Happy Birthday, Sheldon Harnick

Lots of swirling going on about here.  I'm in Chicago on family stuff, so the elves are in charge back at the Home Office and keeping things running.  When I spoke with them they said to send their best.

So, I was out to a late dinner when I finally had the time, and I got a phone call from my Aunt Joan.  "Quick, put on WBEZ, they have an hour-long interview with Sheldon!!"  Sheldon, in this case, is the great lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who wrote among many things, the Tony-winning Best Musical Fiddler on the Roof, the Pulitizer Prize-winning and Tony-winning Best Musical Fiorello!, and She Loves Me.  She can get away with calling him just "Sheldon," since was childhood friends with him in Chicago and went to Northwestern with him.

(About four years ago, I arranged for them to get together when he and I were in Chicago at the same time.  They hadn't seen each other in decades, and it was as time has slipped away.)

As it happens, they mention on the show that today -- April 30 -- is his 90th birthday!  He sounded great, vibrant.  (The interview was done a week ago, but they held broadcast for tonight.)  The show was Fresh Air with Terry Gross, so you can probably hear it online.  When they get it posted, I'll try to get a link.  The show was quite wonderful, because the focus of it was a new CD that's being released tomorrow (maybe they said a double CD??) called Hidden Treasures, basically songs from Harnick's lesser known shows and demo recordings of songs cut from his well-known shows.  One that I recall is from Tenderloin (written after Fiorello! and before Fiddler on the Roof), a show with a good score but a problematic book.  The song was "What's It Like?".  The premise is that it's sung by two young women, both virgins, who are on a religious retreat with the main character, a reformer, and they wonder what it's like to be with a man before you're married.  It was terrific.  Harnick said that women critics loved the song at the time, (1960), but male reviewers oddly felt uncomfortable by it, so it was cut.  But a recent revival of the show put the song back in to a very good response, and then not long ago several of his lesser-known shows were staged in sort of concert versions in New York, and added the song back in, as well -- and he said the audience went wild.  I believe he said that the song has now been reincorporated into the show.

He also told a great story as a young man new to New York about being invited to attend a backers' audition for a new, hopeful musical, the first he had ever seen.  He said that the score was so brilliant, it almost sent him back to Chicago.  "If the unknown songwriters are this good," he said that he was thinking at the time, "then what chance do I have?"  He reluctantly met the other young songwriter.  It was Stephen Sondheim.  He soon learned that, no, all unknown songwriters were not that good.  The two became lifelong friends.

Anyway, in honor of his birthday, here's Sheldon Harnick singing the wonderful, "In My Own Lifetime,"one of my favorite of his songs, from The Rothschilds, the last musical he wrote with Jerry Bock.