{"id":27335,"date":"2024-06-26T13:34:13","date_gmt":"2024-06-26T17:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=27335"},"modified":"2024-06-26T16:46:19","modified_gmt":"2024-06-26T20:46:19","slug":"weekend-music-break-the-fantasticks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2024\/06\/weekend-music-break-the-fantasticks\/","title":{"rendered":"Midweek Music Break: &#8220;The Fantasticks&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: The Fantasticks (Original Cast Recording)\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"352\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/album\/4vCswuqUgwGki83DlPKY0E?si=y-xsjWByQPS3oUOFOlDPbA&#038;utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">Among many, many other things that can be said about the Boomer generation is this: we lived constantly on one cusp or another &#8212; 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&#8230; While it&#8217;s true that we&#8217;re now woefully out of step with popular culture, basically all that&#8217;s happened is: we got tired of keeping up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anyhow, each of us seems able to recall at least one cultural <em>pivot moment<\/em>, some time when a fragment of the former world managed to touch us deeply just before that <em>thing<\/em>, whatever it was, went fully out of style. For me, one such moment was my first listen to the soundtrack of <em>The Fantasticks<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Musical theater and films had never (as the expression goes) done it for me. They were all so <em>cooooorny<\/em>, y&#8217;know, their &#8220;plots&#8221; and &#8220;sentiments&#8221; 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&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"highlight\">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) &#8212; especially of <span style=\"font-style: normal;\">My Fair Lady<\/span>. (<em>Ye gods, how many times must I have heard Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews warbling about Spainish weather?!?<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But here&#8217;s the thing: I could easily scorn all those tropes&#8230; because, well, <em>I had almost no idea what was actually going on<\/em>, onstage or -screen. I couldn&#8217;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. <em>(Missed that last line? Whoops, sorry, too late &#8212; here&#8217;s the next one!)<\/em> 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 &#8220;cool.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8230; as long as I borrowed, listened to, and (very important!) returned to her <em>this<\/em>, her treasured original-cast soundtrack album of <em>The Fantasticks<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">It probably helped that I knew pretty much nothing about <em>The Fantasticks<\/em> at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What little I did knew about it came from the pages of <em>The New Yorker<\/em>. I&#8217;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 &#8220;Goings On About Town&#8221; simply listed &#8212; page after page after page &#8212; capsule details about art galleries, films being shown, dance performances, library events, concerts, and of course stage productions. About <em>The Fantasticks<\/em> it included the theater name and performance times, of course, but nothing at all about the plot; it simply said, like, &#8220;<em>[Some ridiculous number in the thousands]<\/em> performances and counting.&#8221; (From the start of its Off-Broadway run to its closing, it ultimately played at the same theater for 42 years &#8212; over <em>seventeen thousand<\/em> performances.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But of the plot and music, the cast and so on: a complete blank space in my head: a blank space &#8212; a malleable hollow just ripe for filling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">Well, I&#8217;m not gonna try to convince you that it&#8217;s high art. (It never pretended to be.) It&#8217;s outdated in its attitudes about men, about women, about women-and-men, about children and parenting. Two songs in particular jar today &#8212; jar so much that the show&#8217;s creators struggled for years with how to completely rework them; they jar so much that if I&#8217;d come to the soundtrack for the first time at any point in the last 20-30 years, I&#8217;d be horrified. (The songs, for what it&#8217;s worth, are &#8220;It Depends on What You Pay&#8221; and &#8220;Rape Ballet,&#8221; and while the lyrics make plain the meaning &#8212; &#8220;rape&#8221; in the old, antiquated sense of &#8220;abduction,&#8221; as <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Rape_of_the_Sabine_Women\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">here<\/a> &#8212; well, there it is: sticking up in the middle of the playlist like an upraised middle finger.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But <em>The Fantasticks<\/em> meant something to twenty-year-old <em>me<\/em>. I&#8217;d recently tried my hand at poetry and discovered, you know: <em>writing to a rhyme-and-rhythm form is hard as bejeezus<\/em>&#8230; Primarily, though, it&#8217;s easy to be glib and cynical about love if you&#8217;ve never been <em>in<\/em> love. But when you&#8217;ve started &#8212; oh so tentatively &#8212; for the first time to feel something magnetic about one other person, and when you&#8217;re suddenly forced to listen to lyrics clever enough to appeal to your language-loving mind, and grateful for a work&#8217;s occasional, self-aware nod in the direction of its own genre&#8217;s artificiality&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8230;well, then, it&#8217;s easy to remember that kind of September, or March, or Tuesday, or year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>___<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>A handful of additional resources<\/strong>, if you care to follow up:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The show&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thefantasticks.com\/\">home page<\/a> (still active, after a fashion)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Fantasticks\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Wikipedia<\/a>, inevitably<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/genius.com\/albums\/Original-cast-of-the-fantasticks\/The-fantasticks-original-cast-album\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Lyrics<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/hR5EK1wS7s8?si=R_fEDtvQoR8-r3WO\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube<\/a>: the 1964 <em>Hallmark Hall of Fame<\/em> TV broadcast, complete with advertising (I vaguely remember this playing in our house, but 13-year-old me certainly wasn&#8217;t &#8220;into it&#8221;)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em><a href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/2023\/film\/news\/fantasticks-tom-jones-recalled-stage-musical-hollywood-adaptation-1235695218\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Variety<\/a><\/em>: interview with librettist Tom Jones (no relation!), published after his death last year at age 95<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Among many, many other things that can be said about the Boomer generation is this: we lived constantly on one cusp or another &#8212; 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&#8230; While it&#8217;s true that we&#8217;re now woefully [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27344,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"federate","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":false,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38,410,2252,74],"tags":[24,535,3213],"class_list":{"0":"post-27335","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-backwards","8":"category-hearing","9":"category-midweek-music-break","10":"category-music","11":"tag-nostalgia","12":"tag-the-fantasticks","13":"tag-musical-theater","14":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/fantasticksonspotify.jpg?fit=907%2C461&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-76T","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27335"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27346,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27335\/revisions\/27346"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}