Topsy-Turvy: Separate Paths Since the Early 1970s (2024)

Philip Lambert

There were outward signs in the early 1970s that the songwriting partnership of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick had survived the tensions and difficulties of their latest show. When Max Wilk interviewed them (separately) in 1971, as The Rothschilds and Fiddler on the Roof continued to play on Broadway, they spoke as members of a team. Reflecting on these conversations in his book on American popular songwriters, Wilk summarized Bock’s and Harnick’s attitudes toward the future: “And so, for two craftsmen, who wish to exercise their considerable talents to enrich the American theater, … the search for their next project goes on.”1Close In 1971, 1972, and 1973 Bock and Harnick wrote satirical songs for Mayor John Lindsay to sing at the annual Inner Circle dinner for New York political reporters, upholding a tradition they began in 1966.2Close In October 1972 they sang three of their songs, one newly written, for a theatrical gala organized to raise money for the McGovern–Shriver presidential campaign.3Close And they appeared together to help celebrate special events, including the premiere of the film version of Fiddler on the Roof on November 3, 1971, and milestones for the first stage run of Fiddler on July 21, 1971 (longest-running musical) and June 17, 1972 (longest-running Broadway show), before it established the record for longevity with its final performance on July 2, 1972.4Close

But these were only public faces, masking different private realities: issues of team survival were too fresh and unsettled to share with an interviewer in 1971; at this point they could write songs for political revues with minimal effort, perhaps even minimal personal contact; it is easy to smile for photographs on a red carpet. The truth is, Bock and Harnick were drawn increasingly apart during this time. They had stopped discussing new project possibilities, stopped thinking as a team. “Jerry and I were furious with each other and really didn’t speak for years,” Harnick reflected in 1990. “For a while the feelings between us were very bad.”5Close They have acknowledged no defining moment of separation, no tempestuous meeting or icy phone call that became a critical turning point, just a gradual parting of ways. “Jerry and I kind of drifted apart and never managed to drift back together,” Harnick told an interviewer in 1985.6Close More than two decades later, Bock remembered it the same way: “It’s not that we said we would never work together again. We just needed to take some time away from each other.”7Close

Relations did begin to improve in 1985, when the former partners worked side-by-side once again to help fine-tune a production of Fiorello! at the Goodspeed Opera House. “Thank God we have ongoing business with the productions that we’ve written,” Harnick said in 1990.8Close After that they continued to serve as creative advisors for important new productions of their shows in many venues, most notably the Broadway revivals of Fiddler on the Roof in 1990 and 2004, She Loves Me in 1993, and The Apple Tree in 2006. They have shared stages numerous times to accept joint honors and awards, and in 2008 Harnick was on hand to help celebrate Bock’s eightieth birthday with the Encompass New Opera Theater at the National Arts Club in New York. But their reconciliation stopped short of a new major collaboration. Harnick has said that he has proposed new large projects to Bock on several occasions but failed to arouse his friend’s interest.9Close Bock has seemed open to new suggestions but ultimately unwilling to retrace old steps. “I’m sorry we’re not writing together,” Harnick said in 2003. “This is his choice.”10Close They have worked together as a songwriting team only once since the early 1970s, to write the song “Topsy-Turvy” for the 2004 Fiddler. “It felt like yesterday,” Bock told an interviewer.11Close “Once we started, it was as if we’d never stopped writing together. We wrote it in a few days.”12Close

We can never know all the forces that conspired to break up one of Broadway’s most celebrated songwriting teams after fourteen years and a string of distinguished contributions to the American musical theater. Certainly, the conflicts that arose about the creative leadership of Her First Roman and The Rothschilds in the late 1960s were important factors. But as Bock explained in 2008, “The back of the camel had been weakened by other straws along the way, so that The Rothschilds straw broke a vulnerable back, not one broken by a sudden blow.” Perhaps he was referring to conflicts that had arisen earlier in the decade, during discussions they had about writing an opera and working outside the partnership, not long before Harnick announced a collaboration with Burton Lane in 1968 (see chapter 8). In any event, by the early 1970s both were ready for new professional challenges. Bock was eager to write both words and music, having nothing left to prove as the composer half of a songwriting team. Harnick was interested in exploring other forms of musical-dramatic expression besides the Broadway musical. And it is no mere coincidence that their attitudes evolved during the time when Fiddler on the Roof was emerging as a certifiable phenomenon: exploration had become a luxury that they could now afford. Having reached a whole new level of personal and professional comfort, they could be more selective, more reflective. Put another way, their earlier successes may have depended on a certain hunger, born of youthful ambition and financial necessity, that had now been essentially satisfied. The tale of their partnership is a reminder that the creation and production of a work of musical theater entails an extraordinary convergence of diverse creative spirits, complex logistical forces, and deep cultural insight, and that the experience of creating any financially successful show on Broadway, let alone a Fiddler on the Roof, is enough to strike a chord of satisfaction in its creators that reverberates long and far.

As Bock and Harnick moved on to new projects in new arenas with new collaborators in the decades since their partnership dissolved, neither found the same success working alone or with other partners that they once enjoyed working with each other. Their personal chemistry, the compatibility of their artistic sensibilities, have proven to be rare and elusive commodities. Like other great songwriting teams, or like consortia of great scientists or athletes, their individual creative energies coalesced into some magical whole that was somehow greater than the sum of its extraordinarily talented parts. Although it is not a requirement, they happened to be good friends as well. We are left to ponder the formidable lists of distinguished works produced by songwriting partnerships with greater longevity—Rodgers and Hart, Kander and Ebb—and imagine what might have been. There is plenty left to celebrate, but it is a celebration tinged with regret. It is easy to sympathize with Harnick’s own sentiments in 1999: “Every time I see one of our shows, I realize we had something special, and it saddens me.”13Close

Bock and Bock

Jerry Bock’s interest in writing his own lyrics has been constant throughout his life. Even while writing songs with assorted friends in high school and college, with Larry Holofcener and George Weiss in the 1950s, and with Sheldon Harnick after that, he was also serving as his own lyricist for dozens of independent songs not connected to a particular show or project.14Close In the 1970s, then, as he and his long-time partner drifted apart, Bock followed a natural impulse to expand his solo efforts. As he said in 2008, “the experience and approval from peers gave me the heart to write by myself rather than with a new partner, as had been my instinct to do so since unpartnering with Sheldon.” Bock first worked on individual songs and groups of songs that told stories or explored themes. While he has kept these efforts mostly private, in recent decades he also began to develop new, more visible projects for the musical theater, including two major musicals that somehow veered away from paths to Broadway, and, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a very successful series of musicals for young audiences.

In the Studio

Some of Bock’s private songs from the 1970s are as much personal explorations as they are musical creations. In 1972 he recorded what he calls a concept album entitled Album Leaves, and in 1974 another, Trading Dreams. These are attempts at “telling a story through songs only.”15CloseAlbum Leaves, for example, is undisguised autobiography, a series of songs sung by Bock himself, backed by a small band, that traces the composer’s life story from early childhood through young adulthood. It begins with an introductory song, “Album Leaves,” that establishes both an ambience for the collection and a musical theme that recurs as connective material in several of the songs to come. On subsequent tracks we learn about his first exposure to some important life lessons (“Utopia”), friendships (“Trio [Willie, George, and Me]”), memories of his father (“Travelin’ Salesman”), memories of his mother and grandmother (“Piano Man”), rites of passage (“Birthday Party”), adolescent crushes (“Proposal”), the magic of musical discovery (“Lis Nin’ To Music”), the comforts of love and family (“Home Towns”), and the commitment of matrimony (“The Marriage Band”). The album closes with a final reprise of the opening song. The styles of the songs are mostly consonant with the time period being surveyed: Bock explores not only his own personal history but also the sounds and colors of his musical upbringing in the language of show tunes and classic jazz.

The songs in Album Leaves show that indeed Bock is a capable lyricist and is as comfortable with wordplay as he is with shaping a melodic line or inventing a soundscape. In “Proposal,” for example, the protagonist finds himself helplessly smitten with two equally alluring sisters. He can think of no solution but to have them both:

In “Home Towns” he finds “home” wherever he is enveloped by love and family:

The most affecting song in the collection is “Piano Man,” in which Bock reminisces about the baby grand in his childhood home and hours spent entertaining his mother and grandmother. Accompanied by a cascading triplet riff, sounding like figures from a Czerny etude dipped in Fats Waller, Bock paints a vivid scene of music and family:

Eventually the song recalls the day “a Rose began to fade” and the grandson played for her one last time “in a place where people prayed.” It is through the love and support of his family, the lyric explains, that he was eventually able to become a true “Piano Man.”

In Album Leaves Bock essentially offers an explanation for a reputation he has earned since 1970 for avoiding the spotlight of public attention. He is more comfortable, the album seems to say, expressing himself in song than in a speech or interview. If he has a story to tell, he will let his music do the talking. His other private compositions from the 1970s and ’80s likewise tell colorful tales of creative exploration and expansion. Although some of the songs were reportedly written for a songwriting competition or television show, they have remained stored in Bock’s proverbial trunk until recently, when he began to collect and organize them for digital preservation.16Close These songs range across the spectrum, from basic ballads (“We Are One,” “Write Me a Love Song”) to a bossa nova (“Like Our Love”), a gospel anthem (“Lord, Lift the Ark”), and an anti-materialistic Christmas song (“A Christmas Present”).17Close In a CD compilation Bock has called Noblesse O’ Blues, also Bounty of Blues, he offers eight takes on classic jazz, employing figures and feels of typical blues numbers (but not using twelve-bar blues progressions).18Close Accompanied only by himself at the piano, he sings about blues traditions (“They Don’t Write Blues,” to a honky-tonk beat), self-examination (“Mirror, Mirror Blues,” a cabaret-style ballad), lost love (“We Spell Blue,” an up-tempo belter), loneliness (“Still Blue,” a tear-drenched torch song), the comfort of the blues in the face of romantic loss (“Noblesse O’ Blues,” a defiant up-tempo minor-key show tune), waiting for love (“Lemon and Lime Blues,” a melancholy ballad), remembrance of past love (“Anniversary Blues,” recalling early riff-based blues), and finally redemption (“No Blues No More,” another throwback, with a strong scent of ragtime).19Close Overall the collection leaves the strong impression that a need to sing, play, and write in the style of classic jazz has finally burst forth after years of semi-dormancy, a tendency we may have already detected anyway in earlier Bock songs such as “Too Close For Comfort” (Mr. Wonderful, 1956), “Just My Luck” (The Body Beautiful, 1958), “Since I’ve Been To You,” (recorded by Ethel Ennis in 1964), “Popsicles in Paris” (To Broadway with Love, 1964), and “I’ve Got What You Want” and “Tiger, Tiger” (The Apple Tree, 1966).

Yet another private compilation from the 1970s, possibly extending into the early 1980s, consists entirely of solo piano music in triple meter, a focused exploration of the waltz and its metric brethren. Bock calls it Three/Four All. The song titles alone capture a sense of the rich character and humor of the collection:

All work independently as piano pieces—collected together like a set of character pieces by Chopin or Schumann—but some could also be songs awaiting (or missing) a lyric. Stylistically they either rest comfortably in, or comment provocatively on, jazz and so are companions to Noblesse O’ Blues. The title of the sixth track, “Gershlude” may offer a clue to Bock’s overall inspiration for the collection, in its hint at Gershwin’s Three Preludes for Piano (1926). To an even greater extent than Gershwin’s preludes, Bock’s collection explores boundaries of style, as in “Der Rosie’s Cavalier,” where he takes figures suggesting a waltz by Johann Strauss II and morphs them into swing-era syncopations. In “You Bah B’Dah,” similarly, ragtime struggles to disrupt the facade of an ordinary waltz. Indeed the interaction, sometimes competition, between clichés from different stylistic traditions emerges as a theme for the entire collection. On a page kept among an assortment of papers in his archive, Bock seems to have been considering different, revelatory titles for the collection: “Welcome Intrusions” or “The Welcome Intruder (A Fable of Waltzes).”20Close

Musical Theater and Film

Bock continued with his private explorations throughout the 1970s and ’80s. In 1990 he told an interviewer that he was “writing words and music for a performance piece on the theme of food.” “It’s not a musical, as such,” explained Bock; “I’m inventing the form as I go along.”21Close But during those same years he was equally focused on writing music for the public arena, potentially the Broadway stage. His first major post-Harnick theatrical project originated in the early 1970s—probably while The Rothschilds was still playing on Broadway—with Stuart Ostrow, the Apple Tree producer who had recently produced the successful musical 1776 (1969). Perhaps inspired by Anthony Schaffer’s popular award-winning play Sleuth (which opened on November 12, 1970), Ostrow had begun to conceive a “murder-mystery-musical” he called Caper. To write the book he had recruited the novelist Evan Hunter (also known as the author of popular mystery novels, under the name of Ed McBain), and he had at first made an agreement with Richard Rodgers to write the music. Bock got involved, to write both music and lyrics, when Ostrow learned that Bock was open to projects without Harnick, and in light of what seemed to be a lack of enthusiasm by Rodgers. As Ostrow told the New York Times when the creative team was announced in May 1973, the challenge was to use music “in a way that helps to make the suspense mount.” The problem, said Hunter, is that “suspense and mystery seem to disappear the minute someone opens his mouth to sing.”22Close Their solution was to create a “protagonist [who] is progressively endangered when singing each new musical number and is ultimately put to death by the musical’s finale.” The project fizzled, however, when Hunter withdrew after “many unsuccessful book attempts,” recalls Ostrow. Even so, Bock had written a number of songs for the show, and Ostrow still, in 2009, had not lost hope for bringing the concept to fruition.23Close

Bock continued to imagine projects for the big stage and at one point tried to interest Joe Masteroff in a musical adaptation of the Oscar-winning Danish film Babettes Gæstebud (known in America as Babette’s Feast, 1987). Instead of a musical, however, Bock’s next public project after Caper was the score for a film, Sidney Lumet’s A Stranger Among Us (1992). He got involved with this effort in the early 1990s through the film’s orchestrator, his old friend Jack Elliott, who had done dance arrangements for the original productions of Fiorello! and Tenderloin and had arranged incidental music for the original score of She Loves Me.24Close In the years since, Elliott had worked extensively in television and film. The project seemed a natural fit for Bock: the story is set in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn and features scenes of religious services, Sabbath prayers, and Jewish traditions. Naturally, many of his melodies for the film feature raised fourths and lowered sevenths, and Elliott’s orchestrations echo Klezmer traditions, picking up where the Fiddler dance music left off. A scene showing a Sabbath meal essentially comments on the parallel scene in Fiddler, underscored with a melody based on the Ahavah rabbah mode (see Example 6.7a). One of the film’s central ideas is the cultural contrast between the Hasidim and the New York around them, as seen through the eyes of a gritty (and non-Jewish) New York police detective (played by Melanie Griffith). Bock’s music supports this idea just as his score for The Rothschilds portrays the emergence of Jewish outsiders within the European aristocracy. As the detective becomes more and more aware of Hasidic laws and traditions, and more and more immersed in the community—she lives with the Rebbe’s family in order to solve a murder—clichés of Jewish music become more and more integrated into the soundtrack. At the beginning of the film there is a clear separation between the straight-ahead soft jazz style of New York at large and the Klezmer sounds of the Hasidim, but by the end, with the murder solved and the detective enlightened, the two sound worlds have merged. The underscoring of the final scene, when the detective displays her new understanding and appreciation to a Jewish colleague on the force, accomplishes this within just a few beats, moving from the main title theme in basic jazz style to a figure that mixes the lowered third and raised fourth of the Mi shebberakh mode (Example 6.7b) with the raised seventh of major or harmonic minor, rising upward through three octaves, nearly re-creating the ending of the first act of The Rothschilds (see Example 8.4b).

For the remainder of the 1990s Bock held Broadway aspirations for a major musical about the tax code. He was first approached with the idea in late 1991 or early 1992 by Jerry Sterner, playwright of the 1989 off-Broadway hit (and later a hit movie) Other People’s Money. Sterner had already tried to develop the concept with the songwriting team of Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire, who had recently written an off-Broadway revue, Closer Than Ever, but eventually decided to change collaborators and attracted Bock’s interest.25Close Sterner and Bock developed book and songs throughout 1992 and 1993, brought an accomplished director, Jerry Zaks, on board, and seemed destined for a Broadway opening sometime in 1994 or 1995.26Close For one reason or another, however, the project remained in development until 1997, when Stuart Ostrow agreed to present a workshop version in Houston, Texas. Ostrow had joined the Theater faculty of the University of Houston in 1995 and had relocated and revived his Musical Theater Lab, a support program for fledgling musicals that he had started in New York in the mid-1970s.27Close Once called Washington, D. C., finally 1040, the musical premiered in workshop form in Houston on November 14, 1997. The story concerned “a middle-aged real-estate mogul and his estranged daughter who become key players in the campaign to reform the tax code. Along the way, they salvage their relationship, the mogul finds his conscience and the daughter grows up emotionally.”28Close

With four scheduled performances, however, and under the aegis of something called a Musical Theater Lab, the idea was to shape and mold the show into something with a commercial future. This never happened, reportedly, because Sterner and Ostrow could not agree on further revisions. According to Ostrow, Sterner had already made substantial changes prior to the opening, to focus more on the father-daughter relationship, but refused to revise the script further during the four workshop performances. After that the creative team dissolved and Sterner developed his script into a non-musical play that was tepidly received at the Rich Forum of the Stamford (Connecticut) Center for the Arts in November 1998. (Variety [1/4/99–1/10/99]: “If Sterner believes that 1040 is less about tax reform than about a father-daughter relationship, the playwright has to build up the characters of Murray and Emily and explore their relationship more fully.”) Bock’s extensive score, consisting of around twenty musical numbers or scenes, languished after that.29Close This, Ostrow said in 2009, is a shame: “Jerry Bock wrote a wonderful score trying to put a pink sequined gown on a girl who hadn’t bathed.”

The Houston experience did have one providential byproduct, however. While on location for the 1040 premiere in 1997 Bock became acquainted with another member of the school’s Theater faculty, Sidney Berger, who ran a professional summer Children’s Theater Festival and was ever watchful for new material. When Berger learned of the children’s songs that Bock had written decades earlier, released in 1963 as New Songs We Sing in School (see chapter 4), he proposed to write a libretto for a new musical molded around the existing songs. Bock agreed, and eventually wrote two new songs for the show as well, and the result, known as The Magic Journey, “about a guardian angel looking after several runaway children,” premiered in Houston in the summer of 2000.30Close The show was a success, but it was still essentially a revue, and Bock was inspired to return to Houston the following summer and collaborate with Berger on an entirely new book musical for children, Danny and the Dragon, based on an original story by Berger, with music and lyrics by Bock. This also played well, and Bock and Berger continued to write children’s shows together for subsequent summers, eventually creating seven new mini-musicals between 2000 and 2007:

Story ideas for the shows originated with Berger, who would typically send Bock a first draft of a script in December and then collaborate long distance through the winter and spring. Bock wrote both lyrics and music for all of the songs. Their last two shows addressed themes of sensitivity and disability: in The Land of Broken Toys, a disabled boy’s toys teach him how to rise above his physical limitations; in The Princess Who Could Not Be Heard, a deaf princess who is rejected by her own family because of her hearing disability finds acceptance among circus performers.32Close

Their third effort, Brandon Finds His Star (2002), about a pair of unlikely space travelers who learn to accept themselves as they are, has found its way into the catalogue of Music Theater International (which also licenses Bock–Harnick shows) and so has the potential for wider visibility.33Close Its score holds no surprises: the music is witty and colorful and saturated with Bockisms. In “When You Find Your Star,” raised fourths and flatted sevenths call to mind “This is Love” (Example 1.1c), “Ethel Baby” (Mr. Wonderful), “Lovely Laurie” (cut from Tenderloin), and the Rothschilds “music box” tune (Example 8.4). In “The Wizard of Ahhhs,” triplet figures surrounding step 5 with ♯4 and ♭6 echo the Hungarian flavorings of “A Romantic Atmosphere” and the verse of “A Trip to the Library” from She Loves Me. “The Blue Planetarian Blues” features a chromatic lament bass line that revives a thematic element of The Apple Tree, especially bluesier numbers such as “I’ve Got What You Want” and “Tiger, Tiger” (see Example 7.5), not to forget some of the songs in the more recent Noblesse O’ Blues collection. The composer’s familiar facility with stylistic appropriation is on display in “Spanglish,” which moves back and forth between a tango and a rumba. Lyric highlights include “Sing a Song of Planets,” a patter song that serves as a learning aid for the planets of the solar system, and “When You Find Your Star,” a touching ballad about personal identity (“Racing through the skies / Searching for a star / Seems so very far to roam / Then you find your star and know at last / Stars are often found at home”).

Bock embraced each project for the children’s theater festival with full professional commitment. “Jerry treats the festival as he would a Broadway production,” Berger has said.34Close But it was not an unlikely passion for a composer of Bock’s experience and ability, then well into his seventies. Clearly he had found a collaborator, and a supportive professional environment, that motivated and inspired him with no less intensity than a weekly revue at Tamiment or a pre-Broadway tryout in Boston. Although the festival shut down after the 2008 season, Bock and Berger continued to discuss possible projects together, now aiming towards adult audiences in prominent venues, possibly leading to an opening on Broadway. As Stuart Ostrow said of both Bock and Harnick in 2009, “the best is yet to come.”

Harnickiana

If the early lives and professional evolutions of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick were striking in their similarities, the paths they followed since their last major collaboration in 1970 are just as striking for their contrasts. While Bock has worked quietly in his studio year after year, Harnick has pursued and embraced a visible public presence. He has become the spokesman for his former team and has welcomed opportunities to monitor and advise and promote new productions of their work across the globe. At the same time he has nurtured a robust creative drive by exploring all corners of dramatic music, from traditional musical theater to animated television shows to grand opera. He has worked not just as a lyricist, with a variety of new collaborators, but also as a translator, librettist, and composer. He has become a distinguished elder statesman of the dramatic musical arts and a prominent, distinctive voice in American culture of the last decades of the twentieth century and beyond.

Table 9.1 organizes Harnick’s work since the late 1960s into five areas of activity, starting in the left column with a flurry of translations in the 1970s and ’80s. The second category/column represents a wholly new passion, opera, beginning with his librettos with Jack Beeson in the 1970s and including works large and small, plus one cantata with Joe Raposo in 1980. The remaining columns in the table consist of projects that flow more directly from Harnick’s earlier work in the musical theater, although his creative roles vary. For the works listed in the third column he assumed his customary role as lyricist only, but for the next group (column four) he wrote both book and lyrics, and in the final column are two musical theater projects in which he did everything himself—music, book, and lyrics. The table also includes, for the sake of completeness, his first book musical, the project he began with David Baker and Ira Wallach in 1953, earlier known as The Fair-Haired Boy, or Horatio, or Smiling the Boy Fell Dead, and finally called Pluck and Luck, or the ABC’s of Success, because Harnick returned to it in 2004 (see chapter 2).35Close It straddles the third and fourth columns, reflecting his recent involvement with the book as well as the lyrics.

These are just the “major” projects—the ones that presumably commanded the greatest expenditures of time and creative energy. Harnick’s more modest undertakings from recent decades are equally numerous and diverse, ranging from songs for films with Cy Coleman (The Heartbreak Kid [1972], Blame It On Rio [1984]), to music for television (Marriage is Alive and Well [with Fred Karlin, 1980], The Way We Were [with Larry Grossman, 1981]), to an “opera spuffo” with Marvin Hamlisch (The Audition [2006]). For Israel’s Fiftieth Birthday Celebration in 1998 he wrote new ceremonial lyrics for “To Life.”36Close And for Jerome Robbins’s ballet “Ives, Songs” (premiered at the New York City Ballet in 1988) he translated Louis Gallet’s French text of one song by Charles Ives, “Elegie.”37Close Harnick has likewise been a willing participant in theatrical galas, often benefiting charitable causes, and in tribute events, both as celebrant and honoree.

Translations

In a 1986 interview with Bob Cioffi, Harnick described his interest in translations in the 1970s as an outcome of the earlier tensions with his long-time partner. He turned away from Broadway during this time, he said, as a way of managing his own “inner grief and conflicts” in the aftermath of The Rothschilds. Rather than seeking a new collaborator for something original, he found ways to “write with dead composers.”38Close It was a trend that actually began several years earlier, in 1967, when his and Bock’s previous collaborator Bil Baird (Peter and the Wolf [1958], The Man in the Moon [1963]; see chapter 4) asked Harnick to provide a new English translation of the French text by C. F. Ramuz for Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat, for a performance by Baird’s marionettes with the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra. Harnick had been studying French privately and welcomed the opportunity to update and Americanize the two most common English translations of the narration, by Rosa Newmarch (1924) and by Michael Flanders and Kitty Black (1955).39Close Then in 1970 and 1971 he returned to another translation project that he had begun some years earlier, Ravel’s opera L’enfant et les sortilèges. Harnick’s translation of Colette’s original French libretto was premiered at the Manhattan School of Music in April 1971 and has seen wide use since then.40Close

Harnick’s gifts as a translator attracted even more attention a few years later, in 1977, for a production of Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe [The Merry Widow]. The project started, explains Harnick, with a frantic phone call from Julius Rudel, at that time the music director of the New York City Opera:

But Harnick took the challenge and produced translations of Viktor Léon and Leo Stein’s lyrics that were acceptable to Sills by working “day and night for nine days.” The following year he was able to refine his lyrics for a recording by Sills, Rudel, and company, which won the Grammy for Best Opera Recording in 1978, and the year after that Harnick translated and adapted the operetta’s dialogue for publication.42Close Harnick’s version remains one of several that are available and still used, including in a performance at Northwestern University in March 2009, with the translator/adapter/alumnus in attendance.

Thus began Harnick’s busiest years as a translator. His next project provided English text for a staged version of Jacques Demy’s 1964 film Les parapluies de Cherbourg [The Umbrellas of Cherbourg], essentially an opera with music by Michel Legrand, best known for two signature songs, “Watch What Happens” and “I Will Wait For You.” Harnick and Legrand, in association with Charles Burr, made few changes in the basic structure or drama of Demy’s original text, and the story plays on stage about as well as it does on film—as a sumptuous romantic tragedy, best enjoyed by those who can get lost in Legrand’s lush score and overlook quirky details of plot and characterization. (Fans of a young Catherine Deneuve can find additional reasons to like the film.) The original staged version premiered at the Public Theater/Cabaret in New York in February 1979, followed by performances in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1980, and has since been revived in an “elevated concert version” at Sundance (Utah) in 1999 and fully staged by the Two River Theater Company (New Jersey) in 2005.43Close Harnick translated for Legrand again in 2001, this time for a stage musical, L’amour fantôme, with book and lyrics by Didier van Cauwelaert; an anticipated performance in London never happened.44Close

Harnick’s growing reputation as an adept translator and generous collaborator led to a commission from the Houston Grand Opera for a new English translation of Bizet’s Carmen that premiered in Houston in January 1981. Then in 1983, during the run of Peter Brook’s condensed (French-language) version of that opera, La tragedie de Carmen, in New York, Harnick was called upon to adapt his translation as an English text for Brook’s version, to be presented in half of the performances each week, in repertory with the original French for the other half. During this same time Harnick also translated Giovanni Battista Varesco’s libretto for a reconstructed and little-known comic opera by Mozart, L’Oca del Cairo [The Goose from Cairo, 1783], for the Lyric Opera of Kansas City (1982). A few years later Harnick translated two of J. S. Bach’s secular cantatas for staged performances by the Bach Aria Group in New York and on Long Island. (Even the New York Times could not resist trumpeting a new project for Bach and Harnick.45Close) The first, Der Streit zwischen Phoebus und Pan [The Contest Between Phoebus and Pan], which is probably the most opera-like of Bach’s works in this genre, premiered in 1988; the second, Der Zufriedengestellte Aeolus [The Appeasem*nt of Aeolus], in 1990.46Close Harnick has also been involved in many other smaller translation projects over the years but has generally turned his attention in other directions since 1990.

Opera Libretti

Harnick’s interest in opera began in the mid-1960s, after he had seen Julia Migenes, the original Hodel in Fiddler on the Roof, perform in Menotti’s The Saint of Bleecker Street with the New York City Opera.47Close But Jerry Bock had shown no interest in writing an opera, and a subsequent attempt to write an opera with another unnamed “composer friend” had run aground. So when the distinguished composer and Columbia University professor Jack Beeson, who had won wide acclaim for operas such as The Sweet Bye and Bye (1956) and Lizzie Borden (1965), proposed a collaboration with Harnick in 1972, acting on a suggestion from Beeson’s former student John Kander, Harnick was both intrigued and wary.48Close He welcomed the opportunity, but he knew he would need guidance. Fortunately he soon discovered that Beeson was able to provide exactly the assistance that Harnick needed. Beeson gave him a complete account of the requirements of an opera libretto, and the collaboration thrived.49Close Their first project together was an adaptation of a 1901 play, Clyde Fitch’s Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, developed over a three-year period and premiered on September 20, 1975, by the Kansas City Lyric Theater.

Fitch’s story is a natural for musical adaptation. A beautiful American opera singer, Aurelia Trentoni, who has made a name for herself in Europe, arrives to conquer New York, and a handsome young dandy, Captain Jinks, makes a bet with friends that he will be able to seduce her. When Jinks meets Aurelia, however, he falls in true love and regrets his callous wager. As Aurelia prepares for her American debut, performing Violetta in La Traviata, forces conspire against the two lovers, and Aurelia becomes distraught when she learns about Jinks’s bet. Fortunately she is still able to perform beautifully, and eventually Jinks is able to convince her of his sincerity and the depth of his love. The play ends with a jubilant toast to the diva and her newly betrothed, as the crowd sings a spirited chorus of an old song, “Captain Jinks” (William Lingard and T. Maclagan, 1868).

The story was a popular target for Burlesque in the years following the original premiere, and the play was made into a movie in 1916.50Close In 1925 a musical version appeared on Broadway, with a book by Frank Mandel and Laurence Schwab, lyrics by B. G. DeSylva, and music by Lewis E. Gensler and Stephen Jones, although reviewers were unable to detect much of Fitch’s original story in the show, aside from character names and general plot outlines. (Bide Dudley in the Evening World [9/9/25]: “A plot does intrude now and then, but quickly it is batted on the head with the mallet of Terpsichore and all is well again.”) For their operatic adaptation, Harnick and Beeson closely followed Fitch’s original story but gave the character of Aurelia more emotional range and greatly expanded the role of an impresario, a character based on Colonel James Mapleson, who had built the Academy of Music into a prominent opera house in New York between 1878 and 1883.51Close They also added a budding romance between Aurelia’s maid and one of Jinks’s friends, in addition to many other smaller changes in the original story and characters. As Beeson observed, the collaborators had to cut “some of what was comedy in 1901, and might still be in the spoken play,” because these lines “make no effect when the matrix is music.”52Close On the other hand, they of course added extensive lyrical passages for characters to explore inner feelings in arias, as when Aurelia sings about her childhood in Act 1, and when Mapleson muses about the life of an impresario at the beginning of Act 2. In general they wrote a “numbers opera,” divided into arias, recitatives, and ensembles like La Traviata, and also a “love letter to Italian opera” dedicated especially to “singers and opera buffs,” wrote Beeson in his autobiography.53CloseCaptain Jinks ends with a song, not a tribute to Jinks himself but a collective hymn to the power of music (“Music can reach us as no other art / Music can soften the hardest heart,” and so forth).

This message in fact resonates with one of the principles Harnick had learned about the collaborative process for an opera, after reading biographies of opera composers and correspondence between composers and librettists: “the quality of the music is what ultimately determines the life of an opera.” Whereas the lyricist for a musical could play a more dominant role in the process, when writing an opera libretto, Harnick observed, “it was my obligation to accommodate my composer in every way I could.”54Close He also came to feel that opera is more concerned than musical theater with grand gestures and epic themes:

What is clear above all is that Harnick had quickly and skillfully made the transformation from musical theater lyricist to operatic librettist, thereby opening up a whole new outlet for his creative energies.

The success of their initial effort led Harnick and Beeson to seek a story source for a second collaboration right away. Beeson had already received a request from the National Arts Club in New York for a one-act chamber opera, and had hoped to find usable material in the transcript of the divorce trial between Aaron Burr and his second wife.56Close When this failed to bear fruit—Beeson had thought, erroneously as it turns out, that Mrs. Burr’s attorney was Aaron Burr’s rival, Alexander Hamilton, Jr.—they shifted attentions to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (published in Twice-Told Tales, 1837). This tale is perfectly proportioned for a chamber opera, with five central characters and a compact but rich plot about the desire for eternal youth. It has been a popular story source, the subject of at least five other operatic treatments, by Paul Schwartz (The Experiment, 1953), Sam Raphling (Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment, 1956), Stephen Burton (Heidegger’s Experiment, 1974), Leo Smit (Magic Water, 1978), and Richard Wargo (The Crystal Mirror, 1979).57Close The Beeson–Harnick version, titled Dr. Heidegger’s Fountain of Youth, premiered at the National Arts Club in New York on November 17, 1978.

In Hawthorne’s story, the doctor plans a special evening and invites four guests: three “white-bearded gentlemen” and a “withered gentlewoman” who has a romantic past with each of the three men. Dr. Heidegger takes a dried, withered rose from a book and demonstrates the miraculous restorative powers of a liquid that was obtained, he tells them, from the Fountain of Youth—the substance that had once eluded Ponce de Leon but that has now been found in Florida. The doctor’s guests are eager to test the liquid on themselves, and they drink heartily and frequently as they feel the years fall away and gain the energy and vitality of long-forgotten youth. But their startling renewal also rekindles old romantic rivalries, and the revelry eventually degenerates into shouting and shoving, an overturned table, and a vase of magical water falling pathetically to the floor. The rose, and the guests, then return to their true ages, and the doctor thanks them for demonstrating the perils of time manipulation. The guests, however, only crave more regression, and they resolve “forthwith to make a pilgrimage to Florida, and quaff at morning, noon, and night from the Fountain of Youth.”58Close

In his adaptation Harnick takes more liberties with Hawthorne’s text than he did with Fitch’s play for Captain Jinks—and more than he did with the sources for the second and third parts of The Apple Tree as well. Unlike the original story, the opera begins with Dr. Heidegger reading from the book before removing the dried rose; he reads a passage from Paracelsus explaining the moral lesson for the drama to come. In addition, Harnick reorders some of the early events and changes the location of the Fountain of Youth from Florida to Brazil. He also revises the guest list: instead of three men and one woman, he wrote roles for two men and two women, thus changing the personal dynamics of the quartet when they begin to argue and fight at the climax. (The two men compete over one of the women, while the other woman feels spurned and disgusted and tries vainly to attract romantic interest herself.) Above all Harnick adds depth and detail to events and characterizations, enriching the texture and color of the drama. As the characters watch their years falling away, for example, they celebrate their good fortune in an imitative quartet:

Elsewhere the characters rhapsodize similarly about their restored conditions in graceful poetic lines. In the end the doctor gets the last word, telling his friends, “if the vast and varied richness of life can no longer fill your glasses, why then in truth, I pray you find it. I pray you may find your Fountain of Youth.” As his friends embark on their journey to Brazil, Dr. Heidegger himself turns to toast the audience, one more time: “I pray you may all find your Fountain of Youth.”

Within a year of the premiere of Dr. Heidegger Beeson and Harnick had found a source for their third project together (all told, Beeson’s eighth opera) in Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Their goal was to follow up a chamber piece with a grand opera, and also to employ large choral forces.59Close Of course this is a story with a rich history of translations and adaptations, from its first appearance on American soil in 1898 to the many subsequent productions on Broadway and on film. As a source for a musical entertainment, Cyrano had provided fertile material for Burlesque (in Weber and Fields’s Cyranose de Bric-a-Brac, 1898) and had been adapted for the musical stage when the play was still in its infancy by Victor Herbert (1899, book by Stuart Reed, lyrics by Harry B. Smith).60Close A musical version variously known as Cyrano, Roxane, The White Plume, and The Vagabond King, with book and lyrics by Charles O. Locke, music by Samuel Pokrass with late additions by Vernon Duke, abandoned plans for New York openings during two separate pre-Broadway tours in the 1930s. More recently, Michael J. Lewis wrote the music for an adaptation on Broadway starring Christopher Plummer (1973, book and lyrics by Anthony Burgess), and Harnick contributed to the translations for a Dutch musical version that came out after he and Beeson were finished with theirs (1993, music by Ad Van Dijk, book and lyrics by Koen Van Dijk).61Close The first purely operatic treatment of the Cyrano story was by Walter Damrosch (1913, libretto by W. J. Henderson). Later operatic adaptations include versions in French by Franco Alfano (1935, libretto by Henri Cain), in Polish by Romuald Twardowski (1962), in Estonian by Eino Tamberg (1974, libretto by Jaan Kross), and in Italian by Marco Tutino (1987, libretto by Danilo Bramati). Beeson and Harnick worked on this enormous project for virtually the entire decade of the 1980s, at one point anticipating a premiere at the New York City Opera.62Close Instead their opera was first performed in German translation by the Theater Hagen in Hagen, Germany on September 10, 1994.63Close

Still awaiting its first American performance, the Beeson–Harnick Cyrano is known mainly through Beeson’s commentary in his 2008 memoirs.64Close (In 1997 he reworked some of the music as a concert piece, Interludes and Arias from Cyrano, in hopes of attracting interest in the complete work.65Close) Beeson quotes a program note by Harnick giving details of the libretto’s poetic structure (mostly eschewing the alexandrines of Rostand’s original), rhyming style (selective, as in his previous two libretti), and refinements of the original text (especially his efforts to give greater substance and intelligence to the character of Roxane).66Close It was surely a disappointment to find such a lot of hard work failing to find an audience, but the partners nevertheless continued to seek new source material for their next collaboration throughout the early 1990s, until they finally concluded, around 1997, that they were unable to find a project of mutual interest and then “each went on his way.”67Close Harnick’s eighteen (nonexclusive) years of work with Jack Beeson became his most successful collaborative relationship after his fourteen (more-or-less exclusive) years with Jerry Bock.

These experiences also inspired Harnick to pursue operatic projects with others. In 1988 he told Derrick Henry of the Atlanta Journal Constitution that he was “writing librettos for two one-act operas, The Blind Men and the Donkey, based on a French medieval farce, with composer Jonathan Tunick, and That Pig of a Labete, based on a Maupassant short story, with RCA recording executive Thomas Z. Shepard.”68Close Although the collaboration with Tunick never reached fruition, Harnick and Shepard eventually completed both the Maupassant project and another one-act opera based on a story by Nikolai Leskov, A Question of Faith, for a premiere in New York in 1991, under the collective title Love in Two Countries.69Close Shortly after that Harnick collaborated on an opera for children based on Norton Juster’s popular book The Phantom Tollbooth, assisting the author with the libretto. The music was composed by Harnick’s long-time friend Arnold Black, who had worked for many years as a musical consultant and composer in the advertising industry. The Phantom Tollbooth premiered in Wilmington, Delaware in 1995 and was subsequently revised into a format closer to that of a musical, to enhance its marketability. The new version premiered in Washington, D. C. in September 2008 and toured the United States through March 2009.

Harnick produced his most recent libretto in collaboration with Henry Mollicone, a prolific American composer especially known for his choral and dramatic works who was a protégé of Leonard Bernstein in the 1970s.70Close In the mid-1990s Harnick and Mollicone began developing ideas for two operas, one about Albert Einstein that never got off the ground, and another based on Native American legends that piqued the interest of the leadership of the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, who was looking for a new work to help celebrate the institution’s fortieth year.71Close Mollicone and Harnick workshopped the first act of their new opera in Kansas City in 1996 and both acts in Utah in the summer of 1997, in preparation for its premiere in Kansas City on March 7, 1998.

Harnick arrived at the opera’s theme and title, Coyote Tales, after combing books of Indian legends for stories that could be brought together into a single episodic music drama. The main connection between the stories is the coyote, a character common to legends of many different tribes, usually in the tradition of a “trickster,” a “rebel against authority and the breaker of all taboos.” The coyote and his kin, in the words of Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, “represent the sheerly spontaneous in life, the pure creative spark that is our birthright as human beings and that defies fixed roles or behavior.”72Close Harnick created five scenes by adapting coyote tales from five different tribes:

Using the style of libretto construction that he by this time knew very well, Harnick extracted key phrases and central ideas from the sources and reimagined them as poetic sung dialogue and arias. Coyote first oversees the creation of the world from a root and a ball of mud, then becomes endowed with a special gift of resurrection. He gives the world fire, dances with a star, and, in the second act, steals the bride of a mythical figure, Pavayoykyasi. The tales are stitched together through several devices: via a narrating Storyteller; by bringing back the Skooku*ms, the guardians of fire from scene 3; and by bringing Coyote back to life twice—after he is dropped from the sky at the end of Act 1, and after he is killed by Pavayoykyasi at the end of Act 2. At the same time, Harnick was careful not to mix elements of different tribal traditions, following advice he had received from Native American students at Haskell Indian Nations University.74Close The opera concludes with praise for Coyote, not, presumably, for his malicious theft of a beautiful maiden in Act 2, but “For giving us breath / For calling us forth to this beautiful place / For the power to hear and the power to see / For giving us life.” The Storyteller finally observes, “As you behave, we shall too, Old Man Coyote / We are you.”

Coyote Tales was performed again by students at the Oberlin Conservatory in 2000, with the composer conducting and the librettist in attendance.75Close Harnick and Mollicone continued to explore other projects together, at one point planning an opera based on the life and work of environmentalist Rachel Carson.76Close The funding for this project never materialized, but for Harnick it would have provided an amusing symmetry within his career, recalling the inspiration for one of his early songs, “The Sea Is All Around Us” (see chapter 2). In 2009 Harnick and Mollicone were still discussing possible new projects together, this time a “musical theater work.”

Sheldon Harnick in the Musical Theater Since 1970

Harnick has consistently devoted his efforts in the decades since The Rothschilds not only to translations and opera libretti, but also to musical theater and songwriting projects of all sorts. He has written lyrics for puppet shows, a television program, and an animated film. He has assumed the familiar role of lyricist for a legend of the musical theater, Richard Rodgers, and for a legend of film and commercial music, Michel Legrand. He has also spearheaded adaptations of legendary sources, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and the Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life. Building upon his rich previous experience in the musical theater, he has found new confidence as a writer of dialogue as well, and as a composer. “I never thought of myself as having that kind of talent,” he said in 2006.77Close His modesty is disarming, and it is genuine.

Harnick had explored new songwriting partnerships even before his last show with Jerry Bock premiered (see chapter 8), and he continued to do so in the early 1970s, as The Rothschilds and Fiddler on the Roof completed their Broadway runs. In 1973 he was once again affiliated with Bil Baird’s troupe of marionettes, writing songs with Mary Rodgers for a production of Pinocchio at the Bil Baird Theater in New York. Critics were mostly enchanted with the show—Harnick’s wife provided the pre-recorded singing voice for the title character—and with the book by Jerome Coopersmith, who had gone back to writing for television after his work with Bock and Harnick in the initial stages of The Apple Tree in the mid-1960s. By far the more attention-grabbing collaboration of this era, however, was Harnick’s work with Mary Rodgers’s father, who was not in good health but seemed to draw vitality from the process of creating yet another musical theater piece. Actually, Richard Rodgers had first inquired about Harnick’s availability several years earlier, even before the subject of working outside the partnership had arisen with Jerry Bock. Harnick felt obligated to decline at the time, but in the post-Rothschilds period he felt open to a new arrangement “if the property were right.”

Harnick and Richard Rodgers first agreed to collaborate with Michael Stewart in 1972, on a musical version of Joseph Kesselring’s popular farce Arsenic and Old Lace.78Close Stewart had written a draft of a book, but the songwriters could find no room for music in it and sent Stewart back to the drawing board. After one more unsuccessful attempt Stewart withdrew. Harnick concluded that the play was not adaptable as a musical, but Rodgers insisted that they continue the search for a writer who would be willing to try. Harnick recalls Rodgers inviting, and receiving polite demurrals from, Joseph Stein and Abe Burrows, among others. Finally Rodgers found a willing collaborator in Tom Stoppard, whose Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead had won the Tony for Best Play in 1968. Stoppard agreed to make an effort and send a draft for feedback from Rodgers and Harnick. Harnick recalls:

Rodgers and Harnick remained on the lookout for acceptable source material for the next two years, until Richard Adler, coauthor with Jerry Ross of music for The Pajama Game (1954) and Damn Yankees (1955), found it for them.79Close Adler explains in his autobiography that he had been considering a show based on the life of King Henry VIII for some time and was happy to cede the idea to Rodgers and Harnick while taking on producer’s duties himself.80Close To write the book Adler first recruited Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, but when these authors lost interest Adler engaged Sherman Yellen, still willing to give Broadway a try despite his Rothschilds experience.81Close The show would also feature a well-known (and famously temperamental) actor, Nicol Williamson, starring as the King. Rex, as it was called, evolved throughout 1975, leading up to a pre-Broadway tour in Wilmington, Delaware, Washington, D. C., and Boston in February through April 1976, and a Broadway opening on April 25.

When Rodgers and Harnick received a workable script from Yellen, probably in early 1975, Rodgers asked Harnick to locate a song opportunity and write out a complete lyric awaiting a musical setting. This would be their first song together. Harnick has described his relief some time later when he received the master’s approval for his effort; he later learned that Rodgers had been equally apprehensive about getting the melody just right.82Close As work progressed, Harnick realized that Rodgers could only write music when he was working from an existing lyric, probably because of the mild stroke he had suffered.83Close At that point in his life Rodgers could collaborate only as he had with Oscar Hammerstein II, starting from a complete lyric, not as he had in his younger days with Lorenz Hart, either starting from a partial lyric or title, or from no lyric at all. Harnick welcomed the challenge and tried experimenting with formal structures, to avoid falling back on AABA formulas.84Close Rodgers, meanwhile, wrote some beautiful tunes but made no effort to dress the score in sixteenth-century garb. “I wrote my musical impressions of the people and the country at that time,” Rodgers said. “I didn’t go to period music, in the same way that I didn’t go to Siam to write The King and I.”85Close Harnick was surely struck by the difference in compositional philosophy between his current collaborator and a former partner who routinely immersed himself, and his score, in the musical style of his subject matter.

Harnick has candidly admitted that some of the lyrics in Rex are “less than first-rate.” When his lyrics did meet his highest standards, he believes, Rodgers’s music was likewise transcendent; at other times, the music was “only as good as the lyric.”86Close It is not difficult to imagine which songs in Rex Harnick might elevate above others (see Table 9.2). At the beginning of the show, the King’s latest composition, “No Song More Pleasing,” sung by his minstrel, takes its place among Rodgers’s classic waltzes. The song “Elizabeth,” a lullaby about Henry’s child with his second wife Anne, and apparently the first song Rodgers and Harnick wrote together, features a melody that is not easy to sing but is shaped with the sure hands of master craftsmen. “So Much You Loved Me,” written for Anne to sing after the King has spurned her—although cut before the New York opening—is a classic Rodgers ballad.87Close Occasionally Rodgers employs not only familiar elements of his distinctive style but specific musical gestures from his legendary catalogue: “Away From You,” the gorgeous moment when Henry and (in the reprise) Anne first confess their love for each other, revitalizes the 5-♯4-6-5 turning figure from “Some Enchanted Evening” (South Pacific); “As Once I Loved You,” the lament by Henry’s first wife as their marriage disintegrates, follows in the footsteps of “If I Loved You” (Carousel). If Rodgers sometimes seems to be channeling Rodgers, however, some accused Harnick of trying to channel Hammerstein. Martin Gottfried, reviewing the opening of Rex in the New York Post (4/26/76), heard in Harnick’s lyrics “a deliberate attempt to write in the Hammerstein style,” with both good and bad results. Douglas Watt in the Daily News (4/26/76) likewise felt that Harnick was “paying obeisance to Hammerstein.” Even Richard Adler wrote in his memoirs that the collaboration had had a “negative effect” on the lyricist: Harnick told him, “it’s a little like collaborating with God.”88Close In an interview during the Boston tryout, Harnick essentially pled guilty to these charges. “I’ve begun to explore simpler lyrics,” he said. “I’m consciously trying to avoid flashiness, the cleverness of the intricate rhyme. I’m trying to get more direct, more emotionally naked; to find fresh images to communicate genuine feeling.”89Close

Rex was flogged by the critics and abdicated after forty-nine performances. Many blamed Yellen’s book for the failure: Clive Barnes in the Times (4/26/76) called it “basically tedious and quite excessively vulgar on a number of planes”; Allan Wallach wrote in Newsday (4/26/76) that Yellen’s book “covers too much ground historically and, paradoxically, doesn’t tell us enough,” that Yellen failed “to take a cohesive point of view toward the central character.” Yellen stands behind his work but admits that his own writing style, working “against sentiment,” was not a perfect complement for Rodgers’s romanticism. He also regrets that Nicol Williamson was cast in the lead role—a “brilliant actor” but “an extraordinarily difficult person to work with.” Adler traces the problems to his decision not to meet the asking price of a more accomplished director (Michael Bennett) and the basic distaste naturally generated by a lead character who is a homicidal, misogynistic tyrant.90Close Ken Mandelbaum asked the question that was surely on the minds of many audience members: “What made Adler, Rodgers, and Harnick think Henry VIII a good subject for a musical?”91Close The creators had tried to soften Henry’s hard edges during the pre-Broadway tour and had brought in Harold Prince for directorial repairs, but by then the damage was too severe, too deep-seated. Adler wrote, “I know now, in hindsight, that Elizabeth was the fascinating person about whom the musical should have been written in the first place.”92Close

And yet Rex has not faded into total oblivion. In 2000, for the “Musicals in Mufti” series of the York Theater Company in New York, Harnick and Yellen revisited the script and found abundant opportunities for revision. They made “sweeping cuts,” added “transitions and connective passages,” and reshaped scenes, according to Harnick.93Close “We got rid of a lot of the dross,” explains Yellen, and added a series of “prologues, in a kind of Shakespearian fashion,” that “pulls things together.” They also restored songs that had been previously cut, not only “So Much You Loved Me” but also “Tell Me, Daisy,” which Henry sings when he is trying to romance Anne early in Act 1, and “The Pears of Anjou,” sung by Henry just before he dies at the end of Act 2.94Close The latter song, Geoffrey Block observes, makes for a “powerful finale” to the show, “and it poetically prepares for the future rule of his daughter Elizabeth, fruit of Henry’s kingship, a true renaissance.”95Close Two years after the York Company’s bare-bones concert performance, the new Rex was fully staged at the University of Findlay in Ohio, with a “large cast, regal sets, magnificent costumes, and full orchestra.” At last, Harnick feels, the show was realized as the creators had envisioned it. Perhaps King Henry VIII is not such a bad subject for a musical after all.

Harnick’s other songwriting projects have been richly varied. In 1972 he made two contributions to Free to Be … You and Me, a benefit record album intended to promote individuality and self-esteem among children. His poem “Housework” is performed on the album by Carol Channing; his song with Mary Rodgers, “William’s Doll,” based on the children’s book by Charlotte Zolotow about a boy who plays with dolls, is sung by Alan Alda and Marlo Thomas (who conceived and coordinated the project).96Close A few years later, in 1991, Harnick teamed up with one of that album’s composers and co-producers, Stephen J. Lawrence, to write songs for a musical adaptation of some of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit tales for HBO, narrated by Carol Burnett. Harnick is in top form, in a ballad such as “So Near and Yet So Far,” and in the comic number “Decisions, Decisions,” sung by a cat trying to decide what to have for lunch (“Am I in the mood for mice? / Or am I in the mood for fish? / Spicy mice are awfully nice / But a fresh-caught fish is / Twice as delicious”). Harnick also made plans once again to write a musical with Burton Lane, this time an adaptation of Upstairs, Downstairs.97Close Like his earlier publicized effort with Lane (see chapter 8), and like a later project called As Luck Would Have It, any tangible results of the collaboration remained confined to the songwriters’ studios.

In the mid-1970s Harnick also began the first of several projects with Joe Raposo, who had written music extensively for television, especially for children’s shows such as Sesame Street and The Electric Company.98Close They first wrote the theme music for Alan Alda’s situation comedy We’ll Get By, which premiered on CBS in 1975, then a group of songs for a version of Alice in Wonderland by Bil Baird’s marionettes in 1975.99Close In 1980, on a commission from the Boston Symphony, they wrote a cantata for young audiences, Sutter’s Gold, based on the true story of August Sutter, who discovered gold on his property in the mid-nineteenth century.100Close

Harnick also worked with Raposo on one of his most ambitious and successful musical theater projects of recent decades, an adaptation of Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life. The impetus for the project came from Mary Jo Slater, a casting director in New York, and Eugene V. Wolsk, an old friend and a veteran Broadway producer, in 1978.101Close Harnick was persuaded to write the book himself, and fulfilled Raposo’s request to provide complete lyrics first, as he had with Richard Rodgers. With both team members occasionally taking time away from this project to work on other things, they finished a first draft in 1983 and presented a two-week workshop version in New York in the summer of 1984. Making revisions all along the way, they arranged performances at the University of Michigan in 1986, at the Wagon Wheel Playhouse in Warsaw, Indiana in the summer of 1988, and at the Laguna Beach Playhouse in California in December 1989. After Raposo died of complications from lymphoma in February of 1989 (at age 51), Harnick took sole control of the project and found himself making musical additions and changes in addition to refining the book and lyrics. The show, ultimately called A Wonderful Life, has played consistently across the country in the two decades since, including high-profile productions at the Arena Stage in Washington, D. C. in 1991 and a concert staging in New York in 2005. A Broadway run appears unlikely, however, because of legal disputes over copyright ownership and other technicalities. The show mostly emerges every year around Christmas time in regional theaters, in productions of various sizes, before returning to hibernation the rest of the year.

As a result, A Wonderful Life is potentially in annual competition with another of Harnick’s large musical theater projects of the last two decades, a musical rendering of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The idea for this project came in 1979 from Fred Silverman of NBC, who wanted a version of the classic story for television “that eschewed the trivial, commonplace children’s entertainment aspect of the piece, and concentrated on what Dickens had actually written.”102Close Michel Legrand, with whom Harnick had just worked when translating Les parapluies de Cherbourg, wrote the music, and Harnick again wrote both book and lyrics, around the same time that he started the book and lyrics for A Wonderful Life.103Close The deal with NBC fell through, but Legrand and Harnick went forward with the Dickens project anyway, completing a first draft in about two years in spite of all the difficulties of intercontinental collaboration. Refinements began after performances in Elmira, New York, in November 1981 and throughout a tour of Wilmington (Delaware), Baltimore (where the show was called “Penny By Penny,” to avoid confusion with other adaptations of the same material), St. Petersburg (Florida), Miami, New Orleans, and Memphis through the early weeks of 1982, starring Richard Kiley as Scrooge. After further revisions it played in Stamford, Connecticut in December 1982 and in subsequent years at Monmouth College in New Jersey and at a regional theater in Ohio.104Close By 1987 or so Harnick and Legrand considered the show complete and made it available for general licensing. It has not always made fans of reviewers but has become one of several musical versions of the story that receive seasonal productions every year. Meanwhile, Harnick’s collaboration with Legrand continued to thrive, resulting in four songs for a 1997 animated film, Aaron’s Magic Village, based on stories for children by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

One other large musical theater project has periodically consumed Harnick’s energies throughout the post-Rothschilds era. Its origins actually go back even further, to 1963, when Harnick saw a production of Yevgeny Schwartz’s political fable The Dragon at the Phoenix Theater in New York.105Close Harnick told Harold Flender in 1971 that the play “cries out for music,” almost as if the playwright thought of it that way when he wrote it.106Close At one point Harnick tried to interest Jerry Bock in writing music for an adaptation, later Burton Lane, Milton Schafer, and Charles Strouse. He approached Joseph Stein about working on the book. But he was unable to find collaborators who shared his passion for the project and so finally followed Stein’s advice and began to do all the work himself—lyrics, book, and music.107Close In 1973 he told the New York Times that he had completed “the first draft of a book and twelve songs” and was anticipating a Broadway opening the following year.108Close Soon thereafter, however, his professional attention was diverted to operas with Jack Beeson, translations, and his collaboration with Richard Rodgers, and he next returned to The Dragon and began pursuing performance possibilities in the early 1980s. The show was selected for a series of workshop performances in May 1984 by Harold Prince’s National Institute for Musical Theater, and the following November it was given its first complete staging at Northwestern University.109Close Harnick then began a long process of revision and repairs, with the help of productions at Colorado College in 1986, Mesa College (Colorado) in 1987, the Empire State Institute for the Performing Arts (Albany, New York) in 1988, the University of Arizona in 1997, and the Luna Stage Company (of Montclair, New Jersey) in 2003, among others.110Close By 2008 he felt that the show was “very good” and ready for licensing and distribution.

Schwartz’s play explores the nature of tyranny and the relationship between people and their leaders.111Close A dragon controls a community and provides for its citizens so long as one young maiden is sacrificed to him every year. When a wandering knight, Lancelot, discovers this arrangement he vows to rescue the next scheduled victim, Elsa, with whom he has fallen in love. Lancelot and the Dragon duel, but both appear to die in the battle. In the next year the town Mayor takes control of the community and becomes a tyrant in his own right, claiming that he killed the Dragon and planning to marry Elsa himself. But then Lancelot returns, explaining that he had only been critically injured in the duel with the Dragon and has been nursed back to health, and seizes power, and Elsa, from the Mayor. The play ends with Lancelot blissful but uncertain of the future, promising only love and happiness for his bride and his people: “if I love you everything will be wonderful.”112Close

Harnick believes that when he began his adaptation, which he renamed Dragons, he initially drew too heavily from the original text, using it as a “crutch.” As he shaped and revised he made his version more personal and distinctive, less dependent on Schwartz’s. He also benefited from advice he received from his long-time friend Michael Kidd, who read a version of the script and observed that the show’s central message was that “the only solution to power is to have a benevolent dictator.”113Close This inspired Harnick to rework the last part of the second act to emphasize democratic principles of government: in his new ending the townspeople show that they do not want another dragon but want to have a voice in determining their own fates. Harnick’s score includes a delicate ballad in which Elsa sings mournfully about her beloved, departed Lancelot (“You Could Say I Miss Him”), a sleazy soft-shoe number for the Mayor (“I Love Power”), and a trio performed by the perishing Dragon’s three heads (“Passacaglia for Three Severed Heads”). As a finale Lancelot summarizes the show’s ultimate message in a sort of pop anthem, “Take Care of One Another,” seemingly inspired by a sentiment from one of the townspeople, a gardener, at the end of Schwartz’s play:

Harnick’s song recognizes the various threats to the safety and sanity of humanity but ultimately finds comfort in mutual love and respect:

Harnick has said that this song is “deeply meaningful” to him.116Close It is easy to understand why he has remained committed to bringing this show, and this message, to the stage for so many years.

Harnick finally gained full confidence as a lyricist, writer, and composer, and in the mid-2000s began working alone—and wearing a fourth hat, that of translator—on another completely new project, an adaptation of Molière’s Le médecin malgré lui (The Doctor in Spite of Himself), a play that he felt had great potential as an “intimate musical.”117Close It was workshopped at Northwestern University in the summer of 2009. “I will never retire while I can still lift a pen or work a word processor,” he has said.118Close At the same time he can look back on a legacy in the world of dramatic music that will endure despite changing tastes and shifting sensibilities, an extensive web of artistic and personal relationships built on hard work and selfless collaboration. When he reflected on his career and creative life in 1971, just at the end of the Bock–Harnick era, he seemed to have just the right words—a habit, certainly—to sum it all up:

For seven decades the lyrics cloud has lingered in Harnick’s creative firmament, eventually sharing space in the sky with clouds of “music” and “opera libretti” and “translations” and “dramaturgy,” and it is still raining.

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