In 1960, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt created theater history when their whimsical musical, The Fantasticks, the little show that no one believed in, opened and would not close until forty years later. Twenty-seven years later they would say “Smart New York money says we're not what's happening at the moment. We are perceived as the past. The perspective of us needs to be altered,” and so they plunged head first into musicalizing the play that had inspired them to create theater in the first place, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. But why, almost forty years later, no one will ever get to hear it? See what happened was…..well, guess you will need to find out for yourself when we explore how the geniuses behind The Fantasticks struggled against the tides of British imports to bring musical life to Grover’s Corners, with a cast of characters ranging from Gene Kelly to Angela Lansbury to Peter Pan herself, Mary Martin.   If you like what we are doing DONATE HERE Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances. Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 provides the statutory framework for determining whether something is a fair use and identifies certain types of uses—such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research—as examples of activities that qualify as fair use. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices