Show Business: The Eternal Return

If the Manhattan theatergoers who are flinging themselves with glad abandon upon the recent hit revivals of My Fair Lady and Threepenny Opera think they are seeing the rebirth of the nation’s longest-running musicals, they are wrong. The record is held by an unprepossessing little Off-Broadway show called The Fantasticks, and it does not need to be reborn for the simple reason that it never died.

Last week The Fantasticks, a winsome fantasy by Tom Jones with music by Harvey Schmidt, celebrated its 16th birthday with the usual flurry of statistics: 6,668 performances have grossed $4.2 million, with a return of $1.5 million on a $16,500 investment. Meanwhile the 140 actors who have performed in the musical’s eight roles have worn out some 420 costumes and 350 pairs of shoes. The Sullivan Street Playhouse, the show’s home for all these years, has gone through two sets of seats and had to have the stage floor replaced three times.

Who could have recognized, back in May of 1960, such a hardy long-distance runner? Certainly not the critics. Walter Kerr, writing in the now defunct New York Herald Tribune, thought the show “a little less than satisfactory,” and the Times’s Brooks Atkinson found it “the sort of thing that loses magic the longer it endures.”