball coming down in Times Square," Noto said with a laugh. "We're setting the bar at 17,162. And God bless and good luck to anybody who wants to beat it."