Me and Tom Jones
Happy Birthday to Tony-nominated writer Tom Jones, born Feb. 17, 1928, in Littlefield, Texas. Jones attended UT Austin, where he met collaborator Harvey Schmidt in the Curtain Club revue Hipsy-Boo, directed by Word Baker. The club produced the first Jones and Schmidt musical, Time Staggers On, which was so well received that the men continued writing, even via mail while in the Army. After their discharges, they both settled in New York, and their songs began showing up in Off-Broadway revues like Ben Bagley’s Shoestring ’57 (1956), Kaleidoscope (1957), and Julius Monk’s Demi-Dozen (1958). You can listen to some of these original recordings on Hidden Treasures, 1951-2001, streaming for free at the Internet Archive.
The team’s break came in 1959, when UT alum Baker asked them to write a one-act for him to direct at Barnard’s summer theater. Jones decided to rework his college show Joy Comes to Deadhorse. Producer Lore Noto saw the production, retitled The Fantasticks, and asked the team to make it a full-length. They did, and it opened May 3, 1960, with Baker as director and Jones in the role of Old Actor. Below is original cast member Jerry Orbach singing “Try to Remember” in the 1985 PBS special The Best of Broadway.
https://youtu.be/GEW1F9kZ-UE
The production proved so popular that it ran from 1960 until 2002, totaling 17,162 performances, the longest run in musical theater history. It won a 1961 Drama Desk Award, 1975 special Obie Award, and 1992 special Tony Award. The show premiered on the West End in 1961, on TV in 1964 (which you can watch below), and on screen in 2000. The Off-Broadway revival opened in 2006 and ran for 4,390 performances, closing in 2017. During 2010, Jones reprised his role of Old Actor in the revival.
The team’s next projects included a musical adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Anatol (1960) and the original TV revue New York Scrapbook (1961). Then producer David Merrick asked them to work with Richard Nash on adapting his play The Rainmaker. Their musical, 110 in the Shade, opened Oct. 24, 1963, on Broadway, earning four Tony nominations, including score. It debuted on the West End in 1964 and was revived on Broadway in 2007, receiving five Tony nods. Below is 1964 nominee Inga Swenson singing “Simple Little Things” and 2007 nominee Audra McDonald singing “Raunchy.”
The team turned to revising Anatol, retitling it The Game of Love (1965), before director Gower Champion asked them to adapt Jan de Hartog’s The Fourposter for Broadway stars Mary Martin and Robert Preston. The show, I Do! I Do!, opened Dec. 5, 1966, and earned seven Tony nominations, including musical and score. Ed Ames’ recording of “My Cup Runneth Over” was a Top Ten hit and earned Jones and Schmidt a Grammy nomination for Best Song of the Year. Below are Martin and Preston, performing “Nobody’s Perfect” at the 1967 Tony Awards, and Ed Ames singing “My Cup Runneth Over.”
https://youtu.be/Eq0ooP57Muk
With the profits from The Fantasticks and I Do! I Do!, Jones and Schmidt turned an old wedding chapel into a 99-seat theater, which they dubbed Portfolio Studio. Their first production was Celebration (1969), which had a short Broadway run. They followed that with Portfolio Revue (1974), Philemon (1975), and The Bone Room (1975). They won a special Outer Critics Circle Award in 1975 but closed the studio soon after. Philemon was revived in 1991 by York Theater and in 1999 by Music in a Box (which I produced). Below is the 1976 PBS broadcast of Philemon.
The 1980s were a decade of development dysphoria for Jones, with Colette Collage (1983) and Grover’s Corners (1987) experiencing numerous delays. The 1990s were more productive, with the musical Mirette (1996), the revue The Show Goes On (1997), and the book Making Musicals (1998). Jones rounded out the decade with induction into the American Theatre Hall of Fame and a star on the Off-Broadway Walk of Fame, then began the new millennium with the Off-Broadway musical Roadside (2001).
In the past decade, Jones has continued on without Schmidt, who retired just a few years before his death in 2018. Jones paired with composer Joseph Thalken on Harold and Maude (2015) and with composer Andrew Gerle on La Tempesta (2019). Below are the promo reels for the Paper Mill production of the first (with Eric Millegan and Estelle Parsons) and the Japanese premiere of the second.
For a good overview of Jones’ collaboration with Harvey Schmidt, watch the Dramatists Guild’s Legacy Project interview with Jones and Schmidt conducted by fellow Texan musical writer Carol Hall.