'Fantasticks' final curtain call

By Michael Kuchwara
Associated Press

NEW YORK — It is less than an hour before curtain at the Saturday matinee, and someone has accidentally spilled water on the piano keys.

James Cook, left, production stage manager, and actors Natasha Harper and Jeremy Ellison-Gladstone will close the show Jan. 14. Associated Press

The countdown has started toward its final curtain Jan. 13, and there are no more tickets to be had for the remainder of the off-Broadway run, an engagement that began May 3, 1960, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president and George W. Bush was two months shy of his 14th birthday.

Performance No. 17,162 will be the end for this sweet-tempered tale of first love, tested over time, of innocence lost and wisdom gained. It's an affecting story of a young girl and young boy, secretly brought together by their fathers and an assortment of odd characters who include a rakish narrator, an old actor, an Indian named Mortimer and a Mute.

Simple theater

Played by eight actors and with a minimum of props and scenery, "The Fantasticks" — book and lyrics by Tom Jones and music by Harvey Schmidt — has always reveled in the theatricality of its own simplicity. Yet even simple can be hard work.

The wiry Cook is unflappable as he negotiates the rabbit warren they call backstage in the dilapidated theater, greeting the cast and dealing with the many details that are a big part of his job.

Crises are to be expected. Wet piano keys? No problem. Cook remembers an even messier orange-juice incident. It was back in the days when the actor playing El Gallo, the narrator, juggled real oranges in the show. At the end of the musical's best-known song, "Try to Remember," the performer dropped one and it rolled upstage, only to be squished underneath the show's harp.

A spray of orange juice flew about 15 feet into the audience and turned the stage into a sticky mess. "The place smelled like a farmer's market for the rest of the night," Cook recalls. Now "The Fantasticks" uses plastic oranges — one of its few concessions to change in its more than 40 years of performances.

By now, the musical, loosely based on Rostand's "Les Romanesques," is beyond the stuff of theater legend even though it opened to middling reviews. Tenacious producer Lore Noto refused to give up, badgering celebrities to see it and getting items about the show placed in newspaper columns. Word of mouth kicked in, and the show galloped off on a record-breaking run.

Running its course

In recent years, though, "The Fantasticks" has been losing money. "Swimming in red ink," says Noto. "I have always been concerned about when will it close. What are the signs? When do I wake up and realize that you can't go on forever with half-filled houses? After 40 years of a roller coaster, you get tired.

"It's a life sentence — and I have been doing time," says the 78-year-old Noto with a laugh.

If anyone besides Noto has made a long-term commitment to "The Fantasticks," it is the 64-year-old Cook. He has watched over the musical since 1982, but has been associated with it for much longer. As a young actor out of the American Academy of Dramatic Art, he got a chance to audition as a vacation replacement for the role of the Mute in 1961 and eventually was offered the part permanently.

In the 1960s, Cook was in and out of the show many times. In 1973, he came back to "The Fantasticks" to portray Mortimer the Indian, but other jobs, such as playing Nana, the canine housekeeper in the Sandy Duncan revival of "Peter Pan," took him to Broadway and beyond. Finally, he returned to Sullivan Street for good in the early 1980s.

"'The Fantasticks' pretty much has been my life," Cook says. That life includes making sure that everything is running smoothly, watching performances and giving notes to the actors.

New actors get a week's rehearsal. "It's a one-on-one situation," Cook says. "Toward the end of the week, if, for example I am casting a new girl, I will bring in the actor playing the boy for a couple of hours. And on the following Tuesday, which would be their first night in the show, we have a run-through in the afternoon with all the actors."

Many appeared in play

Scores of performers have appeared in the New York production. Among the musical's better-known alums are its original El Gallo, Jerry Orbach, and such soap-opera stars as Eileen Fulton and David Canary. F. Murray Abraham, long before his Academy Award for "Amadeus," played the Old Actor for a while in the '60s.

They didn't do it for the glamour. There's no such thing as a private dressing room at the Sullivan Street Playhouse. Natasha Harper, who currently plays the young girl, shares a cubicle with two actors, although she can swirl a curtain around her makeup table to get some privacy when she needs to change.

On this Saturday, Harper is sharing the dressing area with John Thomas Waite, who is back in the show for a week to play the Old Actor. Waite's ties to "The Fantasticks" go back to 1976 when he joined to play the Mute, and later did a stint as Mortimer and worked as house manager and in the box office.

"I am getting to finish off a bit of history," he says while putting on makeup. "'The Fantasticks' has been 26 years of my life. This has been a home away from home. Whenever I finished another job, I could always come back here and someone would be about to go on vacation or be sick and I could fill in."

That's what Joel Bernstein is doing for two performances this Saturday, playing Mortimer. Bernstein did the show for six years, so he knew the role and came in when Cook needed a quick replacement.

Regrets over the closing?

"I don't think there is any good time to close a show, but if you are going to close, you might as well go out with a bang — which is what we are doing," Cook says. "On Jan. 14, I will probably call the unemployment office. But I fully intend to keep working if I can, maybe doing commercials and directing — but I only direct 'The Fantasticks.' I haven't been out of work since 1960, thanks, for the most part, to this wonderful show."