"Mame," "Hello, Dolly!" composer Jerry Herman has died at 88
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.
His goddaughter Jane Dorian confirmed his death to The Associated Press early Friday. 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" in 1983. He also won two Grammys – for the "Mame" cast album and "Hello, Dolly!" as song of the year – and was a Kennedy Center honoree. 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.
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 AP 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 theater. There's been a rumor 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.
Herman was born in New York in 1931 and raised in Jersey City. His parents ran a children's summer camp in the Catskills and he taught himself the piano. He noted that when he was born, his mother had a view of Broadway's Winter Garden Theatre marquee from her hospital bed.
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 longest-running 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. It was a lavish adaptation of the successful French film about two gay men who own a splashy, drag nightclub on the Riviera. It contained the gay anthem "I Am What I Am" and ran for some 1,760 performances. Three of his shows, "Dear World," "The Grand Tour" and "Mack and Mabel," failed on Broadway.
Later in life, Herman composed a song for "Barney's Great Adventure," contributed the score for the 1996 made-for-TV movie "Mrs. Santa Claus" – earning Herman an Emmy nomination – and wrote his autobiography, "Showtune," published by Donald I. Fine.