Try to remember, if you can, a day…not in September, but in May — way back in 1960. That was when a slight musical called “The Fantasticks” first opened at Greenwich Village’s Sullivan St. Playhouse.
The play got mixed reviews: The Post called it “a rueful and disarming little romantic fantasy” that made for a pleasant evening’s diversion; other critics felt pretty much the same way.
No one, in other words, thought theater history was being made. Save for one song — “Try to Remember” — there really wasn’t all that much memorable.
Yet audiences fell in love with the show.
And now, after a run of 55 years (with a four-year hiatus from 2002-2006) and 20,672 performances, the final curtain is about to fall on what has become the world’s longest-running musical ever.
What’s makes this spectacular run even more amazing is that “The Fantasticks” has played only Off-Broadway.
Yet “The Fantasticks” has been no less a New York institution than any of the biggest hits on the Great White Way.
Future stage and screen great Jerry Orbach was a member of the original cast, and over the years many a rising star — from F. Murray Abraham to Glenn Close to Kristin Chenoweth — would join the show for a time, if only to be able to say they’d done it.
True, “The Fantasticks” eventually became famous simply for being famous, as one critic put it. And while everyone realized there was something magical about the show, no one could really say for certain what it was.
No matter. It ran on and on, filling the house and making a huge profit.
In his opening-night review, The New York Times’ Brooks Atkinson suggested that the show was “the sort of thing that loses magic the longer it endures.” The past 55 years has certainly proved that judgment wrong.
We’ll be sorry to see “The Fantasticks” go. But much more great theater will follow (follow, follow, follow) in its footsteps.