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I. Youth and inspiration

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- So his full name is Gerald Sheldon Herman

- He was born on July 10, 1931 in Manhattan and raised in Jersey City, New Jersey,
the only child of musically inclined, middle-class Jewish parents.

- Herman's father Harry was a gym teacher and his mother Ruth was a singer,
pianist, and children's teacher. They became head counselors at a camp in the
Berkshire mountains →slide
when Jerry was young and he spent all his summer in the camp from 4 to 23 years
old. He was directing the show → slide
and as a first experience in musical theater It was the best because he said he
learned from the greatest like Rodgers and Hammerstein, Arthur schwartz.

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- And so one night his parents took him to show who was going to change his life

→Vidéo 1m20

- Hethel Merman and Irving Berlin became two big inspirations in Jerry’s work after
that.
- The clarity and joy that is the hallmark of an Irving Berlin song is clearly Jerry’s
greatest influence.
- As you can also in the video Herman had a natural gift for music. He could hear a
melody and reproduce It on the piano just by the ear. He never really studied the
music but he was able to recreate feelings and emotions instinctively on a piano.

=> so everything is reunited to make jerry a great composer, family of musician, a natural gift
for music, several years of experiences in his parents camp but though after highschool he
decided to go for design studies. But his mother was not really convinced about it…

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→ He left the Parsons School of Design to attend the University of Miami, which has one of
the nation's most avant garde theater departments.
II. Broadway debut

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a) Off-Broadway

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- Following his graduation from the University of Miami in 1953, Herman moved to
New York City, where he produced the Off-Broadway revue I Feel Wonderful (1954),
which was made up of material he had written at the university It ran for 48
performances.

- He then contributed several songs to a successful revue, Nightcap (1958), and more
to Madame Aphrodite and From A to Z, which were not so fortunate. By 1960 Jerry
Herman had put together enough of his own material to create a revue entirely his
→ slide own called Parade and drew the attention of producer Gerard Oestreicher.

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b) Milk and Honey

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- The result was his first full-fledged Broadway musical, Milk and Honey in 1961.

- The show, about American tourists in Israel, starred Robert Weede, Mimi Benzell
and Molly Picon. It received respectable reviews, was nominated for a Tony award,
and ran for 543 performances.

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III. Golden Age

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a) Hello Dolly

→ So Jerry started to have a name on broadway.

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 - Producer David Merrick wants to create a musical based on Thornton Wilder’s
comedy The Matchmaker → slide and think of him to write the music. But after “Milk
and Honey” he is afraid that Herman would be too “exotic”. So to prove him wrong he
locked himself for a weekend and he wrote four songs and presented them to
Merrick on the next monday.

→Vidéo 4m32

- And it was the beginning of “Hello, Dolly!”: → slide

The story of a wealthy owner, Horace Vandergelder, too busy to find a wife, who
turns to Dolly to choose the right girl for him. It doesn't take much for Dolly, a widow
for several years, to see this as an unexpected opportunity to start a new life and
finally acquire the security she is seeking in vain.

- Herman wrote the role for Hethel Merman but she announced at that time that she
wanted to stop her career. →slide Carol Channing created the role.

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- Hello, Dolly! ran for 2,844 performances, the longest running musical for its time,
and was later revived three times. Although facing stiff competition from Funny Girl,
iT swept the Tony Awards that season, winning 10, a record that remained
unbroken for 37 years. "Hello, Dolly!" was a #1 hit in the United States for Louis
Armstrong, knocking The Beatles from #1 in 1964 after a 14-week run at the top. The
popularity of the work became worldwide due to the filmed version, produced in
1969 by Gene Kelly, with Barbra Streisand and Louis Armstrong.

→Vidéo fun fact = Hethel Merman got to take the part when the original team was on tour in
the US.

b) Mame →slide

- After Hello, Dolly! Jerry turned his attention to the musical version of Lawrence and
Lee’s popular play Auntie Mame based upon the best-selling novel by Patrick
Dennis.
- Mame tells the story of Roaring Twenties socialite Mame Dennis, who teaches her
orphaned nephew the nature of free living and free thinking.

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- During a show of “Anyone can whistle” he saw Angela Lansbury on stage and fell in
love with her. He secretly worked with her before the audition and played the piano
for her. It worked.
The resulting show, Mame, was another Broadway smash, another great star part that
would be played on Broadway and around the world. Mame played 1,508 performances on
Broadway and won Tonys® for both Angela Lansbury and Beatrice Arthur.

→Vidéo

IV. Hard times →slide

At this point, Jerry had written three Broadway shows and had three Broadway hits. He is
fond of saying, “Was I spoiled! I thought you just wrote a musical and it ran for seven years.”
He was about to discover that this was not always the case. The 70’s for him was a bit of
a crisis.

a) Dear World → slide

- His next show in 1969 reunited him with Mame librettists Jerome Lawrence and
Robert E. Lee, and star Angela Lansbury. Dear World was based upon Jean
Giradoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot and it ran 132 performances.

- Tastes in popular music were changing. The advent of the rock musical

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Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar and the sharp-edged work of Stephen Sondheim
were among the elements of an evolving Broadway arena. Broadway musicals were
breaking down barriers and new musical theater styles were emerging.

- Though Dear World, while being a failure, contains some of Jerry’s most
sophisticated and deeply felt work.

→Vidéo

b) Mack and Mabel →slide

- Jerry Herman returned to Broadway five years later with another musical comedy
inspired by the affair between director Mack Sennett and his star Mabel Normand, in
the Time of Silent Cinema, which opened on October 6, 1974.
- Despite the presence of two favorite actors of the general public, Robert Preston, and
Bernadette Peters, the play collapsed after only 65 performances.

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 - MACK & MABEL’s book hasn’t satisfied audiences, but it received a Best Musical
Tony nomination and Herman said that It was his favorite musical follow close by
“La cage aux folles”

c) Le Grand Tour →slide

- The ’70s continued to prove disappointing with The Grand Tour in 1979. Adaptation
from Franz Werfel’s Jacobowsky and the Colonel play.

- It is the story of an intellectual Jewish Pole, owner of a car who doesn't know how to
drive, and of an aristocratic and anti-Semitic colonel who knows how to drive but who
does not have a car, and their relationship when they try to flee the advance of Nazi
forces on Paris.

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- The failure of The Grand Tour, his third in a row, was devastating, leaving Jerry
wondering whether he should continue to write.

For many in Broadway theater circles, Jerry Herman is at the end of his rope and some
agree that his career is over. Two friends, Alexander H. Cohen and director Tommy Tune,
from Baltimore where their show A Day in Hollywood / A Night in the Ukraine was trying out,
resulted in Jerry writing three “special material” numbers for the show. He got his best
reviews in a decade for those songs. His renewed interest in his work reminded him of how
much he loved the theater, and he began actively looking for a new property.

V. The Resurrection : La cage aux folles →slide

- He found it one afternoon in a movie theater in Los Angeles where he saw the
French film La Cage Aux Folles de Jean Poiret. Watching that film he knew that
this would have to be the basis for his next musical.

- La cage tells the story of a middle-aged, gay couple – Renato Baldi, the owner of a
Saint-Tropez nightclub, and Albin Mougeotte, his star attraction – and the madness
that ensues when Renato's son Laurent brings home his fiancée Andrea and her
ultra-conservative parents to meet them.

- debuted on August 21, 1983 and ran for 1,761 performances. The piece found a
wide audience, particularly among homosexual circles who identified with the key
 song, "I Am What I Am". Moreover, the play, which is performed all over the world,
had two sparkling revivals on Broadway in 2004 and 2010.

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- It was the first hit Broadway musical about a gay couple. “ It arrived during the
height of the AIDS epidemic and helped put gay life into the cultural mainstream at a
time when many gay men were being stigmatized."

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La Cage aux Folles was a blast for the composer who declared, “It’s one of those shows
where all the elements seem to have found their place to form a coherent whole. We all had
the same desire to work together and, as a result, all the ideas we brought up seemed to hit
the mark and get everyone's approval. Harvey Fierstein and I worked from day one with
Arthur Laurents, who was responsible for directing, and it was an ideal way to work. We
didn’t have to redo this or that scene to satisfy the demands of a director, but we were
working with a man who had a clear idea of ​what he wanted to do and what we could give
him.”

VI. End of life →slide

a) end of career → slide

- A revue, Jerry's Girls, "a pastiche" of his work, on Broadway from December 1985
to April 1986.

- No new material emerged until a two-hour musical for CBS television in 1996, Mrs.
Santa Claus, starring Angela Lansbury.

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- a ninety-minute documentary on PBS 2008, and an important plot pivot in the 2008
film WALL-E.

- Jerry Herman will occasionally present an evening of his own songs, as he did in An
Evening With Jerry Herman at the Booth Theatre on Broadway in 1998.
- A “concept album” recorded in 1999, Miss Spectacular, is a new Jerry Herman
musical with an all-star cast, intended for Las Vegas but not yet produced.

→Vidéo
 b) Impact

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- Like other writers who see their work go out of fashion, Jerry Herman has survived to
see his work return to be embraced by critics and audiences who grew to doubt him.
Even songs from the scores that were previously dismissed have become
contemporary standards around the world. Like other artists who do what they do
over a long period of time and don’t bend to fashion or trends, Jerry has stayed true
to his inspirations. To put it simply, he is what he is.

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“There is never an evening when somewhere in the world, Jerry’s music and lyrics
are not being sung by a lady with a bugle and a lady in a red headdress descending
their respective staircases. “

- “The Best of Times” is not simply a song from La Cage Aux Folles, it is a reflection
of what the Broadway musical theater was like in the ’50s and ’60s and what Jerry
Herman was lucky enough to be a part of.

- In a rapidly evolving artistic world, Jerry Herman was one of the last representatives
of what is commonly called the golden age of American musical comedy. His
songs, written in a simple and endearing style, mostly inspired by an optimism which
says a lot about the nature of their composer, reluctant to explore the darkest corners
of human nature, but happy to be able to celebrate his joy of life. Even today, we
enjoy listening to tunes like these which all testify to an exuberance and drive traits of
a composer for whom life, despite the setbacks it may involve, was worth living...

→Vidéo 11m56

Herman was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1985.

He died at a hospital in Miami on December 26, 2019, at age 88.

→Vidéo 13m39