By Craig Keller
A passel of swaggering 12-year-olds do their best to evoke the brash hustlers of Damon Runyon’s Broadway. But halfway through the song, a miscue leads to a moment of confusion. Steps and voices falter. Frank Loesser’s masterpiece threatens to implode.
“The place was like a magnet for kids in the theater,” says critic and teacher Albert Williams, a camper and counselor at Harand in the mid-60s. “But some of them were disappointed because Harand didn’t try to be a professionally oriented place. On the other hand, sometimes people who were creative got immersed in the turbulent, messy, neurotic reality and realized for the first time that the world didn’t revolve around them or their talent.”
Half a century ago the Harand sisters made their names here staging inventive solo shows–a sort of musical-theater performance art–at conventions, ladies’ clubs, churches, and synagogues, as well as theaters. Audiences who saw them in their prime–Sulie in her one-woman adaptation of West Side Story, for instance, and Pearl in her tragicomic solo rendition of Fiddler on the Roof–remember them as dynamic, expressive performers who combined skill and talent with extraordinary force of personality. But the Harand sisters did not become legends in the world of American entertainment. They will never be mentioned in the same breath as stars like Ethel Merman and Mary Martin, or guiding forces like George Abbott and Rodgers and Hammerstein. The productions they mount at Harand Camp may be more polished than the average school play, but they’re not destined for the professional stage. Pearl and Sulie have left their true mark as teachers, instilling in their pupils the humanist optimism that distinguished the golden age of the American musical. Students memorize John Donne’s “No man is an island” along with the Carousel anthem “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” When Sulie declares “Nothing succeeds like putting a child on the stage,” she’s referring to the cultivation of the whole person. Theater can impart the lesson that life’s failures are often failures of confidence, not talent. “We helped some children learn to concentrate,” says Pearl, “and to be part of the whole group, not just individuals.”
To reinforce their lessons, the Harands developed an egalitarian, and sometimes eccentric, method of casting that guaranteed each child got a featured role and a part in the chorus in every production. A single performance of Annie Get Your Gun, for instance, might feature four to six different Annies–each girl having her own scene and song, before and after which she would appear in the chorus. The none-too-subtle message: being in the chorus is just as important as being the lead, and everyone deserves a chance at both. The lesson was reinforced by the intensely personal interest Sulie and Pearl took in each kid. “They had this knack of making everyone feel like he or she was their favorite camper,” says Morgan Proctor, a producer of TV and radio commercials for his mother Barbara’s advertising company, Proctor Communications Network. “They both made you feel special. I used to think I was their darling until I talked to three or four other people and they said, “They treat me the same way.”‘
The parents had to be resourceful to nurture their daughters’ artistic inclinations. Frema sewed their clothes and found ways to pinch pennies so the girls could regularly sit in the balcony of the Auditorium Theatre and marvel at such performers of the day as the ballerina Anna Pavlova and violinist Jascha Heifetz. Jacob took out a loan to pay for their after-school lessons and for their enrollment at conservatories, where both trained in voice and ballet.
