Lyricist whose Broadway hits included Hello Dolly! and La Cage aux Folles

Jerry Herman, who has died aged 88, was a composer and lyricist who, despite having only a rudimentary musical education, was behind some of the biggest musicals to hit Broadway, among them Hello Dolly!, Mame, La Cage aux Folles and Mack and Mabel.

His shows were characterised by big costumes and glamour, while beneath the glitz there was also an undercurrent of great emotion that carried the audiences on the crest of his optimistic anthems. Leading ladies such as Angela Lansbury, Carol Channing and Ethel Merman brought a feelgood factor to New York audiences looking to escape the tribulations of 1960s America.

His first big success was Milk and Honey, a musical about the founding of the state of Israel, which opened on Broadway in October 1961. It ran for 543 performances and was nominated for a Tony Award.

Hello Dolly!, the first major Broadway hit after the assassination of President Kennedy, opened in January 1964 and ran for nearly seven years. While it was Herman’s greatest success, picking up numerous awards including 10 Tonys, Hello Dolly! also caused the most anguish, both in terms of preopening rewrites and a lawsuit claiming that the opening notes had been lifted from another work, which Herman eventually settled out of court to avoid delaying the Hollywood adaptation.

Mame, starring Angela Lansbury, came next, and for Herman was the antithesis of Hello Dolly! – nothing but a pleasure. After a trial run in Philadelphia it opened on Broadway in spring 1966, its opening number – If He Walked Into My Life – becoming an instant hit.

La Cage aux Folles (1983), with its theme of homosexual love, was seen by many as a defiant riposte to the Aids crisis that swept through New York in the first half of that decade, leaving Herman HIV-positive and killing his partner. The original Broadway production ran for more than 1700 performances, won six Tony awards and spawned a West End production in 1986, although that ran for only 300 performances.

It was said that, whether in a school hall or on Broadway, there was rarely a day when a Jerry Herman musical was not playing. Many of them enjoyed long runs on both sides of the Atlantic. For Herman the secret of his success was writing songs with a timeless quality. “I write for a mass audience,” he told The

Washington Post in 2010. “I write for people, for a smiling public . . . I write songs that I hope will still be hummed years from now.”

Jerry Herman was born in 1931, the only child of Harry Herman, a New York gym teacher. Family legend had it that his mother, Ruth, played the piano while in labour.

He recalled a happy childhood growing up in Jersey City, with frequent trips to see musical comedies at the theatre, including

Annie Get Your Gun on Broadway when he was 14. During the long summer months his parents ran Stissing Lake Camp, a popular children’s camp they owned in upstate New York, where Jerry spent every summer until the age of 21, increasingly turning it from an athletics camp into a dramatic one.

He was 17 when his mother set up a 10-minute meeting with Frank Loesser, the composer of Guys and Dolls and an acquaintance of her hairdresser. It turned into an afternoon-long session in which Loesser encouraged Herman to pursue his songwriting.

After a year studying architecture in New York, he enrolled at the University of Miami, which had an avant-garde theatre department and was “a glorious experience”. On graduating, Herman hired a small theatre and put on a revue of his college material called I Feel Wonderful. Soon afterwards his father raised the funds from his businessmen friends to bring the show to New York.

By 1958 he had a briefcase full of revue material and approached the proprietor of Showplace, a seedy downtown club, who accepted his proposal to stage Nightcap. “I put the whole thing together myself,” he recalled.

The critics loved Nightcap, which ran for two years and eventually led to an invitation from Gerard Oestreicher, a Broadway producer, to compose Milk and Honey.

The show’s financial success enabled Herman to put his year at architecture school to good use: interior design became a secondary occupation and led to him renovating almost 40 apartments and houses.

But Broadway was soon calling once more. Summoned to see the impresario David Merrick, Herman was given three days to turn Thornton Wilder’s script of The

Matchmaker into the musical Hello Dolly! ,a challenge to which he rose with enthusiasm. “I was like a crazed person, pacing up and down in the middle of the night, scribbling down lyrics and popping candy in my mouth,” he recalled of the show’s gestation.

Not everything was an instant success.

Mack and Mabel ran for only eight weeks on Broadway in 1974, but did somewhat better, both commercially and critically on the West End in 1995.

The immense success of La Cage aux Folles restored his confidence, but thereafter there were only occasional minor forays back into show business. Herman essentially turned his back on Broadway and retired to California to work on his houses.

He received a slew of honours, including a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2009 and a Kennedy Center honour in 2010.

Herman, despite having Aids diagnosed in 1985, found that his body responded well to a regime of experimental drugs.

Latterly he lived in Palm Springs, California, with Terry Marler, a retired realestate photographer who survives him.

‘‘I write songs that I hope will still be hummed years from now.”