This week's Post Quiz is about The Fantasticks, the longest-running musical of all time. Of course, I picked that quiz topic because the musical contains the song that inspired this month's Create Challenge: 'Try to Remember'. The idea behind the song is that nostalgia is not always based on merely the pleasant memories: 'without a hurt, the heart is hollow.' The song, and the musical, are timeless favourites with many people, I've found.

I also found out something cool about this musical: it's based on a stage play written in 1900 by one of my favourite playwrights, Monsieur Edmond Rostand. You know, the author of Cyrano de Bergerac. Super stuff. Rostand's play about the 17th-century poet and duellist is so great, I suspect most people think the play is far older than that. And there's another reason, too: when Rostand wrote his plays, hardly anyone was 'doing' Romantic.

Oh, sure, it was fine to be Romantic back in Byron's day. But 1900? Come on. Here were the hit plays on Broadway that year:

• Sherlock Holmes, with William Gillette.
• Coralie & Company, Dressmakers. Shocking play that included an interracial relationship.
• Sapho. This one got closed by the police for a while.
• Fiddle-dee-dee, described as 'a musical burlesque'. I think that means 'silly jokes'.
• Sarah Bernhardt on tour with all her hits, including two by Rostand and her Hamlet, which was not well received by the critics.

Elsewhere, plays were grittier, more realistic. Here are some other plays from 1900: The Dance of Death, by Strindberg, so you know that was a laugh riot, Madame Butterfly, a Tragedy of Japan, by David Belasco, Captain Brassbound's Conversion by George Bernard Shaw, and The Power of Wealth, based on a bestseller by Marie Corelli. You get the idea. In 1900, people were interested in plays about contemporary topics, and they weren't very taken with airy, poetic notions.

What about the musical? It started running off-Broadway in 1960, and the original run lasted until 2002. But what else was on Broadway in 1960?

• Bye Bye Birdie
• Camelot
• Finian's Rainbow
• The Unsinkable Molly Brown
• West Side Story

All right, The Fantasticks has a bit in common with West Side Story. Both refer to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. But The Fantasticks lacks the Rumble. And how did a show that spent a whole $900 in sets manage to outlast all those big-budget wonders?

I don't know the answer to that, other than to say that some themes are timeless. Why did Parisians flock to see The Bald Soprano over and over for decades? There's just something deep and soul-nourishing about an absurdist take on foreign language phrasebooks, even translated from Romanian. Which is really what I'm trying to say here.

Write about what you want. Particularly here on h2g2. Somebody will find that it speaks to their condition. If you're interesting, and you write well, your work will stand out. Don't try to be 'trendy'. Stay away from 'the latest thing'. The 'latest thing' will be missing the bus next week. Leave that for those lame internet writers who don't have good archives. We're here to stay.

This week, the h2g2 Post is nattering on about The Fantasticks and the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar. Why not? It's what struck us as interesting this week. A couple of weeks ago, as it turned out, just about everybody on h2g2 had been to an agricultural event, or had a farm story to share. So we talked about that.

Do you really remember what the Daily Mirror was chuntering on about last week? I'm sure the headline contained the words 'UFO' and 'coverup', but other than that…

Is everyone else doing gritty crime dramas? Write about explorers, if you'd rather. Buck the trends. Ignore them entirely. Start your own trend. If you tell it, they will read. We certainly will. Remember: El Gallo's in revival now, and hardly a day goes by without somebody, somewhere, singing 'Try to Remember'. And that Bald Soprano is still confusing audiences.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

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