Words &music

BARBECUES AND BRIS'S: "We'll take you to barbecues and bris's—that's the kind of musical that this is!" So opens Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!, the hit musical comedy based on the late Allan Sherman's uproarious parodies from such early '60s albums as My Son, the Folk Singer (a Grammy winner in 1963 and the fastest-selling album ever when it was released one year previously). The off-Broadway show, which debuted 10 years ago, returned last month to New York City's Triad Theater on the Upper West Side, where it's been packing them in ever since.

The show will also spawn a cast album on an as-yet-undetermined label in the fall—and it's about time. Even though Sherman's songs were very much of a time and place—postwar suburban Jewish middle class, to be precise—they still resonate warmly. And besides, all that's left of him in print is Rhino's My Son, the Greatest: The Best of Allan Sherman.

Conceived and written by Doug Bernstein and Rob Krausz, Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh! is named after Sherman's chart-topping summer-camp spoof from his 1963 album My Son, the Nut, which was sung to the tune of composer Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours." The show follows the relationship of Sarah Jackman and Barry Bochman—the characters in "Sarah Jackman," Sherman's parody of "Frère Jacques"—from birth to the Camp Granada setting of the title track, through college, marriage, and parenthood in New Rochelle to retirement in Miami. Featured along the way are a score of Sherman classics, including "Sir Greenbaum's Madrigal" (a parody of "What Child is This?"), "Harvey and Sheila" ("Hava Nagila"), "Grow, Mrs. Goldfarb" ("Glow Worm"), and "The Ballad of Harry Lewis" (a takeoff on "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," about a garment worker who died in a fire "trampling through the warehouse where the drapes of Roth are stored").

A short, overweight meshugener with a singing voice that Sherman admitted in his autobiography sounded "like anyone singing in the bathtub," Sherman's initial recognition came as the creator of the quiz show I've Got a Secret. But he failed in his brief stint producing The Steve Allen Show and fell back on performing the nutty parodies he'd long been doing at show-business parties.

"There he was at the piano, singing these songs that were just hilarious," music-business legend Joe Smith recalls. " 'Seventy-six Sol Cohens' to 'Seventy-six Trombones' from The Music Man and 'When you walk through the Bronx/Keep your head up high' to 'You'll Never Walk Alone'—these things are still indelible in my mind."

Smith had just joined Warner Bros. and signed Sherman to the label. "Korvettes was a major retailer in New York at the time, and My Son, the Folk Singer was on the checkout counter," he says. "Everybody was buying it, because it was such a great, New York kind of thing. And his parodies were much hipper than Sammy Cahn's—who was great with words—but Allan had this warm haimish thing."

Sherman's parodies were so popular, in fact, that even President Kennedy was overheard singing "Sarah Jackman." But Sherman's superstardom, unfortunately, did not outlive Kennedy.

"He was a short, fat guy who was so talented and self-destructive," Smith says. Sherman, whose life had been troubled prior to becoming famous, celebrated his sudden celebrity to excess: A chain-smoker and heavy drinker, he died just short of age 49 from emphysema in 1973, his career long in decline.

It was long, too, from the frozen moment of innocence and optimism so wondrously reflected in his prized parody songs and embodied in the brief Kennedy presidency. Of course, maybe that time never existed in the first place, other than as seen on reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show—which was set in New Rochelle—and in the childlike, universally appealing world of the great Allan Sherman, whose work lives on in Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh! As Smith notes with some certainty, "There's been nobody like him since."