Celebrating the Career and Body of WORTH of Songwriter Tom Jones

Harry Truman famously said that not all readers are leaders but all leaders are readers — they have to be. 

THE FANTASTICKS, with book and lyrics by Tom Jones and music by Harvey Schmidt, opened Off-Broadway in May of 1960 and closed forty-two years later, becoming the longest-running production in the history of the American stage and one of the most frequently produced musicals in the world. Their first Broadway musical, 110 IN THE SHADE, was nominated for a Tony Award and was successfully revived by the New York City Opera starring Karen Ziemba, and later produced on Broadway by the Roundabout Theatre Company starring Audra McDonald and John Cullum. I DO! I DO!, their two character musical with Mary Martin and Robert Preston, ran for a year on Broadway and a year on the road and is frequently done around the country and the world. (One production, in Minneapolis, played for twenty-two continuous years with the same two actors in the leading roles.) Tom in recording studio.JPG For several years Jones and Schmidt worked privately at their theatre workshop, concentrating on small musicals in new and often untried forms. The most notable of these efforts were CELEBRATION, which moved to Broadway, and PHILEMON, which won the Outer Critics Circle Award and was filmed for television. They contributed incidental music and lyrics to the Off-Broadway play COLETTE starring Zoe Caldwell and Milddred Dunnock, then later did a full-scale musical version under the title COLETTE COLLAGE. In addition to an Obie Award and the 1992 Special Tony for THE FANTASTICKS, in 1999 Jones and Schmidt were inducted into the Broadway Hall of Fame at the Gershwin Theatre, in 2012 they were inducted into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, and in December of 2017 they received the Oscar Hammerstein Award.