COMPOSER OF ‘LA CAGE,’ ‘MAME,’ ‘HELLO, DOLLY!’
JERRY HERMAN • 1931-2019
Jerry Herman, the Broadway composer-lyricist who gave America the rousing, old-fashioned musicals “Hello, Dolly!” and “Mame” in the 1960s and Broadway’s first musical featuring gay lovers, “La Cage aux Folles,” in the 1980s, died Thursday at a hospital in Miami. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by Jane Dorian, his goddaughter.
Herman wrote music that left the nation singing — rich melodies with powerful lyrics that stopped shows, dazzled critics, kept audiences returning for more and paved Broadway with gold for producers and performers.
To millions, he was the postwar theater’s clearest successor to Irving Berlin, a throwback to an era of songwriters who touched the heart with sophisticated simplicity, bringing audiences to their feet at curtain calls and sending them home humming the unforgettable tune “Hell-oh, Doll-ee!”
In a half-century of work, he scored a dozen Broadway musicals and five off-broadway revues, composed many of the nation’s most popular songs and was showered with awards, including Tonys for “Hello, Dolly!” and “La Cage aux Folles.”
He also made stage history as the first composerlyricist to have three musicals run more than 1,500 consecutive performances on Broadway — “Hello, Dolly!” with 2,844, “Mame” with 1,508, and “La Cage” with 1,761 — and remains one of only two to achieve that feat. (Stephen Schwartz, with “Pippin,” “The Magic Show” and “Wicked,” is the second.) And “La Cage” (1983) was the only Broadway musical to win the Tony for best revival twice, for 2004 and 2010 productions.
At a time when Broadway musicals were exploring new boundaries, Herman was resolutely Tin Pan Alley. Unlike Stephen Sondheim and other contemporaries who experimented with dark, intricate melodies and witty, ambiguous lyrics, he wrote song-and-dance music that stuck to the storyline with catchy tunes and sunny phrases of hope and happy endings.
Some critics belabored “Hello, Dolly!” and “Mame” as schmaltz. But to Herman, they were just openhearted. Even in “La Cage aux Folles,” Broadway’s first musical to portray the intimacies of a gay relationship (although Broadway, Hollywood and television had previously dealt with homosexuality in more general terms), his score sidestepped polemics and delivered a story of pathos, comedy, dignity and ultimately acceptance of gay life.
Herman still wanted people to hum his tunes on the way home. “There are only a couple of us who care about writing songs that people can leave the theater singing,” he told The New York Times in 1984 after “La Cage” had won six Tonys. “To me, the powerful tune has always been the nub, the meat and potatoes of the American musical theater.”
Gerald Sheldon Herman was born in New York City on July 10, 1931, the only child of Harry and Ruth Sachs Herman, and grew up in Jersey City, N.J. His parents were teachers and amateur musicians who ran a summer camp in upstate New York. The young camper taught himself to play the piano, wrote songs and staged bucolic musicals.
In 1983, Herman met Martin Finkelstein, a designer. They were companions until Finkelstein died of AIDS in 1989. Herman, who learned he was Hiv-positive in 1985, received experimental drug therapies that later stabilized his condition.
He lived in Miami Beach with his husband and longtime partner, Terry Marler, who survives him.
Herman’s last Broadway show was “An Evening With Jerry Herman,” a career retrospective in which he played piano onstage, which had a two-month run in 1998.
With Marilyn Stasio, he wrote “Showtune: A Memoir” (1996). Stephen Citron’s biography, “Jerry Herman: Poet of the Showtune,” appeared in 2004. A documentary by Amber Edwards, “Words and Music by Jerry Herman,” was shown on the Public Broadcasting Service in 2008. He received lifetime achievement honors from the Tonys in 2009 and the Kennedy Center in 2010.
“I’m a happy man who writes the way I want to write,” he told the Times. “If I had the choice of being the most brilliant and sophisticated writer that ever came down the pike or of being the simple melodic songwriter that I am, I would still have chosen the latter.”
Mcfadden writes for The New York Times.