Remembering The Fantasticks

My brother Jeff was a music guy. He was a philosopher of language by training, and a very good one, but music was his first and greatest love. Growing up, our house was not filled with records, because records were very expensive; every new acquisition was a carefully calculated purchase. But, subject to that constraint, we had a lot of records and it was an eclectic mix. Jeff listened to anything and everything, and I, younger and with no real sense of what these records were or what they were doing there, had a lot of music to explore. One of these records, which I listened to over and over, was the original cast recording of The Fantasticks.

It is largely forgotten now outside of musical circles, and the musical as an art form is more broadly being lost, but in the 60s The Fantasticks was huge. It appeared as an off-Broadway musical in 1960 and then ran for many decades. The story is a very quirky romance, playing off of Romeo and Juliet, and has great music by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones. Its most famous song, the gorgeous Try to Remember, was performed beautifully by Jerry Orbach, who had the starring role of El Gallo in the original production. The song was made huge by Ed Ames among many others; Sandy Duncan’s version with the Muppets is charming. Probably there is no more beautiful version than by The Brothers Four, even fifty years later:

Growing up, I knew nothing about The Fantasticks beyond the album. In the 90s, Rice University performed the musical, the only time I’ve seen it, and I was very puzzled when one of my students proudly announced that she was going to be playing the Wall separating the two families; I had not previously realised that the Wall was a character. (My student turned out to be an excellent Wall.) But the story is told clearly enough in the songs and in the lead-in banter to them.

The Fantasticks brings back for me fond, and now sad, memories. One year, by request, my birthday present for Jeff was the sheet music to Try to Remember. It was always a difficult and poignant song, as it is intended to be, and it is now very difficult. There is one other, oddball line, however, that has motivated me to write on the musical.*

Early in the musical, Luisa, the Juliet character, is fantasising about all that she is and wishes to be. This is delivered perfectly by Susan Watson,** in the clunky and short, but charming 1964 TV version:

Please, God, please! Don’t let me be normal!

This line more than any other resonated with me as an adolescent and stays with me, and it captures as well as any the soul of The Fantasticks. As Tom Jones, the lyricist and librettist, put it,

The point of [The Fantasticks] is that one must give up one’s youthful illusions and romanticism and move into the season of maturity and reality.

This wisdom, and the inevitably awkward and painful manner by which it is achieved, is captured perfectly by Try to Remember.

Of course as youth we are meant to have illusions, we are meant to be romantic. We are supposed to worry that we’re not normal and simultaneously wish to be anything but normal. We are supposed to be dreamers, and the struggle of the years of growing up is balancing those dreams with reality. This is more or less true of all teenagers, particularly girls, who are the objects of so much attention and scrutiny, and thus self-scrutiny. Then, eventually, slowly maybe, the balance changes. We come to recognise that normal is all that we can reasonably hope to be, and that it is a very good bargain.

Perhaps it is playing too much on too little, but this one line from The Fantasticks seems to me to capture much of the pathology of our modern age. It now seems that many young people are striving, are desperate, to be other than normal. Yes, it was ever thus, but now there is less counterbalancing desire to be normal. What is new is that there are strong forces encouraging this romanticism, beyond any possible compatibility with reality. Authority figures, including parents, are too often encouraging and themselves indulging in such fantasies: you can be anything, and you are what you believe yourself to be. The traditional forces, which once helped guide youthful romanticism into maturity and reality, are now confused and weak.

This seems to me to be a very difficult era in which to grow up.

*) Fishing around for this post has raised another good reason to write on the musical, which I’ll do in a second post, soon. 

**) Susan Watson played Luisa in the original, one-act version of The Fantasticks. By the time the musical reached off-Broadway, Watson was busy, becoming a Broadway star.