Person

Bock, Jerry

1928-2010

Composer Jerry Bock is best known as half of an award-winning musical team of Bock and Harnick. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, and raised in Flushing, New York, he got his start in musical theatre in high school after childhood piano lessons. It was in his senior year at the University of Wisconsin in Madison that his talent became evident: the musical he wrote for a student club, “Big as Life,” about the Paul Bunyan legend, went on a state tour and later had a run in Chicago. He and his classmate collaborator, Lawrence Holofcener, spent three summers gaining experience at Taminent Playhouse in the Poconos. Back in New York, Bock and Holofcener made their Broadway debut in 1955 with songs they wrote for the musical “Catch a Star.” There followed “Mr. Wonderful,” written for Sammy Davis, Jr., which ran for over 300 performances, then “Ziegfield Follies of 1956,” which flopped. Bock met a new partner in lyricist Sheldon Harnick. Their first effort, “The Body Beautiful," was not a success, but director George Abbott and producer Hal Prince nevertheless hired them to work on a musical biography of New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. For this, in 1959 they won the so-called “triple crown”: a Tony (tied with Richard Rogers for “The Sound of Music”), the New York Drama Critics’ Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The team went on to compose many other musicals together, the most famous of which was “Fiddler on the Roof,” which won them another Tony in 1964. They were both inducted into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame in 1972, and in 1990 the institution gave them the Johnny Mercer Award on the 25th anniversary of the opening of “Fiddler on the Roof” on Broadway. That same year they were inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. In 1997 the BMI, the performing rights organization, instituted an annual Jerry Bock Award for Excellence in Musical Theater for a composer and lyricist of a project developed in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop. In a bittersweet coincidence, Bock died just ten days after he had spoken at the funeral of Joseph Stein, the author of “Fiddler on the Roof.”