Jerry Herman (1931–2019): The Best of Times, From Our Seats

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Jerry Herman, the composer and lyricist who gave Broadway Hello, Dolly!, Mame and La Cage aux Folles, died on December 26, 2019, in Miami. He was 88, and the cause was pulmonary complications. Nearly seven years later, his songs are still being sung on New York stages, and TheaterScene.net’s critics are still writing about them. This is our appreciation of the man our Editor-at-Large Chip Deffaa called “one of the Broadway greats,” and of the music our pages have celebrated for more than a decade.

A Broadway legend from Jersey City

Herman was born in Manhattan on July 10, 1931, and raised in Jersey City, New Jersey, where, as he once told Deffaa, his middle-class family went to the theater all the time. He taught himself piano, studied theater at the University of Miami and, after graduating in 1953, staged his first Off-Broadway revue, I Feel Wonderful, with songs he had written in college. His first Broadway book musical, Milk and Honey (1961), ran for more than a year.

Then came the hits. Hello, Dolly! (1964), starring Carol Channing, ran for 2,844 performances and won 10 Tony Awards, and Louis Armstrong’s recording of the title song knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts. Mame (1966) starred Angela Lansbury. La Cage aux Folles (1983), written with Harvey Fierstein, won the Tony Award for Best Musical. Deffaa wrote that “The scores of all of his musicals–even shows that were not box-office hits, like ‘Mack and Mabel’ and ‘Dear World’–offer an abundance of riches.” Herman won Tony Awards for Dolly and La Cage and two Grammys, and he received the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre in 2009 and Kennedy Center Honors in 2010. His memoir, Showtune, was published in 1996.

His songs on our pages

TheaterScene.net has written about Herman’s work in 15 articles, and his name runs through our coverage like one of his own melodies.

Deffaa knew him personally, and he wrote a personal appreciation on the night of the news, because “Herman’s passing is such a tremendous loss, I want to write a personal appreciation of him here, right away.” He had just heard Michael Feinstein sing Herman’s songs at Feinstein’s 54 Below. “Offstage, Jerry Herman was a gentle, quiet, tremendously warm, self-effacing man–down-to-earth, and very easy to like,” he wrote. Herman confided that he would not write another show: “At my age, I don’t think I could bear to have a flop.” And Deffaa shared that “He told me that ‘Mack and Mabel’ was his own favorite score, out of all the scores he had written.” His verdict: “Some of his songs–like some of Irving Berlin’s–are so simple, direct, and accessible–that sophisticates sometimes failed to appreciate them. But he spoke to the heart.”

Deffaa returned to Herman again and again. In a 2017 column he praised Bette Midler’s Dolly for “succeeding just as well with the comic dialogue as with Jerry Herman’s irresistible score.” In a 2022 essay on The Music Man, he recalled the cut Dolly number “Penny in My Pocket”: “But both Jerry Herman, who wrote the song, and Carol Channing, who starred in the original production of Hello, Dolly!, told me that the show worked better without it.”

In 2016, TheaterScene.net covered the Mame 50th anniversary reunion at Sardi’s, where “Leading the fun filled special evening was Angela Lansbury (Mame).”

Herman’s lesser-known shows found champions here too. Victor Gluck called the York Theatre Company’s Milk and Honey “a radiant revival of Milk and Honey, Herman’s underrated first Broadway show and the first Broadway musical about Israel,” and added that “The show’s most famous number is still the title song, which remains a rousing anthem.” Later that year, at the York’s Jerry’s Girls, he concluded: “This is a fitting tribute to the greatest hits of Jerry Herman, a consummate composer/lyricist for the theater.” At Encores!’ 25th-anniversary concert, Hey, Look Me Over!, Darryl Reilly wrote that “Jerry Herman’s 1974 flop Mack and Mabel is one of the Holy Grails for musical theater aficionados.”

In February 2020, two months after his death, New York paid tribute to him twice. Sheila Kogan reported that Encores!’ Mack & Mabel “was a tribute to him, with huge, framed photos of him displayed during the entr’acte.” She was honest about the show’s old trouble (“Somehow, the book still doesn’t quite work”), but she concluded: “But the real star of the show was the music and lyrics of Jerry Herman. The lyrics are clever and rich with meaning, but deceptively simple; and the music is tuneful and engaging.” At the 92nd Street Y’s Jerry Herman: You I Like, Joel Benjamin noted “A bittersweet mist of sadness” over the evening, which, directed by Cady Huffman with music director Andy Einhorn, “revealed all of Herman’s richness and, yes, sophistication.”

Our critics did not pretend every Herman show was a masterpiece. Reviewing Encores!’ Dear World with Donna Murphy in 2023, Benjamin wrote that “Dear World is, at heart, like a very long Herman song: schmaltzy, romantic, silly and melodic,” and that “Although Dear World isn’t topnotch Jerry Herman, it still holds interest for theater mavens and Herman diehards.”

His songs also lit up concerts and cabarets. At Broadway by the Year: The Broadway Musicals of 1965 – 1989, Reilly wrote that “Jerry Herman’s emotionally charged anthem was a triumph for Reams,” as Lee Roy Reams finally sang “I Am What I Am” in New York. At Marilyn Maye’s 92nd Street Y concert, “An extended version of Jerry Herman’s ‘It’s Today’ with her limberly dancing and high kicking was the joyous affirmative finale.” And at Carnegie Hall, the New York Pops kept him in its holiday programs: Daniel J. Lee heard Essential Voices USA sing “We Need a Little Christmas” at Home for the Holidays, and Gluck heard “Larry Blank’s rousing arrangement of Jerry Herman’s ‘The Best Christmas of All'” open The Best Christmas of All with Norm Lewis.

Most recently, in June 2026, Tony Marinelli reviewed Robert O’Hara’s Encores! production of La Cage aux Folles, with Billy Porter and Wayne Brady, in which conductor Joseph Joubert “restores Herman’s score to its full symphonic splendor.” He wrote: “Herman’s genius lay in his ability to express profound emotional truths through melodies of disarming simplicity.”

Curtain

Herman was survived by his longtime partner, Terry Marler, and his goddaughters; his goddaughter Jane Dorian told the Associated Press that plans for a memorial were in the works. As Deffaa reported at the time, Broadway would dim its lights for him on January 7, 2020. TheaterScene.net’s full coverage of his work is collected on his tag page.