Bock and Harnick 2007 Inge Festival Honorees

 

Jerry Bock (left) Sheldon Harnick (right)

Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, creators of beloved musicals such as “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Fiorello!” and “She Loves,” are the Honorees of the 26^th Annual William Inge Theatre Festival in Independence, Kansas.

 

The festival takes place April 25-28 at the William Inge Theatre at Independence Community College and is named for the late Pulitzer Prize and Oscar-winning writer William Inge, who was a native of that southeast Kansas town and ICC alumnus.

 

“We are thrilled to honor the enduring works of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick and showcase not only their most famous musicals but all their amazing contributions to the literature of musical theater,” said Inge Center Artistic Director Peter Ellenstein.

 

 

Bock and Harnick will receive the “William Inge Theatre Festival Distinguished Achievement in the American Theatre Award.” Great American playwrights such as Arthur Miller, August Wilson, Neil Simon, and Stephen Sondheim are among previous honorees saluted at the Inge Festival.

 

This year’s Inge Festival is also the debut of the “Peter Stone Unsung Heroes” award for librettists, named for the late Peter Stone, book writer of “1776,” “The Woman of the Year,” and “The Will Rogers Follies,” among many.

 

The “Jerome Lawrence Award” for outstanding service to both the Inge Festival and the national theater (named for “Inherit the Wind” co-writer and frequent Inge Festival visitor Jerome Lawrence); will be presented this spring for the second time along with the annual Otis Guernsey New Voices in the American theater Award, for an outstanding emerging playwright.

 

The Festival’s four days include performances, dinners with special guests and public workshops with professional artists.  Tickets go on sale online March 1^st online at www.ingefestival.org.

 

In 1956, Bock and Harnick began their celebrated collaboration that yielded five scores in seven years: “The Body Beautiful,” “Fiorello!” (winner of Broadway’s “Triple Crown”: The Tony Award, The New York Critics’ Circle Award and The Pulitzer Prize in Drama); “Tenderloin,” “She Loves Me” (winner of Variety’s poll of critics as Best Musical); “Fiddler on the Roof” (nine Tonys, notably the citation for Best Musical of the Year); “The Apple Tree,” and “The Rothschilds.”

 

Bock and Harnick’s musicals are thriving.  In addition to the 1989 silver anniversary production of “Fiddler” (from which a major excerpt was featured in “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway”), there was a 1993 Broadway revival of “She Loves Me,”  another  recent Broadway revival of “Fiddler” starring Alfred Molina, then Harvey Fierstein, and an esteemed revival of “The Rothschilds,” which enjoyed a successful run off-Broadway in 1980.  Furthermore, “The Apple Tree” is in a major revival currently playing on Broadway and starring Kristen Chenoweth.

 

Bock and Harnick have been triply honored by being inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame, receiving the Johnny Mercer Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Spirit of American Creativity Award from the Foundation for a Creative America.

 

Each took a separate path to New York prior to their teaming up.  Born and raised in Chicago, Sheldon Harnick began studying the violin while in grammar school. After serving in the U.S. Army, he enrolled in the Northwestern University School of Music, and earned a Bachelor of Music degree in 1949. Though his focus had been the violin, Harnick also developed skills as a writer of comedy sketches, songs and parody lyrics, and eventually decided to try his luck as a theatrical lyricist in New York City.

His first song in a Broadway show, “The Boston Beguine,” for “New Faces of 1952,” introduced theatergoers to the subtle humor and deft wordplay for which he is known.  Harnick contributed lyrics or whole songs to revues as “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac,” The Shoestring Revue” and “The Littlest Revue.”

 

Harnick spent a few years working on other writers' trouble-plagued Broadway-bound musicals before he joined up with composer Jerry Bock.  Harnick is also the librettist for numerous operas and musicals with other collaborates: these include Michel Legrand, Mary Rodgers, and Richard Rodgers.

 

Jerry Bock was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1928. His family moved to Flushing, New York where Bock studied the piano from an early age and began writing music for various shows while still in high school. As a senior at the University of Wisconsin, he scored the musical comedy, "Big as Life," based on the legend of Paul Bunyan. Bock's collaborator was a fellow student, Larry Holofcener, who was to become a co-writer on Bock’s early scores.

 

Bock and Holofcener were fortunate in being selected to audition their skills for Max Liebman, a producer of early music variety shows for television. They joined the staff of "The Admiral Broadway Revue," which later became "Your Show of Shows," starring one of the world's premiere comedy duos, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. The young writers wrote songs for the stars as well as the chorus and the Corps de Ballet.

During the early 1950s, an introduction to the very well-known music publisher, Tommy Valando, resulted in Bock's debut Broadway vehicle, the score for "Catch a Star." This was followed by song contributions to Tallulah Bankhead's "Ziegfeld Follies," some pop-styled songs for Sarah Vaughan and Bob Manning and a score for a Columbia Pictures short, titled "Wonders of Manhattan," which won an honorable mention at The Cannes Film Festival.Another Bock project of the time was “Mr. Wonderful,” starring Sammy Davis Jr. and written with Larry Holofcenter and George Weiss.

Bock and Harnick began their celebrated collaboration in 1956.

Major supporters of the William Inge Center for the Arts include the Kansas Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, Hallmark Corporation, the William T. Kemper Foundation/Commerce Bancshares, the Kansas Humanities Council, the Cessna Foundation, and many corporate and private foundations and hundreds of individuals across the country.