Tony winner was forever ‘optimistic’
Herman composed tunes for ‘Hello, Dolly!’ and ‘Mame,’ among others
Tony Award-winning composer Jerry Herman, who wrote the cheerful, good-natured music and lyrics for such classic shows as “Mame,” “Hello, Dolly!” and “La Cage Aux Folles,” died Thursday. He was 88.
He died of pulmonary complications in Miami, where he had been living with his partner, real estate broker Terry Marler.
The creator of 10 Broadway shows and contributor to several more, Herman won two Tony Awards for Best Musical: “Hello, Dolly!” in 1964 and “La Cage Aux Folles” in1983. He also won two Grammys — for the “Mame” cast album and “Hello, Dolly!” as Song of the Year — and was a Kennedy Center honouree. He had three original Broadway productions playing at the same time from February 1969 to May 1969.
Tributes poured in Friday from Broadway royalty, including from Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book of “La Cage Aux Folles” alongside Herman’s songs. “We lost one of the greats,” Fierstein tweeted. Writer and host Seth Rudetsky honoured Herman for writing “quintessential Broadway songs. Beautiful melodies and fantastic lyrics.”
Herman wrote in the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition, an optimistic composer at a time when others in his profession were exploring darker feelings and material. Just a few of his song titles revealed his depth of hope: “I’ll Be Here Tomorrow,” “The Best of Times,” “Tap Your Troubles Away,” “It’s Today,” “We Need a Little Christmas” and “Before the Parade Passes By.” Even the title song to “Hello, Dolly!” is an advertisement to enjoy life.
Herman also had a direct, simple sense of melody and his lyrics had a natural, unforced quality. Over the years, he told The Associated Press in 1995, “critics have sort of tossed me off as the popular and not the cerebral writer, and that was fine with me. That was exactly what I aimed at.”
In accepting the Tony in 1984 for “La Cage Aux Folles,” Herman said, “This award forever shatters a myth about the musical theatre. There’s been a rumour around for a couple of years that the simple, hummable show tune was no longer welcome on Broadway. Well, it’s alive and well at the Palace” Theatre.
Some saw that phrase — “the simple, hummable show tune” — as a subtle dig at Stephen Sondheim, known for challenging and complex songs and whose “Sunday in the Park With George” Herman had just bested. But Herman rejected any tension between the two musical theatre giants.
“Only a small group of ‘showbiz gossips’ have constantly tried to create a feud between Mr. Sondheim and myself. I am as much of a Sondheim fan as you and everybody else in the world, and I believe that my comments upon winning the Tony for ‘La Cage’ clearly came from my delight with the show business community’s endorsement of the simple melodic showtune, which had been criticized by a few hardnosed critics as being old-fashioned,” he said in a 2004 Qand-A session with readers of Broadway.com. Herman was born in New York in1931and raised in Jersey City. His parents ran a children’s summer camp in the Catskills and he taught himself the piano.
Herman dated his intention to write musicals to the time his parents took him to “Annie Get Your Gun” and he went home and played five of Irving Berlin’s songs on the piano.
“I thought what a gift this man has given a stranger. I wanted to give that gift to other people. That was my great inspiration, that night,” he told The Associated Press in 1996.
After graduating from the University of Miami, Herman headed back to New York, writing and playing piano in a jazz club. He made his Broadway debut in 1960 contributing songs to the review “From A to Z” — alongside material by Fred Ebb and Woody Allen — and the next year tackled the entire score to a musical about the founding of the state of Israel, “Milk and Honey.” It earned him his first Tony nomination.
“Hello, Dolly!” starring Carol Channing opened in 1964 and ran for 2,844 performances, becoming Broadway’s longestrunning musical at the time. It won 10 Tonys and has been revived many times, most recently in 2017 with Bette Midler in the title role, a 19th-century widowed matchmaker who learns to live again.
“Mame” followed in 1966, starring Angela Lansbury, and went on to run for over 1,500 performances. She handed him his Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2009, saying he created songs like him: “bouncy, buoyant and optimistic.”
In 1983, he had another hit with “La Cage Aux Folles,” a sweetly radical musical of its age, decades before the fight for marriage equality.
He is survived by his partner, Marler, and his goddaughter Jane Dorian. Dorian said plans for a memorial service are still in the works for the man whose songs she said “are always on our lips and in our hearts.”