Sheldon Harnick

Michael Kantor: So starting with Fiddler, what was the source material for the music?

Sheldon Harnick: Fiddler on the Roof began when a friend, and I cannot remember who the friend was, suggested that I read a novel by Sholom Aleshim called Wandering Star. I read the book. It was a fascinating story about a theater troupe wandering all over the Ukraine. And I loved the book, so I called Jerry Bach, and I said, read this. So he read it. He loved it. And we thought… Maybe there’s a musical in this, and we gave it to our friend Joe Stein. We had done the first musical that Jerry Bach and I did together was a show called The Body Beautiful, and we had met Joe Stein, and I’d stayed in touch with Joe. So Joe read Wandering Star, and he loved it too, but he gave us a report. He says, too big. He said it covers about 40 years, and it would need a cast of about 80. He said, it’s really impractical. But we thought because we loved Sholem Aleichem having read this book, let’s go out and read more stuff by him. So we read and read and read and it’s interesting in the light of everything that’s happened the one of the books Tevye’s Daughters was hard to find. It was kind of out of print and we wanted copies for all of us. We read the Tevya stories and thought that’s where there’s a musical. We also the material might be very special, so that we thought this will be a labor of love, and if we do our job right, maybe it will run a season, maybe. So that was the source material. It was starting with Wandering Star and then coming down to reading a lot of material and finally selecting the Tevye stories, of which I think there are about seven or maybe there are more, and we finally opted for about four of them.

Michael Kantor: What was the first title for the show? And, you know, what was the general consensus about its potential appeal to a Broadway?

Sheldon Harnick: Well, the first title that we had, I think we were thinking of calling it Tevye’s Daughters. And then we thought, no, let’s find another title. We made a long list of titles, especially looking for something that would suggest music. Although, truly, the title that Jerry Bach and Joe Stein and I wanted to use was Where Papa Came From. Because we thought we’ll dedicate this to the memory of our fathers. So that was one of the titles, but we had a lot. And eventually, when Harold Prince became our producer, he said, what do you want to call it? And we said, well, here’s this list of titles. So he looked down, and the one he selected, he said there’s going to be a tough sell raising money for this show. Everybody’s going think it’s just too Jewish. But I like this title, Fiddler on the Roof. It suggests music. And to this day, Joe and Jerry and I, we all would like to take credit for the title, but we really can’t remember who invented it. But I know where it came from. And that was the image from a Chagall painting of a violinist sitting, playing the violin on a roof. I think it may be called the Green Violinist. I’m not sure what it is. But it’s a very Chagal image. So that was where the title came from We did many, many auditions. It was very discouraging. Uh, the theater.

Michael Kantor: I say auditions, backers auditions to raise money.

Sheldon Harnick: We did many Becker’s auditions for the women who sell theater parties, the party ladies. And many of them were Jewish because they represented Jewish groups who, thank God, are wonderful theater goers, very interested in the theater. And they were perhaps even more sensitive than non-Jews would be to the fact that this was a show about Jewish persecution and about Jews generally. Usually the way the audition would go is that I would explain what the book was in brief. And Jerry Bach and I would then sing maybe three quarters of the score. Then after we did that, Harold Prince would get up and he would address the audience a little frantically saying, because the audience had just heard that there’s a pogrom that ends act one and act two, ends with everybody being exiled. So Hell would get up and say, you know, there’s going to be a lot of humor in this show, too. And actually, we’re going to have zero Mostel. And he would really have to try and sell the notion that it wasn’t just going to be a Jewish tragedy. It was hard. And he really did raise the money. I remember once when we were in Detroit, our musical conductor, Milton Green, called, this was before we opened, our very first performance before an audience, he called an extra rehearsal, and he hadn’t notified Hal, and Hal blew his stack. He said, you don’t do that again. He said you don’t know how close to the edge we are financially with this show, so don’t that. We can’t risk any extra money. And that was a revelation to me.

Michael Kantor: What, I mean, what was the key to making Fiddler work?

Sheldon Harnick: The key to making Fiddler work was Jerome Robin’s idea. We presented the show to Robbins and he decided to do it, which was, we didn’t know at the time how important that was, although we knew he was a brilliant director. But one of the things about Robbins, now of blessed memory, he just died, one of the things that Robbins was that he knew once you go into rehearsal, it’s like being on a toboggan slide. You start and then the next day you’re opening. So what he would do, rather than risk trying to accomplish all the changes and revisions in rehearsal, he would schedule six months of pre-production meetings, where we would explore all of the areas where he anticipated there might be problems. And his biggest problem was a theme. And I can’t tell you how many meetings we had where he said, what is this play What is this story about? And we would say, innocently, well, it’s about this Jewish dairy farmer in pre-Soviet Russia. And he has these five daughters he’s trying to marry. And Robbins would say no, no, that’s like the television show the Goldbergs only set earlier. He said it’s warm and it’s funny. But these stories have a power. And it’s not because of that story about a father trying to marry off his daughters. There’s a power here. And we don’t know what it, where does this power come from? Well, we had meeting after meeting about this. And one day, at the meeting, he said again, what is this story about? And one of us, and again, I wish I could say I was the one, but I have no idea which of us said it. Somebody said, you know what this show is about? It’s about the changing of a way of life, of a set of traditions. And Robbins. I’m calling him Robbins because otherwise it gets confused with Jerry Bach, they’re both Jerry’s. Robbins got very excited and he said, that’s right, it is about the change, it’s about tradition. Well, if it’s a about tradition then we have to have an opening number which tells the audience what some of these traditions are. And I remember his phrase, he said the opening number has to be. A tapestry against which the whole rest of the show will play. And so we knew that the opening number had to be about tradition. And like many shows, I don’t think we wrote the opening number until we were ready to go into rehearsal. Going into rehearsal and seeing things and changing things and becoming even more familiar with the material, especially as it’s fleshed out through actors and a director, ultimately we were read to write the show because finally we knew what it was about.

Michael Kantor: Describe Jerry Robbins as a man.

Sheldon Harnick: I wish I could describe Jerry Robbins as a director, but I can’t for the simple reason that like most of the shows that I’ve written, I seem not to do my job right the first time around. So that in rehearsal I’m constantly, if we’re in New York, I’m at home rewriting. If we’re on the road, I am in a hotel rewriting and I didn’t get to attend many rehearsals. I did get to see the putting together of tradition, the opening number. And it was during rehearsal, and it was like watching a combination of a sculptor and a magician, because he would take pieces. Joe Stein had written pieces, a little dialog for the rabbi, a little dialog for the matchmaker, a little for the beggar. He had the various sections of the song that Jerry Bach and I had written. And in rehearsal, he wove them all together with movement. And by the way… When he decided to do the show, he told us that an immediate image came to him, and that was the, one of the oldest folk images, which is the circle, so that he knew he wanted to begin the show with the villagers in a circle. And then he wanted the end the show with that circle disintegrating, and with everybody just going off in different directions, and that’s what he actually did. But in rehearsal, we watched. As he put the thing together and at one point he realized he needed a transition and I guess I don’t remember whether it was he or Joe Stein, but together they invented a whole argument about somebody selling somebody a donkey and saying it was a horse. And so it becomes this big argument, horse, mule, horse mule tradition. It was just, it was amazing watching the way this thing came together. He did it in a couple of hours.

Michael Kantor: Let’s just talk a little bit more about Jerry Robbins.

Sheldon Harnick: Jerry Robbins had an extraordinary facility, born partly out of experience, but I think much of it was from his native intuition, of looking at a thing in rehearsal and being able to gage whether it was going to work. Usually, I can’t tell, and most people can’t until we see it in front of an audience. But I remember there was one song in particular which used to start the second act, and it was a duet. It was called Dear Sweet Sewing Machine between Mottle and his wife, Cycle. And in rehearsal, Robin said, there’s something wrong. I don’t know that this is going to work and I don’t t know what it is, but there’s something wrong, and then he said, well, maybe I’m wrong, we’ll just keep rehearsing And everybody was reluctant to throw it out because during the backers’ auditions not for the theater party ladies, but really for money. The song was a lot of people’s favorite song uh… So when we opened in detroit we got to that moment in the show at the beginning of the second act towards the beginning the second muttland cycle sang the song and the applause was almost literally like We thought, uh-oh, he’s right, it doesn’t work. Well, I knew from experience that the first thing you do is to make the orchestra softer because there’s the possibility that the audience cannot understand the words. So we said, take it a little slower and make the orchestras softer. So they did that for the second preview. And by this time, Robin said, the number doesn’t work. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t work, we’ve got to cut it. So we cut it, because I think the opening might have been the next night or the night after that. And so we didn’t cut it just yet. But what they did, they didn’t stop for applause. As soon as the number was over, underscoring began. They went right onto the scene. And as soon as we could gracefully cut the number, we cut. Then we had a lot of postmortems. Why didn’t it work? And it was Robin’s theory, and he’s probably right. That the show has a forward motion. And once you are through, once the marital status of one daughter has been resolved, you can’t go back for any length of time and dwell on that daughter. You have to keep going forward. And this was a moment in the show where we went backwards. Also, talking about Jerry Robbins, I loved him, by the way, and I loved I love the fact that socially, he was a terrific audience. He loved to laugh and he had a very infectious laugh. He was a funny man. He had a great sense of humor. He loved talk to people and appreciate their stories. In rehearsal, it was a different thing. He was, and I’d heard this from many people, he was perfectionist. Uh, and that’s why usually he, uh… Made the budget larger by asking for more rehearsal time. With Fiddler, instead of getting the customary four or five weeks, I believe he had eight because he was doing both choreography and direction. So he did the dances, and then he did book scenes. And we had more time than we needed, as it turned out, which allowed him to get very anxious. Being a perfectionist, he kept going back, is this version correct of a dance or a scene? Is this version, correct? He had a an assistant, Tommy Abbott, who had a photographic memory. And he would ask Tommy, what was version four like? And Tommy would do it. What was version six like? And it was very difficult for him to make up his mind. Is this the best it can be? Is this is the best can be. He would drive everybody crazy, himself most of all. And then, shortly before a show was to open, then his demons would really go into overtime, and he became impossible. And it this fear that he hadn’t done as good as he could. Shortly before the show opened, he and I were walking somewhere and I asked him, I said, what’s your next musical going to be? And he said, I don’t know whether I’ll ever do another musical. He said, it’s too painful. I have this image, this vision of what a show should be and when I can’t realize it and sometimes I just can’t get on stage what I know it should be, it is so painful for me that I can bear it. So he said, maybe I’ll do another musical. But right at the moment, he said I think I’ll stick to ballet. And as a matter of fact, I think one of the next ballets he did dispensed with all other people and was, it might have been called Moves, where it was just dancers. No music, just dancers and robins.

Michael Kantor: So Fiddler really was just about…

Sheldon Harnick: I think it was his last musical. I think he did one play after that, a play by Irene Maria, Maria Irene Fornis. But I think that was the last theater piece, a stage play or musical that he did. He was a friend of his, a dear friend of him, Sandra Lee, who had been Tiger Lily in Peter Pan. Before we went into rehearsal, Sandra alerted me. She said. When Jerry begins to get uptight because he’s not able to realize something to his own demands, usually if he can be reached, he can reach through humor. And I found that to be true. I would get kind of desperate, but if I could make him laugh, then everything was fine. But I remember with one song in particular, Sunrise Sunset, He wasn’t happy with the second chorus of it. And that song took me months to get the second chorus right. I don’t think I got it right until about three weeks before we opened in New York. And I would come to him with a lyric and he’d say, no, it’s not right for this reason or that reason. Go try it again. And so I would try again. And I knew that he was not in a state to be reached by humor or anything. I brought him, very shortly before we opened, I brought I’ll do it. And sang it to him, and he snapped at me, saying, no, that’s not it, go back, try it again. And his whole manner was so uptight and so curt, which was so uncharacteristic from the Jerry Robbins that I knew, I thought, okay, no humor, no nothing, just stay out of his way, finish the lyric, and finally I did, and it was fine. And once the show had opened, then we were fine. You know, I asked him, I said, how often will you come back and see the show? Keep it up.” He said, I don’t do that. He said we have a wonderful stage manager and she will keep it in shape. I, he said it’s too difficult for me. I go on to the next one and he said, in particular with this show, I do not want to see it because I know what’s going to happen. I know Zero Mustel. Two months after we open, there’s going to be such changes in the show. He says, I did not want see them. And that turned out to be basically true. Jerry Robbins himself… Must have been an intensely emotional man and poured that into the work he did both the dances and the shows. There was an intensity, again, that goes beyond words. The first time I ever wept at a musical was during The King and I. I saw it when it first opened. I was sitting there. And when they did the Uncle Tom’s Cabin Ballet, I started to sob only because what I saw represented such the heights of poetic imagination, poetic theatrical imagination. And I was just so overwhelmed by the beauty of it and the theatricality and the imagination that I began to solve. The same thing happened, he had something called Ballets USA and there was a ballet and jazz or something like that. At the end of it, the total ensemble just kind of all got together and made some intense gesture and it was so breathtaking, again, it just got me in the stomach and I began to cry. How he managed to communicate that was his genius and maybe it was that thing in him that had to be communicated. Which made him try again, and again, and again in version after version, and never being quite sure that this was the version which was going to show the audience, or reach the audience in the way that he meant to. He also took complete charge of a show, which I guess every director should, although George Abbott didn’t. Every element of the show had his stamp. For instance, when he hired Boris Aronson, he said, I would like this show to be sort of Mark Chagall. And Aaronson’s, the first drawings he gave were Mark Chagal, and Robbins looked at them and just broke out laughing. He said, Boris, we also want Boris Aaronso. So he just controlled that. He controlled the orchestrations. When we had the first orchestra reading, the orchestration were by Don Walker, was a brilliant orchestrator. And Robbins sat there and constantly would say, I don’t like the violins here. Can you do that with clarinet? I can do that with something else. The trumpets, the sound is too loud, the this, that. He just ripped the orchestrations to pieces. And Walker sat there taking notes. And I could see Jerry Bach getting terribly upset. So after the rehearsal was over, Jerry went to Don Walker and said, Don, the orchestration’s are wonderful. I hated to see you treat it this way. And Walker just grinned. He said, I’ve worked with Jerry Robbins before. He said believe me, today I got off easy. But every element, the lighting, everything. He controlled.

Michael Kantor: So in Fiddler, do you think there’s a lyric line that encapsulates the show?

Sheldon Harnick: Fiddler on the Roof, as we found out, is about the changing of tradition. And there is one lyric line which I think points the direction that the show is going. During the scene where Tevye has been asked to approve the marriage of his oldest daughter to the tailor. And he has arranged for her to marry the butcher. It’s an arranged marriage. So he has a monolog and in the monolog, he says, tradition, I’ll paraphrase, I’m not sure of the exact word, tradition. Marriages must be arranged by the papa. One little time, you pull out a prop and where does it stop? Where does it stop? Nothing should be changed. And that’s really what the heart of the show is, that it’s this man who lives in changing times. And he’s trying to hold on to the thing which allows him to live a stable life, and that’s his sense of who he is and his traditions. And yet, his children are going other directions, and it’s a torment for him. And it’s… The decision he has to make time after time, do I stick with tradition or does my love for my daughter allow me to move with her in the direction she’s going? And it is that tug of war between the older generation and the younger generation, which apparently has made the show successful around the world. When it played in Japan and we talked to Japanese, they said, that’s what was meaningful to them. The fact that They were a very rigid, hieratic society. And after World War II, the children began to break away. It was very difficult for the parents to watch these children take up living with new ideas. So it’s that element of the show, the changing of traditional ways, which has made it successful around the world.

Michael Kantor: How was tradition, the opening song, not a traditional opening for a Broadway musical?

Sheldon Harnick: Tradition as an opening number is a very rich number. I don’t know whether I’m in a position to say whether it’s an untypical opening. I think in many musicals, the writers look for something which is going to give a hint to the audience of what the show is about, what they’re in for. If it isn’t the opening number, then it may be the main character’s first number. You know, what does he want? Where is he going so the audience can sit there and say, aha, he has a goal. Will he get the goal? Will he reach the goal. Fiddler sets up all of the elements that are in the musical that people are about to see. As Jerry Robbins said, it is a tapestry against which the rest of the show plays. We meet the fathers and the mothers and the daughters. And the sons. And the sons are hoping that in the arranged marriages, which will be arranged for them, that at least the girls will be pretty. The girls know that they have to learn to bake and so on and everything, so they can be good wives to their husbands. In the opening number, it presents the matchmaker, who’s so important in the piece. It presents a glimpse of the surrounding entity, the Russians, the priest and the Russian villagers. It tries to introduce the audience to many of the people and some of the ideas which are going to then be developed in the show. I think there are other musicals which attempt to do that successfully.

Michael Kantor: Why do you think fiddler remains so popular with American audiences? What part of American values does fiddling tap into?

Sheldon Harnick: Fiddler on the Roof, when it opened, I think we were still closer to a time when people had been coming over from Europe and it was the older people identified with the show. We were curious as to whether the younger people would and apparently they identify with it on several levels. One is that it’s that, again, that tug of war between parents and children and they recognize it because they’re part of that tug-of-war. They have to. Contend with the parents who say no we don’t want you to do it that way we want you to do this way. Also it’s a very attractive score and Joe Stein did a wonderfully amusing book and I must say in passing he gets very little credit for it. The critics who first reviewed the show say well the book is terrific and it’s funny but Joe Stein had an easy job. All he had to do was go read Sholem Aleichem’s material and then put that material on stage. What they didn’t know is that. The Sholem Aleichem humor in those stories is very literary. We found you could not take it off the page and put it on the stage. It didn’t work. So that Joe had to invent a whole set of dialog that sounded as though it might have been written by Sholel Aleichim, but it was written by Joe Stein. There’s something else, and I wish that I had taken this more to heart in musicals that I worked on after Fiddler. Fiddler is a very easy show to do for amateur groups. The songs are not demanding. The roles are very clearly defined. So that it’s a very gratifying show. It’s a gratifying to be done by amateur groups and it’s done by many. And it’s in high schools. I saw a black and Hispanic version that was done some years ago where the teacher in the school wanted to do this. To teach the children something about what it meant to be Jewish. They had their own sense of oppression, and he wanted to introduce them to another people who had undergone oppression. We saw the show, and it was kids who were 13, 14, 15, 16. They understood the show absolutely, and because the demands of the show are such that they could do it comfortably, it was a wonderful production.

Michael Kantor: Fiddler is a Jewish show and there’s immigration to America. It seems that so much of musical theater is created by immigrants and specifically by Jewish immigrants. What do you think accounts for that?

Sheldon Harnick: I’ve asked myself many times why it is that there were so many Jewish writers in the musical theater. And I haven’t studied the straight theaters, I don’t know. But in the music theater, there’s a long line of them, of which I am grateful to be part of that tradition. And I think one of the reasons is that the Jewish religion, the Jewish people has been a literary people from the beginning, the people of the book. We’ve always had great store by reading. And for the young people that has, I think more often than not, meant not just reading our own religious books, but reading other books, reading widely. Also, although I guess many other churches are like this, the Jewish Orthodox services are very rich in music. The cantorial tradition is a very emotional tradition of just pouring out these emotions in melody, so that many of us, including myself, who grew up witnessing these orthodox services, imbibed that sense of emotion. And when Jews came to this country and found that they were blocked for many professions, Also, in the old country, they hadn’t been allowed, many of them, to follow many professions. So in this country, when they were blocked in certain areas, they gravitated to those areas that were open to them, and one of them was certainly the entertainment area. When they came to New York, in particular, there was Second Avenue, which had a very flourishing Yiddish theater musicals and straight plays. The people of the book and the people of the synagogue, the cantorial tradition, put this all together and began to communicate to other immigrants. It was a very warm and rewarding experience for them. And out of this, as the children of these immigrants began to be more accepted into American life, I think they carried this tradition with them, as Ira Gershwin did, as Yip Harburg did, as these young men did. And brought what they knew into American life. That’s a thumbnail description, and I’m surprised to hear myself speaking so articulately because I don’t think I knew this.

Michael Kantor: Okay, tell me about, you know, you were very sensitive about using Hebrew or Yiddish in the show and explain that in terms of, you, know, the L’chaim.

Sheldon Harnick: Shortly before we saw, before we started writing Fiddler and the Roof, I saw Lenny Bruce’s act, and there was a lot of obscenities in it. And to my surprise, they didn’t bother me. But he would also use Yiddish, just loosely. And some people laughed and other people didn’t, and I thought, that’s cheap. So we decided with Fiddlar, we would not use Yiddish because, just to get laughs, that was wrong. But we thought for flavor, for salt and pepper, we would use a Yiddish phrase, a Hebrew phrase. With the knowledge that when it was tried, if anybody in the audience laughed, it would come out. And so, that’s why we used, oh, for instance, to life, to life l’chaim. I wanted to use the word l’chiam, but I thought I’m going to explain it. And I did it. I found a way to do it in the song. There are maybe three or four words. The night that Jackie Onassis Kennedy saw the show, when somebody on stage said mazel tov. Everybody around her just leaned in and said, it means good luck, congratulations, not realizing that it was very clear from the context of the show. But that was the thing. It was used for flavor and we thought if anybody laughs, it comes out.

Michael Kantor: So the title of this series is Broadway the American Musical. And we’re asking everyone, if you recall the first time or when you were very young that you heard the word Broadway, and what did it mean to you?

Sheldon Harnick: I used to love to go to the movies when I was a kid. We were not a family that went to the theater, but we went to movies a lot. And I think early on, there were these wonderful movie musicals. I get they all become the same musical in my head. So Broadway rhythm or Broadway this, Broadway that, but it was usually Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler and Busby Berkeley. And I think like everybody, I became enamored of the whole notion of Broadway and the Broadway theater. In fact, the first song I ever remember asking my father to bring home to buy was from one of those musicals. It was a song called The Shadow Waltz. In the shadows would you come and sing to me. And the, I think it was Busby Berkeley, what he had done was to have an all-girl orchestra, I believe it was all girls. And all of the string instruments were outlined with neon. So that at one point, the lights went off and all you saw was the neon shapes of the violins and the celli and so forth. It was just spectacular. And the music was beautiful. I was very taken with it. And I asked my dad, could you buy me a copy of this? And it sat on the piano for a long time.

Michael Kantor: When I ask you today, when I say what is the word Broadway, what springs to mind, what does it mean?

Sheldon Harnick: Today, what the word Broadway means to me, unfortunately, is high prices. And the reason I say that is because when I came to New York in 1950, it was possible for somebody like me with almost no money to buy a seat in the very top row, the very last row in any theater. I had a little chart which showed me which theaters I could buy that kind of a seat and still see and hear. But I could go there and I could see shows. And today, with what it costs to see a show, you know, we happen, the musicals, the hit musicals seem to be doing extraordinarily well and they’ll run for decades. But that doesn’t make for healthy theater. A healthy theater means the shows that we used to have that would run a season or two seasons and perhaps make their money back so that producers were willing to gamble. More shows, more shows, more shows. And as has been pointed out many times, writers learn more from the unsuccessful shows. Because when you write a hit, you think, I wrote a hit. That’s terrific. When you write flop, you’re like, why? What did I do wrong? And you have to examine, so you won’t do it again. But producers, this year may be an exception, but producers by and large are very reluctant to gamble. It costs too much money to bring in a show. It costs to much money. To take a show on the road now, where we used to go on the road for two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, more if necessary, and work the kinks out. Now it’s this big gamble. If you do a show which is meant to open on Broadway and not come from England or Chicago or California or someplace where they work the Kinks out there, if it’s open on broadway, then too often you just start previews. And case in point, if. Sweeney Todd, which when it opened, they weren’t ready to open, and consequently, the first word that came out was, oh, it’s a bomb, it’ a bomb. But they worked on it. The sound had to be improved, the orchestrations, everything. They worked on and by the time they opened, it was the wonderful show that it is now. But they had that uphill climb because word was out already. It’s not that good. So Broadway today means something that looks healthier than it is because of shows like The Lion King and Ragtime and all these big hits. It looks like Broadway is flourishing, but there are very few straight plays. This year was exceptional, and there were a number of straight plays, more often than not, straight plays take place off Broadway, so that isn’t healthy. And it isn’t health that producers are looking for the blockbuster rather than the show which will have an artistic, which will have artistic merit enough. To get through for a season or two. And again, I think what that means is that we develop an audience that is willing to pay the money if they see the blockbuster, if they are stupefied by what they see on stage, it’s not healthy.

Michael Kantor: Why are the roots of the Broadway musical, what, rather, what are the roots of Broadway musical? It’s sort of a mishmash of so many different things and yet it’s American. You were mentioning Opera Booth, for instance, earlier. Isn’t it, isn’t the musical itself a sort of amalgam of lots of different influences?

Sheldon Harnick: The American musical, I think Leonard Bernstein may have put his finger on it, that the American part of the American musical was the elements of jazz that crept into it, because certainly Gilbert and Sullivan, long before we were doing it, were doing comic operas with wonderful songs and funny scenes and good stories. They were musical theater, and they’re still done. The Viennese operas which were done at the turn of the century are something like The Merry Widow which is an evergreen, has scenes, has songs, it has funny characters, it has wonderful songs, wonderful lyrics. So in that sense the elements of the musical are there. But it was the introduction of jazz and or something that was American popular music as George M. Cohen brought it into it that made it particularly American so that… Americans could particularly say this is my kind of music. This is my show. Gershwin came along and not only brought his sense of American popular music and elements of jazz, he not only bought it into the theater, but he brought it into the concert hall. And that’s been a staple. It’s been harder to bring rock music in for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, but even that is creeping in. I remember years ago in an interview saying something, I now feel I was very prescient, but I can’t prove that I said this. I answered a question by saying, you know, some writers are gonna come along who will be thoroughly trained in the classical tradition. They will be classical musicians, but they will grow up with the sound of rock in their ears, and they will have an amalgam of the classical and the rock. And I really was describing Andrew Lloyd Webber without knowing it. Weber’s been very influential, but he in turn had been influenced by rock musicians from this country. So that it’s a big circle. It’s now worldwide, our rock musicians are influencing people all over the world, and what they do is influencing us in turn. But the American musical, we have borrowed heavily from the operatic tradition and from the Gilbert and Sullivan tradition, and that’s fine. But the American musical that is the thread that unifies everything has to do with American popular music, and especially as it’s reflected in jazz and rock and roll and rock, and those kinds of music.

Michael Kantor: Everyone worships the great composers. But what special skills does a lyricist bring to bear on the creation of a song?

Sheldon Harnick: It’s, I think it’s a truism that when people speak of the score of a show, they’re usually referring to the music. We lyricists, we know each other, we appreciate each other. And we know that it takes a lot of craft, it takes a lot patience, a lot thought. I remember Steve Sondheim once describing, calling the craft of lyric writing like doing a crossword puzzle. And another excellent lyricist, Marshall Bearer, just flew up. He said, oh, but you’re leaving out emotion. You’re leaving it. Anyway, but there is a lot of that crossword puzzle because the craft of lyrics is the craft of substitution and especially if the music comes first when you have a thought and you’re trying to fit that into phrases that will fit the music. You have a though and it doesn’t work with this phrase. There’s too few syllables. There’s to many syllables. So you think, how else can I say that? That’s why one of our tools is the thesaurus, the synonyms, because we have to become very conversant with other ways to say things. Then once we find ways to see things, then we have to be aware that they’re meant not to be just said, they’re mean to be sung. So we have be conscious of how these words lie on high notes. Ah, you know, singers are most comfortable and they can open the mouth, ee, ah. If you give them an ick, they can’t hit a high note. Sometimes it’s done you have to We try and stay conscious of the vocal demands. We also have to stay conscious of little technicalities like for instance, if you say talk cool, I’m just making that phrase up, but talk cool is difficult because talk cool the K sound runs together the buts and that can cause confusion when you’re hearing it with a lyric unlike a poem, the audience has to be able to hear it the first time around. You can’t just say, wait a minute, and go back and say, what did he say, and go read the passage over again. It has to register immediately. So you have to be conscious of those phrases. You have to very conscious of the ambiguity of language. Something that you think means one thing, and the audience hears it a different way. Quite often in rehearsal, a singer will sing something and you think, why are you doing it that way, and you realize they’ve misunderstood because of the problem of technically the homonym. The two words that sound the same, but they’re spelled differently and they have different meanings. So that can be a real problem. Also, there’s the problem with just conciseness. Just saying as much as you can in as few words as you

Michael Kantor: What happened, just jumping back historically for a minute, what happened after Fiddler on the Roof and Say Hello Dolly in the mid-60s? How did the Broadway musical then?

Sheldon Harnick: After Fiddler, after Hello Dolly, I think with the advent of The Beatles and the gradual change in the style of pop music as it became more and more rock oriented, I think there was a turning away from Broadway for its popular hits. They hit. What was what was a hit in the Broadway show used to be synonymous with a hit in the American culture you know but albums didn’t sell as much it was very rare that that songs became hits and younger people particularly I think might have begun to turn from the theater as a place that where they wanted to spend their lives writing. Having said that I doubt that that’s true at all. And because I really haven’t studied this area, I’m kind of winging it in a way that I don’t trust. But I think what has happened, definitely, is that. The musical has gone in two directions. One is to the popular music and shows like the Fats Waller musical, shows like Smokey Joe’s, which are where the scores are made out of songs that became hits, not on the stage, but in the culture, now have a life in the theater. Shows like Rent. Writers who are able to bring that kind of skill, that kind a contemporary pop sound onto the stage, they have influenced the musical. Another way that the theater has gone is harder to describe. It’s what we tend to call traditional theater music. And by that, I think what we mean is music that is meant to sound timeless. It’s not meant to reflect any special. Unless the show, oh, like Fiorello had a Charleston in it, so we wrote Charleston music. But when the music is for character and emotion, then the composer, I think, will feel freer to borrow or use harmonies that might be more comfortable in the concert hall. He might use those techniques more, trying to give the musical creations a sound. That will register just as effectively 10 years from now and won’t sound like they’ve dated because the popular sound has moved on.

Michael Kantor: What, you know, when you think of Broadway and the Broadway sound, which you’re sort of putting in, what are the kind of adjectives you use to describe a Broadway music?

Sheldon Harnick: Oh, traditionally, a Broadway musical, I don’t think that many, let me start that over again. A lot of musicals don’t fit what is, depict the pattern of a traditional Broadway musical. But the traditional image is something brassy, something with high energy, something that’s jazzy, a lot of brass, loud and infectious and you set your feet tapping. And then, of course, we think of Oklahoma, which opens with, oh, what a beautiful little waltz, and has energy of a different kind. But the, I think the 20s and the 30s tended to fit that image of the happy-go-lucky musical with a lot of energy and a lot of whatever the musical equivalent of flappers is and comics. It was just lighthearted. And then along came World War II. And I know, speaking personally, I came out of World War Two when I realized I was interested in the musical. I was interesting in saying something serious. Not that I had anything against lighthearted musicals, and I’ve tried to write some too, but you came out having survived something, and especially being Jewish, being very aware of some tragic mystery like the Holocaust. And it changes you, it changes as a creator. So you bring all of those feelings of seriousness to the work you do. And although those of us who have tried to make a career in the musical theater, we become one way or another historians of the musical theater. We become familiar with what preceded us and what was good registers in the mind and you use it or you use something like that when you think it’ll be effective. I had the occasion to do a book about, a book review about Ira Gershwin, his, the lyrics, and I looked at all those songs, which are just songs, and we, we tend not to do that anymore. Now, more often than not, in a musical, the song has to fit the situation, the period, and so forth. We write songs that are dramatically viable, but which are hard to lift out of the show and just sing as freestanding songs. When I got through with the Gershwin, I thought, oh God, they’re so wonderful. I should try and do that again. Just write good songs and stick them in some way.

Michael Kantor: What about the concept musical? What was the concept of musical and how did it differ from the book musical?

Sheldon Harnick: There’s a phrase, the concept musical, which to me, I think my foot is making noises, I’ll try and stop that. The concept musical to me is like the word postmodern. I don’t really know what postmodern means and I’ve never been entirely sure what the concept musical is. I, in my mind, I think when I hear the term concept musical So what it means to me is something with such a strong… Such a strong focus that every scene along the way, in one way or another, has to reflect that initial concept. And that’s as far as I’d be willing to go. I think the people who deal in what they refer to as concept musicals, Hal Prince and Steve Sondheim, I think would be more articulate, more explicit in describing what they mean by that term.

Michael Kantor: Talking about some of the great lyricists, what do you think was Larry Hart’s special contribution to the evolution of the music?

Sheldon Harnick: I think that among my favorite lyricists certainly Larry Hart is one for various reasons. One the one that comes most quickly to mind is that his own emotional pain is so is just below the surface in so many lyrics or on the surface and he communicates a poignancy in his lyric, which just. Reaches me and affects me and makes me Feel what what I think he was feeling that’s one of his talents. He was also like I Guess he preceded Gershwin. Didn’t he he precedes Ira Gershon? He brought a Feeling for American slang Along with George M Cohen Cohen can’t leave him out, but he broke away from the operetta feeling of that language, which is too often found no place except on the operatic stage, operetta ease. And he wrote American slang. But with his, this ear he had, he was able to use that slang in ways that bordered on or actually was American poetry. It was poetic slang. Also, his his feeling for rhyme, and it was extraordinary. When I did, I had to review some poems of his. After reading them, I realized that one of the things that communicates over and above the language itself is his joy in language, his joy and slang, his joy, in all kinds of phraseology. And I think… For anybody who’s writing for the musical theater, one is affected by that absolute joy in exploring, let’s try this, let’s that, let try this rhyme. His joy is so contagious that one wants to write lyrics that will please oneself the way his must have pleased him.