gay-themed version of “The Fantasticks” Bway debut this fall

[samhexum]

How Luisa Became Lewis in the World’s Longest-Running Musical
“The Fantasticks” ran for decades in Greenwich Village. Now, in time for its Broadway debut, it gets a gender makeover.

Tom Jones was 92 when he received an email from a director in Michigan asking to alter one of his shows.

The alterations the director sought were few but momentous, just as the show — “The Fantasticks” — was small but historic. The original production, which opened Off Broadway in 1960 and closed in 2017, with a four-year break and a relocation in between, is generally considered the longest-running musical in the world.

For more than 21,000 performances, Jones, who wrote the book and lyrics, kept a tight leash on it. He rehearsed generations of replacement casts, sometimes including himself; his collaborator, the composer Harvey Schmidt, trained the replacement pianists. (The original was scored for just piano and harp.) Major productions, like the 1990 national tour with Robert Goulet, could not go forth without the team’s approval and often their close involvement.

But the email, dated January 18, 2021, came too late for Schmidt to consider. He died in 2018.

Jones himself was unwell, often too tired to work. Was it time to let others rethink what John Schak, Schmidt’s longtime assistant and close friend, recently described the team’s greatest legacy, “the most perfect and most profitable thing they did”?

“The Fantasticks” certainly has one of the loveliest Golden Age scores. Three of its numbers became popular standards in the 1960s: “Try to Remember,” “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” and “They Were You,” the big love song for the show’s young couple.

But the story of that couple, Matt and Luisa — romantic teenagers whose fathers fake a feud to make them want each other more — began to seem twee as musicals turned their attention to harridans and psychopaths.

Nor were the other roles aging well. The fathers sometimes seemed like throwbacks to a dusty vaudeville universe. One character is known as “the Mute.” Another at times portrays a figure referred to as “the Indian” while dressed in stereotypical Native American costume. And in a comedy number called “It Depends on What You Pay,” the swashbuckling El Gallo, originally portrayed by Jerry Orbach, offers a catalog of kidnappings the fathers might purchase to further their scheme. More than 40 times in the lyric, the kidnappings are called “rapes.”

Over the years Jones tinkered with the libretto, solving some of those problems. (The rapes became abductions.) And as he watched videos of newer productions, including a steampunk version in Nebraska, an avant-garde version in Germany and a Kabuki-inflected version in Japan, he began to feel that the work might not be as dependent as he’d thought on the original’s fable-like concept and minimalist aesthetic.

But the change that Michael Lluberes, the Michigan director, was suggesting for a production at the Flint Repertory Theater was the most substantial yet. In the email, he explained that as he studied the roles of Matt and Luisa, he kept “thinking that they could so easily be two boys who fall in love with each other.” It would take only a few slight edits, he wrote — pronoun changes and the like — to give the musical “a whole new contemporary resonance and significance.”

Would Jones consider turning Luisa into Lewis?

Two days later, Jones, who had rebuffed such requests in the past, wrote back: “In theory I am not opposed.”

HOW A THEORETICAL YES to a cold email led to the complete reframing of a musical theater classic — one that is still a staple of regional and school theaters, throwing off royalties averaging $250,000 a year — is a surprising tale, sad and sweet. Much like “The Fantasticks” itself, it involves innocence, disappointment and growth, with maybe even a hint of abduction.

In any case, a gay-themed version of “The Fantasticks” is scheduled to make its extremely belated Broadway debut this fall. There’s no doubt it will be different from the original. Sometimes a single word delivers that difference: Matt, the more conventional lover, now rhapsodizes about “this boy” he loves, instead of “this girl.” Sometimes no word change at all is needed: Lewis, the more extravagant one, sings that he’d like to “let my hair keep growing / til it billows to the floor” — just as Luisa did for decades.

But what’s more surprising than how gay the show has become is how quietly gay it was all along.

Its authors, both Texans, were not much alike. Jones, the son of a turkey farmer, was from rural Littlefield; Schmidt, the son of a Methodist minister, from bustling Dallas. Both attended the University of Texas at Austin, where Jones studied theater and Schmidt, though a gifted pianist, studied art. They met in 1950 when Jones, hearing Schmidt play, asked him to collaborate on a revue called “Hipsy-Boo!” for the university’s Curtain Club. Soon they were an exclusive team.

Close as they remained professionally for the next 68 years, their intimacy was not personal. Jones was a classic theater type, ambitious and opinionated; Schmidt, who quickly found success as a commercial artist and illustrator, a gentle dreamer.

More to the point, Jones had two wives and two children; Schmidt was gay and, like many gay men of his vintage, didn’t discuss it. Dan Shaheen, the authors’ representative and longtime friend, said Schmidt never mentioned a lover “the whole time I knew him.” That doesn’t mean he didn’t have one. Schak, Schmidt’s assistant, said that though “Harvey entered Tom’s straight world to socialize, Tom never entered Harvey’s gay world.”

Jones’s initial response to Lluberes’s email followed suit, focusing not on how a gender change might affect the lovers but on how it might affect everything else. Why, he wondered, would fathers build a wall to keep gay sons apart? Why would they hire El Gallo to stage an abduction? That “standard plot device” in stories about “typical young lovers,” he wrote, did not apply to gay ones.

A gentle back-and-forth — “like collaborating with my grandfather,” Lluberes said — ensued over the next three months. Acting as a kind of gay cicerone, he explained how gay people like himself, and presumably like Schmidt, learned in their youth to invest in the exclusively heterosexual clichés offered by popular culture.

Jones accepted the explanation, along with the pronoun and name changes. But he decided that instead of the piecemeal alterations Lluberes suggested, he would write a thorough revision himself, to accommodate the gender change and the sensitivities of 2021.

His revision suggests a man feeling his way into an unfamiliar world. To balance the cast, the fathers became mothers, as some productions had tried before, but now one of them and her son were Hispanic. Lluberes, who is Dominican, convinced him that this was a change too far, as no other character has an ethnic identity.

And though Jones allowed Lewis, in the song “Much More,” to keep Luisa’s billowing hair, he drew the line at his wanting “to go to town in a golden gown.” The gown became a crown.

For Lluberes, then 42, the chance to collaborate with a man he thought of as a legend was an astounding turn of events. But for Jones it was perhaps something else: a chance to polish his legacy and finally get his gem to Broadway. Flint was a proving ground.

The results were positive: The production, which after pandemic delays ran for two weeks in June 2022, drew sold-out houses and rave reviews. Jones, by then unable to travel — he would receive a diagnosis of lung cancer later that summer — watched it on tape. Some ideas he had allowed as an experiment, such as making the old actor character a drag queen and having the boys in a bathtub, still bothered him.

But on July 3 he wrote in an email that if the show was “sometimes a bit confusing (for me),” it was also “beautiful and classy.” Going forward, he added, the frontispiece to the new edition, which he intended to license so that actors of any gender could perform it, would say: “Dedicated, with many thanks, to Michael Lluberes.”

FOUR OTHER “GAYTASTICKS” followed, in small productions designed to let Jones fine-tune his revisions. Though he worked nearly up to the day he died, in August 2023, he did not get to see any of them.

Still, the stops in Tokyo, Provincetown, California and Florida amounted to a kind of pre-New York tour. By then, commercial producers, led by Ryan Bogner, were seeking a suitable space to house the new version; they eventually partnered with Second Stage, a nonprofit whose Helen Hayes Theater, with 600 seats, is the smallest on Broadway. In 2025 they hired Christopher Gattelli to direct, a decision that must have seemed especially gratifying when, this June, his production of “Schmigadoon!” won the Tony Award for best musical.

By then, Lluberes, assuming he would direct the show in New York, had moved from Flint to do so.

But the producers and the authors’ estates felt they couldn’t move forward with him. “There were elements of the Flint production that, even if we wanted to, we couldn’t have done because Tom didn’t want them,” Bogner said. “And we knew we had to put together a Broadway team and put that sort of vision on it.”

Gattelli endorsed Bogner’s vision: While “still keeping things simple,” he said, he planned to “put them on steroids a bit.” The orchestra has been beefed up to eight players. Instead of unknowns, established theater and television performers have been hired for some roles: Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer and Ruthie Ann Miles as the mothers; Zane Phillips as El Gallo. Even the boyish lovers — Maxim Chlumecky as Matt and Nathan Levy as Lewis — are buff.

So Lluberes’s name is not on the marquee or the frontispiece. But Bogner said that, in recognition of his contribution, he would be given a co-producer credit if the show has a commercial life beyond Second Stage.

Lluberes would not comment except to say: “I love Tom, and I also don’t want to make it complicated for the producers to move forward. What I care about,” he added, “is that this gay version will be in the canon, that high school kids 20 years from now will do the gay ‘Fantasticks.’”

Of course, in a way, they always did. There was the original Matt, Kenneth Nelson, who later starred as the self-loathing Michael in “The Boys in the Band.” (He died from complications of AIDS in 1993.) The original director, Word Baker. Ed Wittstein, who designed the sets and costumes. And as Jones himself eventually realized, writing in an email to Lluberes, “the absolutely hundreds (maybe thousands) of gay actors who have appeared in the show during its long run.”

And finally there was Schmidt: the partner of seven decades Jones never fully knew. In a way, his last gesture, this gay “Fantasticks,” was a long-belated gift to the man who, in the song “Try to Remember,” set his words to such enduring music: “Without a hurt the heart is hollow.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/theater/fantasticks-broadway-longest-running-musical.html

[pleasureseeker]

If it's anything like the production in Provincetown a few years back, save your money. In my opinion it was as lame as lame can be.