Dallas native Harvey Schmidt, a Tony Award-winner who composed the music for the longest-running musical in history, The Fantasticks, died…
“I was born here in Dallas when my father was studying to be a minister at Southern Methodist University,” Schmidt said in 2001, in an interview with Lawson Taitte, then theater critic for The Dallas Morning News. “We lived in a 1920s bungalow north of SMU when there was nothing there but those bare hills. Later we mostly lived in little towns around Houston.”
Schmidt and Jones’s biggest success was The Fantasticks. It ran off-Broadway for 42 years, from 1960 to 2002, and reopened in 2006 in Times Square. It closed in 2015 after 21,552 performances. Schmidt also collaborated on the 1995 film adaptation. In 1992, he received the Tony Award for “excellence in the theatre” for The Fantasticks, the only time an off-Broadway show has been given such an honor.
Schmidt and Jones also teamed up on the Broadway shows 110 in the Shade and I Do! I Do! and were inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1998.
Schmidt’s death on Wednesday was confirmed by Dan Demello, a publicist for The Fantasticks.
