The Fantasticks Reaches Broadway on November 16, 66 Years and 21,552 Performances After It Opened

Every other show opening this month is new. This one is older than most of its audience, and its résumé doesn't fit on a poster: 21,552 performances since 1960. The Fantasticks — the world's longest-running musical — never played Broadway in all that time. On Monday, November 16, at Second Stage's Hayes Theatre, it finally does. Previews began October 22, and the engagement is limited: 15 weeks, through February 7, 2027.

The original production ran 42 years off-Broadway

The original production opened May 3, 1960, at the Sullivan Street Playhouse — 153 seats — and simply refused to close. It ran 42 years and 17,162 performances, closing January 13, 2002, as the longest-running musical in history. Producer Lore Noto had put up $3,000 of his life savings to open it. The original El Gallo was a young Jerry Orbach; book writer and lyricist Tom Jones himself played Henry, under the stage name Thomas Bruce.

In 2006 the show returned off-Broadway at the Jerry Orbach Theater — named for that first El Gallo — and ran another 11 years and 4,390 performances. Add the two runs together and you get Broadway.com's headline number: 21,552 performances before a single one of them happened on Broadway.

How this production reimagines the story

This isn't the 1960 show in a museum case. Jones revised his own book and lyrics — the work he continued until his death in August 2023 — to retell the story as a romance between two young men, Matt and Lewis (Maxim Chlumecky and Nathan Levy), watched over not by two scheming fathers but by two mothers: Ruthie Ann Miles as Bessie Mae Bellomy and Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer as Mildred Hucklebee. (Harvey Schmidt, the composer, died in 2018; the score — including "Try to Remember," the song that outlived every theatre it played in — is unchanged in spirit.)

Zane Phillips makes his Broadway debut as El Gallo, the narrator-bandit who runs the story. David Patrick Kelly is Henry, the old actor; Kevin Del Aguila is Mortimer; Ahmad Simmons is The Mute. Christopher Gattelli directs and choreographs. The revision premiered at Flint Rep before this Broadway transfer.

The preview week's numbers from the Broadway League

In the Broadway League's table for the week ending November 1, the production was still in previews: $305,307 gross, 3,771 in attendance, 93% of seats sold — a healthy preview line for a chamber musical in the Hayes, and a starting point we will track as reviews land and the 15-week clock starts ticking in earnest.

Sixty-six years, two off-Broadway runs, one song everybody's grandmother can hum — and a first night on Broadway still ahead of it. Some shows open. This one arrives.