The Tony Award-winning music composer Jerry Herman has died at the age of 88.
Herman wrote the music and lyrics for the evergreen musicals Hello, Dolly! La Cage Aux Folles and Mame.
His goddaughter, Jane Dorian, revealed that the musician and composer died in Miami where he had resided.
Herman wrote ten Broadway shows and collaborated to many other such productions. He won Tony Awards for best musical for Hello, Dolly! in 1964 and La Cage Aux Folles in 1984.
He also received two Grammy awards, one for the Mame cast album and another for Hello, Dolly! as Song of the Year. In a measure of the enduing popularity of Hello Dolly!, 55 years after the show first opened, Craig Revel Horwood danced in an interpretation of the musical in a recent edition of Strictly Come Dancing.
Hello Dolly! was not yet a Broadway show when jazz singer Louis Armstrong laid down his gravel-voiced demo of the song in December 1963 as a promo for the forthcoming musical.
The Los Angeles Times said his performance of the song, "turned it from the swaying, "Gay '90s"-style tune Herman had envisioned into a phenomenal toe-tapping hit, inspiring the producers to slap its name across the marquee."
Armstrong's version made the number one spot on the US Billboard Hot 100, ending the Beatles' run of three number-one hits in a row over 14 consecutive weeks
Hello Dolly! began its Broadway run in early 1964, and remained there for a record-breaking 2,844 performances.
Accepting the Tony award in 1984 for La Cage Aux Folles, Herman said: "This award forever shatters a myth about the musical theatre. There's been a rumour around for a couple of years that the simple, hummable show tune was no longer welcome on Broadway. Well, it’s alive and well at the Palace Theatre."
The composer always denied the existence of any kind of unhealthy rivalry between him and fellow composer Stephen Sondheim, whose music was sometimes seen to have a greater degree of aesthetic value.
"Only a small group of 'showbiz gossips' have constantly tried to create a feud between Mr. Sondheim and myself, " he told readers of Broadway.com in a 2004 Q&A session.
"I am as much of a Sondheim fan as you and everybody else in the world, and I believe that my comments upon winning the Tony for La Cage clearly came from my delight with the show business community's endorsement of the simple melodic show tune which had been criticised by a few hard-nosed critics as being old-fashioned."
