Musical Mondays: Jerry Herman (1)
You're looking swell
If you stopped the mysterious and possibly mythical 100 people who provide the answers for Pointless and asked them to name giants of musical theatre, they might name some of those whom in the past six months we have (mostly) praised, such as Alan Jay Lerner, Stephen Sondheim and Oscar Hammerstein; possibly the one-per-centers might mention Yip Harburg, Harold Arlen or Kurt Weill.
In passing, we have also had cause to praise the terribly under-rated composer-lyricist Jerry Herman. I think he’s under-rated because he never obviously shifted the terms of musical theatre or wrote anything seminal, although Cage aux Folles has some claim to be included in the latter category. Perhaps it’s because Cage aux Folles is seen as a drag version of his two biggest shows, Mame and Hello, Dolly! There is a reason the revue of his work was called Jerry’s Girls.
But there is much to be said for good solid craftsmanship that is sometimes touched with genius. There’s not much in a Herman musical that actually sucks - not in the score, at least, although they were not always so good onstage. Mack and Mabel is often held up as the optimal example of greatest and most depressing disparity between score and show.
Musical-theatre historian John Kenrick (of musicals101.com) wrote that Herman “has often been taken for granted… this gifted songwriter would never try to reform the musical theatre; he settled for creating some of its most tuneful, heartfelt expressions of the human condition.”1 Herman is too close to being a guilty pleasure. Musical theatre - indeed, theatre in general - doesn’t have to be dark and discordant to be good.
If you were creating a 20th-century identikit musical-theatre genius, you might choose the boxes marked New York, Jewish and gay. And lo! In July 1931, Gerald Herman was born in New York to a nice middle-class Jewish couple.2 And, whatever the combination of Nature and Nurture, he was certainly gay in the world of 1950s New York City cabaret and revue.
Making his way steadily up the ladder, Herman really came to attention in 1960 with the Off-Broadway revue Parade and his contributions to the Broadway revue From A to Z. Despite or because of Hermione Gingold, the latter closed within three weeks but nobody blamed Herman. In the former, ‘Jolly Theatrical Season’ reviewed the brilliant and thoroughly gloomy offerings on Broadway:
“Chayefsky’s Tenth Man is a riotous revel / A Long Island girl is possessed by the devil.”
Almost none of which suggests that his first Broadway show would be a musical about Israel, but Milk and Honey (1961) it was. When it opened, Israel had been in existence for only thirteen years (no thanks to its neighbours) and had great emotional resonance for New York audiences, many of whom were or knew Holocaust survivors. “Herman’s music was a bit light,” thought Ethan Mordden, because Herman “didn’t do atmosphere.”3 He did write emotion and character, however, with “eloquently basic” lyrics such as the title song, sung here by the wonderful triple threat Tommy Rall:
“This is the place where the hopes of the homeless
And the dreams of the lost combine
This is the land that heaven blessed and
This lovely land is mine
What if the earth is dry and barren
What if the morning sun is mean to us for
This is a state of mind we live in
We want it green and so it's green to us for
When you have wonderful plans for tomorrow
Somehow even today looks fine”
Israel did indeed make the desert bloom, but with lyrics like “how about the border where the Syrians attack? / How about the Arab with his rifle at your back?” I don’t imagine Milk and Honey will be back on Broadway anytime soon.
Herman hit the stratosphere with his next show, an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s (very good) play The Matchmaker. The thing about Hello, Dolly! (1964) is that much of the credit goes to librettist Michael Stewart, choreographer Gower Champion and whoever plays Dolly, with Herman slightly lost in the mix (possibly because some of the score was by divers hands).4 And, really, the title song is by a load of waiters greeting a diner they haven’t seen for a while; is that a great number? Well yes it is, even if you don’t imagine the cakewalking waiters and the actress essentially bullying the audience into an ovation. It has what would become the Herman touch, building irresistibly into a vaguely pentecostal act of worship. This is distilled musical theatre: splashy, bombastic, melodic, jaunty and exclamatory.5
There is much to love in the score: ‘Before the Parade Passes By,’ the exuberance of ‘Put On Your Sunday Clothes’ and ‘Penny in my Pocket’, cut from the original but restored for the latest (Bette Midler) revival and sung here at the Tony Awards by David Hyde Pierce.
“Put on your Sunday clothes, there's lots of world out there
Get out the brilliantine and dime cigars
We're gonna find adventure in the evening air
Girls in white
In a perfumed night
Where the lights are bright as the stars!”
That so effectively captures the giddiness of a young swell eager for a joyous (but affordable) night on the town that one immediately wants to give him a fiver for a drink.6
Herman contributed a couple of songs to Ben Franklin in Paris (1964) and then moved on to HIS show, Mame (1966), based on Auntie Mame, one of the few books I didn’t finish because the title character was so ghastly. Fortunately the magic of musical theatre transformed her into charmingly eccentric rather than monstrously selfish, helped no doubt (as everything is) by Angela Lansbury. “She’s for freedom,” wrote Mordden, “scattered and wilful and even manipulative: but she’s always right, because she’s always fair.”7
“If you don’t leave the theatre whistling the tunes,” wrote Mark Steyn of Herman, “it’s not for lack of effort on his part. His trademark is the splashy production number, with a Busby Berkeley appetite for repeat choruses and all the tricks in the book - spare orchestration, then the whole band; vocal solo, then full company; dance break, double time, slow it down, speed it up, and hammer it home in a high-stepping, slam-bang, triple-rhymed finale: in the words of Mame’s Dixie belles,
We’re baking pecan pies again,
Tonight the chicken fries again,
This time the South will rise again,
Mame!”8
Again: the title song is a multi-minute act of worship to the leading lady. Dolly and Mame are by no means the same show but the eponymous characters would hardly look out of place in the pantheon as demi-goddesses of Improving Others’ Lives Through Sheer Vitality.
It’s amazing what can be found on YouTube. The link above is to Ginger Rogers in the 1969 London production and, truly, if you have any musical theatre in your soul then it is surely worth six minutes of your time.
Elsewhere in the score, everyone loves ‘Bosom Buddies’ (“how old do you think?” / “oh, I’d say somewhere in between forty and death”), especially the Marie’s Crisis crowd9, but my favourite number is the introspective ‘If He Walked Into My Life’:
“Were his days a little dull?
Were his nights a little wild?
Did I overstate my plan?
Did I stress the man?
And forget the child.
And there must have been a million things
That my heart forgot to say.
Would I think of one or two,
If he walked into my life today.”
That’s about a generation gap and is true to life on its own terms, but it’s also about those relationships that somehow, no-one knows how, didn’t quite work out. One picks through the threads, wondering just what happened, how and if it could have been different.
Mame is musical comedy in the classic tradition, conventional in its construction and presentation of an unconventional - but harmlessly unconventional - character. There are plenty of worse shows that have been successfully revived, which makes its absence all the more puzzling. Sutton Foster could do it, or Audra McDonald or, best of all, Kelli O’Hara. And presumably Imelda Staunton would do it over here.
That rings down the curtain on the first half. After the interval, in a very musical theatre way, three flops and one grand triumphant finish.
Kenrick, Musical Theatre: A History, pp310-11
In March 1930, Stephen Sondheim was born in New York to a nice middle-class Jewish couple. One tries to imagine the results if each had written the other’s shows; one struggles.
Mordden, Open a New Window (the title is a song from Mame)
And, by his own admission, scared by those talents and by the notorious producer David Merrick.
I should say that this is not the only acceptable distillation of musical theatre. Not everything need be baubles, bangles and beads.
I realise that in London 2024 a fiver would get you nowhere, but adjust as necessary.
Mordden, op cit
Steyn, Broadway Babies Say Goodnight
Two great ladies of American theatre, Angela Lansbury and Bea Arthur, who made fortunes on TV in the 1980s in Murder, She Wrote and The Golden Girls respectively. Such is life.