BWW Recap: Tribute Show Honoring Musical Theater Legend Sheldon Harnick at the Harvard Club is Truly a Dutch Treat

By Stephen Hanks

One night in the fall of 1965, when I was nine going on 10, my parents were driving my Great Aunt and Uncle back to Yonkers from the Bronx after a Jewish holiday dinner. My Uncle Lenny was the current big macher in the family and my mother liked to kvell about how he had money in a few Broadway shows. So I'm sitting in the back seat squished between the Greats when mom says, "Stevie, did you know that Uncle Lenny is an investor in Fiddler on the Roof?" Fiddler had recently won the Tony Award as "Best Musical" and so I wondered why Uncle hadn't gotten so rich from the show that he couldn't cough up more than a quarter for my brother and me whenever he came to visit, but that's beside the point. The Fiddler cast album had been playing so often in my house that I already knew all the lyrics to "If I Were a Rich Man." So, of course, Mom went into producer mode. "Stevie, sing "Rich Man" for Uncle Lenny, she urged sounding like Lainie Kazan would years later in the film My Favorite Year. So in a beat up car--make and model no longer remembered--and on a bumpy road through the Bronx, I did my adolescent impression of chicks and turkeys and geese and ducks squawking noisily and of someone posing problems that would cross a Rabbi's eyes. It was a tour de force performance, but did not earn me another quarter.

When I was in ninth grade, which was still junior high school in those days, I so desperately wanted the role of Oliver in the school musical, I commuted all the way from Co-Op City in the North Bronx (where we had just moved) back to the South Bronx every morning just to be in the senior show that June. At the risk of our teacher/director thinking I'd be better suited as Fagin, my audition song was "If I Were a Rich Man." I ended up being cast as one of Fagin's urchins and quit junior high to attend the high school near my new monolithic neighborhood. Not getting that part still pisses me off.

I thought about these happy childhood musical theater memories last night while I attended the Dutch Treat Club's Annual Gold Medal Tribute Dinner and Show at the Harvard Club in honor of the legendary Fiddler lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who received the Club's "Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Arts." It was especially thrilling for me since I was sitting close enough to Mr. Harnick to tell him how I've had a chance to direct two amateur productions of Fiddler, one three years ago at the Union Temple of Brooklyn, and that it has been a joy to listen to his wonderful lyrics for the past 50 years.

As Harnick would mention during his speech at the end of the night, he was joining entertainment and literary royalty as a Dutch Treat Club Award recipient. Past honorees include Bob Hope, Richard Rodgers (one of Harnick's collaborators), Michael Bennett, Walter Cronkite, Hal Prince, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and last year Gay Talese. As someone who has collected a Pulitzer Prize (for Fiorello!), 2 Tony Awards, 2 Grammy Awards, and 2 New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, Sheldon Harnick certainly deserves to be in that company. The Dutch Treat Club, by the way, is one of the city's elite arts clubs and was founded in 1905 by Thomas Masson, an editor of Life Magazine, and Robert Sterling Yard, a reporter with the New York Sun. The journalists wanted a New York City club for creative people and its founding 11 members included writers, illustrators, editors and a publisher. As former Chairman John O'Hara Cosgrave said, the Dutch Treat Club "is a picked body of active agents in the production and dissemination of literature, art, music and drama in New York. It is their business to know what is going on and about the men and women who are doing things and getting them done." According to the Club's officers, such a tradition, along with the historic sense of conviviality, is still maintained to this day. (Please click on Page 2 below to continue).

With cabaret luminaries such as singers KT Sullivan, Lauren Fox, Shana Farr and Emily Bergl and Musical Director Bill Zeffiro attending the festivities, and with the outstanding Jon Weber as the evening's Musical Director at the piano, Dutch Club President Ray Errol Fox started the proceedings by introducing Bel Kaufman, the granddaughter of Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, from whose stories the book of Fiddler On the Roof--and to a large extent Harnick's lyrics--are based. After the congregation sang "Happy Birthday" to Kaufman, who will be a sprightly 102 on Friday, the ageless author of 1964's Up The Down Staircase took the microphone and told a story about how when a William Morris agent first heard a reading of Fiddler she thought it was lovely but might be "too Jewish." It was a charming kickoff to a show filled with lovely musical tributes to Harnick's vast songbook.

Beautiful Alexandra Silber, who once played Hodel in the West End revival of Fiddler, got things started by playing all three Tevye's daughter roles in singing "Matchmaker, Matchmaker," and then offered an enthralling rendition of "Will He Like Me," from the 1963 Harnick and Jerry Bock musical She Loves Me. Jim Brochu (left, in photo above with Hal Linden), who won all kinds of awards in 2010 for his one-man play, Zero Hour, about the life and career of Zero Mostel, naturally sang "If I Were A Rich Man," including in rhythm the lyric, "I've sung this song many times but never in a tuxedo," before donning his Tevye cap and turning the Harvard Club into turn-of-the-20th century Russia. As Brochu sang the cantor-esque "Lord who made the lion and the lamb . . . You decree I should be what I am" etc, Harnick and his photographer wife Margery held hands as if they were a young married couple celebrating the success of these songs for the first time. (After the show, the couple signed copies of their recently released book of Margery's stunning photos and Sheldon's related poems, "The Outdoor Museum (not your usual images of NEW YORK)."

Broadway Musical and television actress Jill Abramovitz was up next and did a lovely job on both "The Ballad of the Shape of Things" from 1956's Littlest Revue, and "Marry the Very Next Man" from Fiorello! Brian D'Arcy James, who starred opposite Kristin Chenoweth in a 2006 Broadway revival of The Apple Tree, sang "Beautiful, Beautiful World" from that show. Then Ron Raines, who most recently was nominated for a Tony Award as Best Actor in a Musical for Follies, was rapturous with his stirring version of "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler. D'Arcy James returned for a delightful turn on "Give Me Wine, Wine, Wine," a song from Harnick's most recent musical project, A Doctor In Spite of Himself (drawn from Molière's classic French comedy), for which he has written book, music and lyrics. After Raines and Silber returned for a lovely duet as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn on "Away From You" from Rex, Hal Linden seemed like he hadn't aged a day singing the comical story song "He Tossed a Coin" and the poignant "In My Own Lifetime" from The Rothchilds, for which Linden won a Best Actor in a Musical Tony in 1971.

In his own lifetime, Sheldon Harnick has achieved the kind of success most people in Broadway Musical Theater can only dream about. "My career has lasted more than 60 years," he said after accepting his Award. Then to raucous laughter he added, "It might be interesting if I collapsed." With a new musical in the pipeline and doubtless more in his head, Sheldon Harnick is truly a rich man in more ways than one and showing no signs of collapsing any time soon.

Photos by Russ Weatherford

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