Word Baker, the director who in 1960 set "The Fantasticks" spinning into theater history as the world's longest-running musical, died Tuesday, Oct. 31, at a nursing home in Paris, Texas. He was 72.
Harvey Schmidt, the composer of the show, which is still running at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in New York after 35 years, said the cause was complications of a series of recent strokes.Baker, a native of Honey Grove, Texas, grew up listening to his mother, Maggie, teach piano and play the organ at the local Presbyterian church.
He met his theater destiny at the University of Texas, where, as a graduate student in drama from 1948 to 1951, he collaborated on a musical revue with two classmates, Schmidt and the lyricist Tom Jones, who later recruited Baker to direct "The Fantasticks," first a one-act version and then the historic two-act show.
Baker came to New York and began a long and varied theatrical career that ranged from directing Lillian Gish in a television production of "The Glass Menagerie" to directing the AT&T Bell Telephone Show at the 1964 New York World's Fair.
For all that, Baker could hardly have surpassed his work on "The Fantasticks," which opened on May 3, 1960. "Although the story is slight," Brooks Atkinson wrote in his review in The New York Times, "the style is entrancing in Word Baker's staging."
Despite the generally favorable review, the musical parable about a romance between a teenage girl and the boy next door played to as few as two or three patrons during the first few weeks of its run.
It later picked up such enthusiastic support from theater luminaries that it took off.
In addition to his mother, who is 96, Baker is survived by three daughters.