Among many, many other things that can be said about the Boomer generation is this: we lived constantly on one cusp or another — at the winding-down of one era, at the start of another, even as the lifespans of each succeeding era narrowed, and narrowed, and narrowed… While it’s true that we’re now woefully out of step with popular culture, basically all that’s happened is: we got tired of keeping up.
Anyhow, each of us seems able to recall at least one cultural pivot moment, some time when a fragment of the former world managed to touch us deeply just before that thing, whatever it was, went fully out of style. For me, one such moment was my first listen to the soundtrack of The Fantasticks.
Musical theater and films had never (as the expression goes) done it for me. They were all so cooooorny, y’know, their “plots” and “sentiments” almost ridiculously easy to lampoon: people meeting and falling in love, falling out of love, falling back in love again; the collision of worldly upper-crust characters with innocent young ingenues and songboys; aspiring singers and dancers getting their Big Chances in ridiculously overproduced numbers (any excuse, really, for the frequent, manifestly implausible burstings-into-song which the genre required); all the absurd reworkings of old classic non-musical genres (Westerns, especially) into misshapen pastiches of easy plot devices stitched together with music…
One of my sisters had latched onto musicals early on, and frequently played their Broadway original-cast soundtrack albums (around the house, where I could not escape the experience) — especially of My Fair Lady. (Ye gods, how many times must I have heard Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews warbling about Spainish weather?!?)
But here’s the thing: I could easily scorn all those tropes… because, well, I had almost no idea what was actually going on, onstage or -screen. I couldn’t hear a lot of what was being said, let alone sung, especially in musical numbers which often delivered their goods in rapid-fire fashion. (Missed that last line? Whoops, sorry, too late — here’s the next one!) Furthermore, I had close to zero life experience (especially with anything like romance, or, all right, with emotion in general). And finally, the culture itself was edging into cynicism and “cool.”
So then I got all the way to college, where an admired professor adroitly mocked my mockery, punctured my balloon: she simply observed the obvious. Which was: if I’d never really paid attention to the form at more than an eye-rolling dismissive level, then sorry, I had no idea what I was talking about. If I wanted to badmouth musicals, then fine, badmouth away… as long as I borrowed, listened to, and (very important!) returned to her this, her treasured original-cast soundtrack album of The Fantasticks.
It probably helped that I knew pretty much nothing about The Fantasticks at the time.
What little I did knew about it came from the pages of The New Yorker. I’d recently started picking up occasional copies of the magazine and would soon start subscribing to it. In the front of each issue, a section headed “Goings On About Town” simply listed — page after page after page — capsule details about art galleries, films being shown, dance performances, library events, concerts, and of course stage productions. About The Fantasticks it included the theater name and performance times, of course, but nothing at all about the plot; it simply said, like, “[Some ridiculous number in the thousands] performances and counting.” (From the start of its Off-Broadway run to its closing, it ultimately played at the same theater for 42 years — over seventeen thousand performances.)
But of the plot and music, the cast and so on: a complete blank space in my head: a blank space — a malleable hollow just ripe for filling.
Well, I’m not gonna try to convince you that it’s high art. (It never pretended to be.) It’s outdated in its attitudes about men, about women, about women-and-men, about children and parenting. Two songs in particular jar today — jar so much that the show’s creators struggled for years with how to completely rework them; they jar so much that if I’d come to the soundtrack for the first time at any point in the last 20-30 years, I’d be horrified. (The songs, for what it’s worth, are “It Depends on What You Pay” and “Rape Ballet,” and while the lyrics make plain the meaning — “rape” in the old, antiquated sense of “abduction,” as here — well, there it is: sticking up in the middle of the playlist like an upraised middle finger.)
But The Fantasticks meant something to twenty-year-old me. I’d recently tried my hand at poetry and discovered, you know: writing to a rhyme-and-rhythm form is hard as bejeezus… Primarily, though, it’s easy to be glib and cynical about love if you’ve never been in love. But when you’ve started — oh so tentatively — for the first time to feel something magnetic about one other person, and when you’re suddenly forced to listen to lyrics clever enough to appeal to your language-loving mind, and grateful for a work’s occasional, self-aware nod in the direction of its own genre’s artificiality…
…well, then, it’s easy to remember that kind of September, or March, or Tuesday, or year.
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A handful of additional resources, if you care to follow up:
- The show’s home page (still active, after a fashion)
- Wikipedia, inevitably
- Lyrics
- YouTube: the 1964 Hallmark Hall of Fame TV broadcast, complete with advertising (I vaguely remember this playing in our house, but 13-year-old me certainly wasn’t “into it”)
- Variety: interview with librettist Tom Jones (no relation!), published after his death last year at age 95
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