For 15 years on Broadway, between 1956 and 1970, the lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who has died aged 99, and his composer partner Jerry Bock were at the centre of an interim golden period between the heyday of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the advent of Stephen Sondheim as a fully fledged composer/lyricist.
Their most notable shows, She Loves Me (1963) and Fiddler on the Roof (1964), remain classic examples of the romantic, yet socially observant, beautifully crafted and spiritually impassioned Broadway musical at its best. The first was a quiet success, elevated in recent years to cult status; the second, a schmaltzy, dramatic celebration of displaced Jews in tsarist Russia, and the longest-running show of any kind on Broadway (eight years) at that time.
Significantly, both were produced by Hal Prince, the first directed by Prince making his Broadway debut in that capacity, the second by the great choreographer Jerome Robbins. And in both, Harnick’s lyrics were smart and sharp, achieving a conversational tone without being over-strained on the rhyming front.
Fiddler we know about, but She Loves Me, with a book by Joe Masteroff (who also wrote Cabaret), demonstrates Harnick’s great skills even more effectively in the enchanting, deliciously scored version of Ernst Lubitsch’s film The Shop Around the Corner and the play on which it was based, with lyrics such as these from the title song:
My teeth ache from the urge to touch her
I’m speechless for I mustn’t tell her
It’s wrong now, but it won’t be long now
Before my love discovers
That she and I are lovers
Imagine how surprised she’s bound to be,
She loves meeeeeeeeeee!
Harnick wrote nine Broadway shows with Bock, their last, The Rothschilds (1970), coinciding with a huge rift – not repaired for another 15 years – over the replacement of the Australian director Derek Goldby, who had worked at the National Theatre in London, with a more experienced Broadway hand, Michael Kidd. After the show tried out on the bumpy road into town, Bock wanted to keep Goldby; Harnick and the producers did not.
Lyric writing, he said, was “the art of substitution”, of finding the right words in the right place at the right pitch. He was a thoughtful, sceptical man in contrast to Bock’s more ebullient nature.
Born in Chicago, he was the son of Harry Harnick, a dentist, and his wife, Esther. He took violin lessons and wrote songs at the Carl Schurz high school in the city. Called up to the army during the war, Harnick did not see active service, although he sustained a bayonet wound, he said, trying to open a can of peanuts.
After the war he went to the Northwestern University School of Music, Illinois, graduating in 1949. He had decided to work in theatre after hearing a recording of Burton Lane and Yip Harburg’s Finian’s Rainbow (1947) and moved to New York in 1950. His first song on Broadway, for which he wrote music and lyrics, was The Boston Beguine, sung by the eccentric comic actor Alice Ghostley in Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1952 revue.
Realising that television was killing off Broadway revue, Harnick started looking out for “book” shows needing lyrics, and paired with Bock on The Body Beautiful, a misfired musical set in the world of prize-fighting. Despite mediocre reviews, Bock and Harnick caught the attention of the main man on Broadway, the producer/director George Abbott, and his apprentice/successor as Broadway sorcerer, Prince.
The pair worked with Abbott on Fiorello! (1959), the story of the reforming New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia. The show played 800 performances, won three Tonys (sharing the best musical gong with The Sound of Music) and, unusually for a musical, a Pulitzer prize.
This was followed by Tenderloin (1960), directed by Abbott and designed by Cecil Beaton, in which a crusading minister, played by Maurice Evans, takes up arms against a sea of corruption and debauchery in the red-light district of 1890s New York. Unfortunately, he succeeds – and the show flopped.
They never topped the success of Fiddler. The Apple Tree (1966) was a bill of three musical playlets directed by Mike Nichols that failed to yield fruit, even though one of the pieces was based on a text by Mark Twain and starred Adam and Eve. After The Rothschilds demi-débâcle – a show that had five sons rising from the ghetto to financial power play, rather than, like Fiddler, five daughters looking for salvation in soulmates – Harnick worked less happily with other composers.
These included Mary Rodgers, on a 1973 version of Pinocchio performed by marionettes and, three years later, Mary’s exalted father, Richard, on Rex, another chaotic dud with Nicol Williamson barging his way through 49 performances before the show keeled over and expired. Rodgers – who died at the end of 1979 – much admired Harnick’s lyrics, though, and they got along just fine.
He then worked with Michel Legrand on stage adaptations of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1979) – Harnick’s lyrics, by turns mordant and poignant, were given a welcome airing in Emma Rice’s 2011 West End production – and A Christmas Carol (1982). And he wrote new libretti for The Merry Widow, The Soldier’s Tale and Carmen.
Harnick lived – and worked, notepads on his knee or on the dining table – for 58 years in an Upper West Side apartment looking over Central Park, with his third wife, Margery Gray, an actor turned photographer whom he had married in 1965.
Previously, he had been married to Mary Boatner from 1950 to 1957 (after an annulment had been declared), and then briefly, in 1962, to the comedian and writer Elaine May, with whom he remained lifelong friends.
Margery survives him, as do their children, Beth and Matthew, and four grandchildren.
• Sheldon Mayer Harnick, lyricist, born 30 April 1924; died 23 June 2023
• This article was amended on 30 June 2023. One of the three musical playlets of The Apple Tree (1966) was based on a text by Mark Twain and starred Adam and Eve, rather than two, as an earlier version stated.
