One Passage from The Fantasticks

[rhetoretician]

Last night I took Hannah to see The Fantasticks at Trinity Rep in Providence, and I realized with a start how much this play, which I've known for 32 years, has influenced me and especially my writing.

I first saw The Fantasticks in high school, and was floored by the way it both embraced and rejected sentimentality, and especially by its reminder

Comments

[stmargarets]

It's amazing really when you start to see a pattern in your own work and then start to realize where it all came from. It makes me glad in a way that no one in my real life reads my writing!

An evening at the theater is always fun. I'm glad Hannah liked it, too.

[rhetoretician]

Actually I really like it when people from my real life read my writing. I'm so proud of doing something creative...

[girlspell]

We had The Fantasticks in high school also. I never saw a professional version of it. I didn't know that Jerry Orbach was in it. No ownder it inspired you. It's supposed to be the longest running musical in the world. There was always a version of it playing somewhere near me, but I just never went. How long did it run on broadway?

[rhetoretician]

Forty-two years. It opened in 1960 (not long after I was born) and closed in 2002 -- it was an indirect casualty of 9/11 (the theater was pretty close to Ground Zero).

Jerry Orbach was in the original production, and for several years I never knew anything else he'd done. Then I started seeing his name in scripts and albums and realized what a cornerstone of the American theater he'd become: Scuba Duba; Promises,Promises; Chicago; etc., etc.

[girlspell]

I hope that Jerry Orbach was appreciated by his peers. He was an "invisible" actor, you always saw the part he was playing, never the actor behind it. Long after you saw him in something, you remembered the character first, then you would think...yeah he was the guy playing...