Jerry Herman

Born in New York City on July 10, 1931, Jerry Herman (born Gerald Sheldon Herman) died in Miami on December 26, 2019, at the age of 88. He was one of the most important composers of musicals of his generation. His hits include Hello, Dolly! (1964), Mame (1966) and La Cage aux Folles (1983), which ran on Broadway for several years running and have been frequently revived since. The only son of a gymnastics teacher and an English teacher, both amateur musicians, he learned to play the piano at the age of six, taking no outside lessons and playing by ear, without deciphering sheet music. He developed a taste for musical comedy at an early age, and devoted himself to music after graduating as an interior decorator. Encouraged by Frank Loesser, he studied drama at the University of Miami and devised his first amateur shows. One of them, I Feel Wonderful, was later adapted for the stage. After becoming a bar pianist, he wrote songs for cabaret acts, and in 1958 developed his first revue, Nightcap, which ran for two years at the Showplace Club. Renamed Parade, it played in an off-Broadway theater two years later, for 90 performances, and gave rise to a first recording. In October 1961, he launched the Broadway musical Milk and Honey, which ran for 543 performances and was also recorded. Producer David Merrick took an interest in him and hired him to transform Thornton Wilder's play The Matchmaker into song: the result was the musical Hello, Dolly! (1964), whose title track was recorded by Louis Armstrong to great acclaim, earning Jerry Herman the Grammy Award for Song of the Year. The musical's album also reached number one, as did Louis Armstrong's, while the show's record-breaking 2844 performances won a Tony Award. Herman's commitment to the entertainment tradition continued with his adaptation of Mame, which won a Grammy Award in 1966, played 1508 times and was adapted for the screen in 1974. After the failure of his next show, The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969), the composer didn't reappear until 1974 with Mack & Mabel, which was rejected by the public. That same year, he composed the songs for the album An Evening with Jerry Herman for a musical writing workshop, then returned to musical comedy with The Grand Tour (1979), another commercial failure. However, in 1981, Jerry's Girls, a show based on his songs, ran for two years before being performed on Broadway four years later. In 1983, he adapted La Cage aux Folles, which ran for 1,761 days and won a Tony Award. The hit song "I Am What I Am" gave Gloria Gaynor another disco hit. Herman subsequently opened a nightclub and supervised revivals of his musicals in New York and London. In 1996, he composed the music for the Christmas TV program, Mrs. Santa Claus, then commissioned the comedy Miss Spectacular (2002), for a Las Vegas hotel, which was the subject of a final album rather than being staged on stage.