Vital Viewing (Mister Fantastick Edition)

 

What book? What lyrics?

Let's go find Mr. Jones and ask him.

No, not him.

Not him, either.

There's the Tom Jones we want! Lyricist Jones and composer Harvey Schmidt (1929-2018) cooked up twelve stage musicals together, the most well-known of which is...

...this one. Since it opened off-Broadway in 1962 and ran all the way to 2002, a total of 17,162 performances (earning the original investors a 24,000% return), it's no wonder it's the most well-known thing the two ever did. Now, as he passed away just yesterday at the age of 95, I can't really ask Mr. Jones about his book and lyrics. However, what I can do is dig up the following video from when he was still among the living and discussing his most famous work:

If you haven't seen The Fantasticks, let me sum up at least the first act. Two middle-aged fathers, one of a son and the other a daughter, decide amongst themselves that their two kids would make the perfect married couple. The problem is convincing their kids of that. Figuring that reverse psychology would work the best, they pretend to feud, thus turning the son and daughter onto the idea of forbidden love, a la Romeo and Juliet (or maybe Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.) Now that the kids are smitten, the two dads need to end the feud but not the romance. To this end they hire El Gallo, a wise, kindhearted crook with occasional godlike powers, to abduct the daughter (a scheme merrily carried out in the unfortunately titled "Rape Ballet"--try not to judge the semantics of the past too harshly, dear reader, they know not what they say.) Like a boxer in an old black-and-white movie, El Gallo takes a dive when the boy comes to rescue the girl. How can any two young lovers not stay true young lovers after all that?

Jerry Orbach, best-known for his twelve-season portrayal of wisecracking police detective Lennie Briscoe on TV's Law and Order. However, that's not his original claim to fame. Orbach was the first actor (and singer) to play El Gallo in that long-running off-Broadway production. Now, in addition to staging abductions, Gallo also serves as the musical's narrator, giving Orbach the chance to vocalize the show's most well-known number:

I personally associate the month of September not with anything to do with romance but the beginning of the school year. Hearing that song makes me want to bug my mother into buying me a new lunch box, preferably one with Snoopy, but I digress. As Jones said in that interview, The Fantasticks is both a send-up of love stories and at the same time an honest-to-goodness love story. If you pay attention to the following number closely, you can somewhat detect the send-up, but the honest-to-goodness love story is what, for the time being, wins out. Playing the young lovebirds are Matt Leisy and Juliette Trafton, both of whom appeared in a 2010 off-Broadway revival:

As you just witnessed, not only was the above off-Broadway but outside-the-theatre as well. It's actually Bryant Park in Manhattan, something for the lunch crowd before heading back to work.

Now, that happy ending Julliette Trafton refers to is not the musical as a whole, but just the first act. Things sour before--I hope I'm not giving too much away--things get better again. My final video comes before the final happy ending, and I want you to see it because, frankly, it's a hoot. What follows is a 2010 high school production featuring Sara Niemetz (who's gone onto a professional career in the theatre), and this time as El Gallo, Jacob Thomson (who doesn't appear to have turned professional, but he's pretty good anyway.) Watch:

As another Tom Jones once observed, it's not unusual to have fun with anyone.

Quips and Quotations (Know the Brill Edition)

 

I wanted to write for Broadway.

--Lyricist Cynthia Weil, who with husband Barry Mann wrote over 80 songs that charted on the Billboard Top 100, and 25 or so that reached the Top 40, including this one that reached No. 1 in 1965:

As for wanting to write for the Great White Way, Weil at least got to write ABOUT the Great White Way, this song reaching No. 9 in 1963:

1940-2023

Overages

 

Hal David, Dionne Warwick, and Burt Bacharach. By 1962 lyricist David and melodist Bacharach, both working together and separately, had enjoyed some success as songwriters. However, the success wasn't so immense that they could just sit back and let the record companies and recording artists come knocking on their door. They still had to take their wares and hawk their wares to labels big and small, and that was best done with demos. Hire a competent sessions vocalist to give voice to a song the two had composed, and if the record exec liked what they'd heard, they'd assign the song to a different vocalist, one who was already a star, or on the fast track to becoming a star. The sessions vocalist Bacharach and David hired was a young woman by the name of Dionne Warwick. Stories vary, but Warwick seems not to have realized at first that the two men wanted her only as a demo singer, to be merely a tool to make someone else a star, rather than turning her into a star herself. Once she wised up to their nefarious plan, she was said to have shouted out in anger, don't make me over! Rather than take offense at this act of insubordination and fire her on the spot, Bacharach and David looked at each other and said something along the lines of, hey, that might not be a bad idea for a song title. The demo for "Don't Make Me Over" with Warwick's vocals was sent to a label. The record exec heard it and didn't assign the song to a different vocalist who was already a star or who was on the fast track to becoming a star, but to Dionne Warwick herself, who quickly became a star herself. Many, many more Warwick/Bacharach/David collaborations followed. In the little booklet that came with my The Very Best of Dionne Warwick CD, I count fourteen and I'm sure there were more. Eventually, Bacharach and David themselves became songwriting stars, and recording artists as disparate as B.J. Thomas and Jackie DeShannon and Herb Albert and Tom Jones and The Carpenters came knocking, even banging, on their door. Dionne Warwick lives on, but Hal David died in 2012 at age 91, and Burt Bacharach (who also cowrote several hits with third wife Carole Bayer Sager) passed away just the other night at 94. R.I.P Burt.

Noncentral Heating

Hitching for a ride it looks like, but who are they? Well, I'm sure most of you recognize Mary Poppins and Bert the Chimney Sweep, aka, Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, but who are the two dudes flanking them? On the left is composer Richard M. Sherman (who turns 92 today) and on the right his brother, also a composer, Robert B. Sherman (who died in 2012.)  The Sherman Brothers composed many movie scores and wrote many movie songs throughout their decades-long careers, but are best known for their association with Walt Disney (not the corporate monolith we know today, but, at the time, the actual, living, breathing Walt Disney), in particular the classic Mary Poppins,  including this Academy Award-winning paean to carbon residue:

Sure, he's happy now, but wait till his doctor shows him the chest X-ray.