PnhlicPerspective is the PittsburghPnhlicTheater's newslettertorsnhscrihers andfriends. Bock, Harnick And She Loves Me For twelve years Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick were one of the most important teams writing musicals for Broadway. Beginning with The Body Beautiful in 1958 and continuing with Fiorello! (1959), Tenderloin (1960), She Loves Me (1963), Fiddler on the Roof(1964), The Apple Tree (1966), and The Rothschilds (1970), they managed to write a landmark musical (Fiddler), a cult classic (She Loves Me) and garner a rare Pulitzer Prize for Drama with Fiorello! This celebrated team garnered Tony Awards (for Fiorello! and Fiddler on the Roof) a Pulitzer Prize (for Fiorello.0, a Grammy (for She Loves Me) and New York Drama Critics Circle Awards (for Fiorello! and Fiddler on the
Barbara Cook and Daniel Massey as Amalia and George in the 1963 Broadway musical production of She Loves Me.
human longings. She Loves Me is based on Miklos LasIo's play Parfumerie. A film version was made in 1940 called The Shop Around the Corner and a musical film was made in 1949 called In the Good Old Summertime. The film musical had music by several composers and is related to She Loves Me only in terms of source material. After a Broadway run, She Loves Me ran in London and was revived in a concert version in New York in 1977 and off. Broadway in 1985. A television version was made by the BBC and was broadcast in the United States by PBS in 1979. Intimate in scope, She Loves Me is considered one of the most fully-integrated musicals ever written. St~phen Berwind
Zero Mastel as Tevye in the Tony Award-winning Fiddler on the Roof.
Roof). The team split after The Rothschilds and neither achieved the success alone that they had achieved together. Recently, Harnick has collaborated on two New York musicals: as lyricist for Rex with Richard Rodgers and as librettist for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. He has moved into more serious music working as a translator/adapter for several operas. As composer and lyricist, Bock and Harnick were noteworthy for their recreation of the time and place of their shows without becoming truly imitative of older styles. Sock's music is often very melodic and Harnick's lyrics offer a compassionate, often witty understanding of
FfOREL 1:AGIJI\RJ> Pulitzer Prize-winning Fiorello! starring Tom Bosley as New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
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November• December 1986
Acting, Singing And Dancing: Bringing It All Together. Theater is a collaborative art form and in successful productions of musicals the close cooperation of a director, a musical director and a choreographer is necessary. One Saturday morning before a 10:00 a.m. rehearsal, I met with She Loves Me's director, Peter Bennett; musical director, Ken Gargaro; and choreographer, Judy Conte. I started by asking Peter how he felt about the collaboration involved in a musical PETER: It's always a collaborative effort on some level even in the straightest of plays. You've got designer collaboration, producer collaboration and actorto-actor collaboration. The process remains the same even though there are more variables to juggle in a musical. It's just a matter of opening it up for more input all along the way. • The timing of this interview is great. Today is the first day that all three of us will be there dealing with specifics. The first thing we're going over today is Maraczek's song "Days Gone By." We'll look at what's going on dramatically and . decide where and how he's going to move. It all starts to come together toaay. HOW ARE YOU APPROACHING THE PLAY? PETER: . .. We're trusting the piece for starters. Clearly, it's one of the few musicals where there are wonderful little dramatic scenes. The relationships are really clear and nicely developed. The various elements of the show are very well integrated. If you look at the piece on paper to find out- How did this relationship develop? Where did they fall in love? How do they feel about each other on a conscious level? The subconscious level? There are really no scenes where this happens in the first act. It all happens in the music - in the letters they read which are basically songs. SINCE SHE LOVES ME ISN'T A WELLKNOWN MUSICAL, CAN YOU TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT THE MUSIC? KEN: Musically. . . the atmosphere is implicit in the music. As I began to get into the piece, I began to notice the stylistic authenticity of the piece in that they are using a European style. Not only in the musical orchestrations which are orchestral in nature and derived from a romantic feel. The vocal parts themselves are written almost like instrumental pieces. The voice will be imitating a violin many times or a cello. The choices of the rhythms are polka rhythms, cancans and czardas. That is where the charm comes from musically. What I've been trying to do is to really go for an authentic sound with the voices... So that we have something that creates a time that is different from our time. A fantasy world that is a pre-World War II world. It must have been a time when people were seeing things fail apart so that the art was pulling on the romantic
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Public Pers11Ctive . l'ittsllJrgh PY/ICTheater • Pagel
as people were trying to immerse themselves in some sort of fantasy world. It's really very exciting. The more I get into the piece, the more I think 'Yes, this is really a rare gem.' PETER, DID YOU GIVE KEN ANY SPE• CIAL INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE YOU SENT HIM OFF WITH THE SINGERS? PETER: Not really. We had enough time getting to know each other musically through the audition process to where I had total trust that he was seeing the piece in the same way. Then once the song is learned and we start to put it Into the show, I'm sure that Ken and I will be talking a lot about interpretation. JUDY, HOW DO YOU BECOME IN• VOLVED IN ALL THIS? JUDY: The best way for working on the show is for Peter and I to talk about it. . . or for me to see the sketched-out block-
o-lrector Peter Bennett at rehearsal for She Loves Me.
ing which is what we're going to start to work with. I best serve him by trying to embellish his point-of-view, our point of view, for how we can make it a total piece. You can do that physically by having them bump-up what would be normal gestures and that can evolve into dance which would certainly not be naturalistic movement. That's where I come in. To keep embellishing so we can keep layering. I'll come up with something and then Peter'II say,'Oh, you know, if they would turn and see something in Maraczek's window, that will be the impulse to help them move into the store. Now, how can I help accommodate that?' It keeps flopping back and forth. PETER: It's really interesting that the one event that is really danced is in the cat~ - which is a deliberate puncturing of the romanticism. It's a little insulin shock for the audience. That's obviously a very conscious choice on the creators' part. The only time we see a dance number, it's not a romantic dance number. continued on page 3