The Fantasticks opens at the Hayes Theater on November 16. Previews began on October 22, and the limited run is booking through February 7, 2027. It is the show’s first time on Broadway. Here are eight things worth knowing before you take your seat.
1. It took 66 years to reach Broadway
The musical opened Off-Broadway on May 3, 1960. Its first Broadway performance came on October 22, 2026, in this Second Stage Theater production at the Hayes. The run is a limited 15 weeks.
2. It holds the record for the longest-running musical
The original production played the Sullivan Street Playhouse, a small house in Greenwich Village, from May 3, 1960, to January 13, 2002. That came to 17,162 performances. Guinness World Records lists it as the longest theatrical run of any musical. The score includes Try to Remember and Soon It’s Gonna Rain.
3. It started as a one-act at Barnard College
Tom Jones wrote the book and lyrics and Harvey Schmidt the music. They first tried the piece out as a one-act at Barnard College in 1959, on a week-long bill of new short plays. The full-length show reached the Village the following spring. The plot borrows loosely from Edmond Rostand’s 1894 comedy Les Romanesques.
4. Jerry Orbach was the first El Gallo
Jerry Orbach created the narrator, El Gallo, in the 1960 company, at the start of a career that later took him to Broadway and to television. The Off-Broadway theater that housed the show’s revival was later renamed in his memory. On Broadway the part goes to Zane Phillips.
5. It came back for another 11 years
A revival directed by Jones opened at the Snapple Theater Center on West 50th Street in 2006. It closed in 2017 after 4,390 performances. Add the original run and the show has played 21,552 performances in New York.
6. There is a TV version and a film
A shortened version aired on the Hallmark Hall of Fame on October 18, 1964. A film directed by Michael Ritchie was shot in 1995, shelved by MGM, and finally reached a handful of movie theaters in September 2000.
7. The Broadway version tells a new love story
This is not the 1960 script. Jones revised his book and lyrics for a 2022 production at Flint Repertory Theatre in Michigan, developed with the company’s then producing artistic director, Michael Lluberes. The young lovers are now two young men, Matt and Lewis, played by Maxim Chlumecky and Nathan Levy. The parents who scheme to bring them together are two mothers, Mildred Hucklebee and Bessie Mae Bellomy, played by Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer and Ruthie Ann Miles.
8. Neither writer lived to see it on Broadway
Schmidt died on February 28, 2018. Jones died on August 11, 2023, at 95. The Hayes production uses the revised text Jones prepared for Flint.
Christopher Gattelli directs and choreographs. Opening night is November 16, and the run ends on February 7, 2027, at the Hayes Theater, 240 West 44th Street. For a first look at the staging, see our production photos from the Hayes.
Tickets for The Fantasticks on Broadway are on sale now.
