Close Before Striking

The Fantasticks is a sugary off-Broadway musical that has been running for ten years. With serene irrelevance, it has been variously described in the Goings on About Town department of The New Yorker as: "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!"; "Close cover before striking match"; "Rock of ages, cleft for me"; and "Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John." Associate Editor Gardner Botsford explains that he gets bored writing the same straight capsule reviews of long-run shows. So did Robert Benchley when he handled theater listings for the original Life magazine in the '20s. Of Abie's Irish Rose, which ran 2,327 performances, Benchley once babbled: "One,two,three,four,five,six, seven,eight,nine,ten." But Botsford has added a new literary dimension. He is currently using listings for The Fantasticks, Fiddler on the Roof and Hello, Dolly! to serialize James Joyce's Ulysses, sentence by sentence. Says Botsford of reader reaction to his serialization: "Many are delighted they can identify the excerpts, but others think we are trying to communicate with the Russian herring fleet in code."

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