The Fantasticks, the world’s longest-running musical, will return after a brief hiatus to Broadway’s Snapple Theater Center.  The romantic, funny “boy meets girl” tale, with book and lyrics by Tom Jones and music by Harvey Schmidt, features Dennis Parlato as the narrator, El Gallo, and Nick Spangler and Erica Piccininni as the two young lovers.  Rounding out the cast are Tom Flagg, Gene Jones, Jordan Nichols, Steve Routman, John Shuman and John Thomas Waite.  The production is directed by Tom Jones.

The Fantasticks is a captivating and simple love story about a boy, a girl, two fathers and a wall.  The audience uses its imagination to follow El Gallo as he creates a world of moonlight and magic, and then pain and disillusionment, until the boy and girl find their way back to one other.  The score, which includes “Try To Remember,” “They Were You” and “Soon It’s Gonna Rain,” is as timeless as the story itself.

Having played a record-breaking 17,162 performances in its original run at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, and an additional 655 performances in its initial run at the Snapple Theater Center, The Fantasticks has been performed in every corner of the world, from Afghanistan to Iran to Zimbabwe.  It is the only Off-Broadway show to have won a Tony Award (for Excellence in the Theater), and it has become a true New York institution.  In fact, Mayor Michael Bloomberg attended the New Year’s Eve performance before ringing in 2008 in Times Square.

The original 1960 company starred the late Jerry Orbach as El Gallo.  Last June, the theater that is home to this revival of The Fantasticks was christened The Jerry Orbach Theater.  Other notable performers who have appeared in the show include F. Murray Abraham, Glenn Close, Liza Minnelli, Elliot Gould and, most recently, American Idol finalist Anthony Federov.

Tom Jones (Book, Lyrics, Director) and Harvey Schmidt (Music), wrote The Fantasticks for a summer theater production at Barnard College.  After its Off-Broadway opening in May 1960, it went on to become the longest-running production in this history of the American stage and one of the most frequently produced musicals in the world.  Their first Broadway show, 110 In The Shade, was nominated for a Tony Award and was successfully revived by the New York City Opera and later produced on Broadway by the Roundabout Theatre Company starring Audra MacDonald and John Cullum.  I Do! I Do!, their two-character musical starring Mary Martin and Robert Preston, was a success on Broadway and on tour and is frequently done around the country and the world.  (One production, in Minneapolis, played for 22 continuous years with the same two actors in leading roles.)

For several years Jones and Schmidt worked privately in Portfolio, their theater workshop, concentrating on small-scale musicals in new and often untried forms.  The most notable of these efforts were Celebration, which moved to Broadway, and Philemon, which won an Outer Critics Circle Award.  They contributed incidental music and lyrics to the Off-Broadway play Colette starring Zoe Caldwell, and later did a full scale musical version under the title Colette Collage.  The Show Goes On, a musical revue featuring their theater songs and starring Jones and Schmidt, was presented at the York Theatre to great acclaim and Mirette, their musical based on the award-winning children’s book, was presented at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut.

In addition to an Obie Award and a special Tony Award for The Fantasticks, Jones and Schmidt were inducted into the Broadway Hall Of Fame at the Gershwin Theater, and their “stars” were added to the Off-Broadway Walk Of Fame outside the Lucille Lortel Theater.