JERRY BOCK & SHELDON HARNICK
Jerry Bock was born in New Haven, Connecticut and attended the University of Wisconsin. It was at university that Bock initially realised his desire to become a professional music writer with a musical written for the dramatic society Big As Life. On leaving university, Bock started work at the Admiral Broadway Revue, where he wrote Show of Shows. He attended the legendary summer workshop for musical comedy, Tamiment, writing material for night club acts, revues and variety shows. Bock’s first contribution to a Broadway musical was in 1956, with Catch a Star. A brief excursion to film writing, with Wonders of Manhattan, led to his Broadway return with the complete score of Mr Wonderful. His collaboration with the lyricist Sheldon Harnick started thereafter with productions such as The Body Beautiful, Fiorello!, Tenderloin, She Loves Me, The Apple Tree, The Rothschilds and of course the most famous and well-loved Fiddler on the Roof.

Sheldon Harnick was born in Chicago and trained as a violinist, graduating from Northwestern University. His work as a writer started in the early 50’s and included The Boston Beguine in New Faces of 52’ and work for revues which included Two’s Company, John Murray Anderson’s Almanac and The Littlest Revue. He met Jerry Bock in 1956 and they embarked upon a highly successful partnership thereafter. Harnick is also well-known for his parodies and satires, industrial shows, children’s musicals for the Bill Baird Marionettes, original operas (Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines for the Kansas City Lyric Theatre and Dr Heidegger’s Fountain of Youth for the National Arts Club, both with composer Jack Beeson), translations of operas and operettas, and songs for TV and the films The Heartbreak Kid and Blame it on Rio, both with Cy Coleman.

Thomas Andrew (Tom) Lehrer (born April 9, 1928) is an American songwriter, satirist, pianist, mathematician, and singer.

As a graduate student at Harvard University, he began to write comic songs to entertain his friends. Those songs later became THE PHYSICAL REVUE. Influenced mainly by the musical theatre, his style consisted of parodying the then-current forms of popular song. For example, his appreciation of list songs (à la Danny Kaye's "Stanislavski") caused him to set the names of the chemical elements to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Major General's Song".
    Inspired by the success of his performances of his songs, he paid for some studio time to record an album, SONGS BY TOM LEHRER, which he sold by mail order. Self-published and unpromoted, the album, which included the macabre ("I Hold Your Hand In Mine"), the lewd ("Be Prepared"), the unusual ("The Elements"), and the mathematical ("Lobachevsky"), became a success via word of mouth. With a cult hit, he embarked on a series of concert tours and released a second album, which came in two versions: MORE SONGS BY TOM LEHRER was studio-recorded, and AN EVENING WASTED WITH TOM LEHRER was recorded live in concert.
    By the early 1960s Lehrer had retired from touring (which he intensely disliked) and was employed as the resident songwriter for THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS, a satirical TV show. An increased proportion of his output became overtly political, or at least topical, on subjects such as pollution ("Pollution"), Vatican II ("The Vatican Rag"), race relations ("National Brotherhood Week"), and nuclear proliferation ("Who's Next?"). He also wrote a song which satirized the amorality of Wernher Von Braun. A selection of these songs was released in the album, THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS.
    There is an urban legend that Lehrer gave up political satire when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger in 1973. He did say that the awarding of the prize to Kissinger made political satire obsolete, but has denied that he stopped doing satire as a form of protest, and points out that he had stopped doing satire several years earlier.
    In the 1970s he concentrated on teaching mathematics and musical theatre, although he also wrote the occasional educational song for the children's television show THE ELECTRIC COMPANY.
    In the early 1980s, TOMFOOLERY, a revival of his songs on the London stage, was a surprise hit.
    In 2000, a CD box set, THE REMAINS OF TOM LEHRER, was released by Rhino Entertainment. It included live and studio versions of his first two albums, THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS, the songs he wrote for THE ELECTRIC COMPANY, and some previously unreleased material, accompanied by a booklet containing an introduction by Dr. Demento and lyrics to all the songs.
Lehrer's influence on rock music
While Lehrer hated rock and roll — referring to it as "children's records" in the intro to "Oedipus Rex" — his literate satiric style clearly influenced Frank Zappa. Fans of rapper Eminem have also noted some similarities in Em's style to that of Lehrer. The style comparison is best evidenced on Em's South Park parody "The Kids" with its piano backing, clever use of syntax and off-beat rhyming, and even references to torturing small animals similar to that of Lehrer's notorious "Poisoning Pigeons In The Park".

Reviews selected by Lehrer for his liner notes
• "Plays the piano acceptably" - Oakland Tribune
• "More desperate than amusing" - New York Herald Tribune
• "Mr. Lehrer's muse does not suffer from such inhibiting factors as taste." - New York Times [1]

George Stiles was born in 1961. In collaboration with Anthony Drewe, he has written scores for Just So (1989) produced by Cameron Mackintosh in London, revised for Goodspeed-at-Chester in 1998 and Northshore Music Theatre; Tutankhamun (1992); and Honk! (1993), originally commissioned by the Watermill Theatre, Newbury which opened at the Royal National's Olivier Theatre in December 1999 and won Best New Musical at the Laurence Olivier Awards 2000. Honk! received its US premiere in 2000 at the Helen Hayes Performing Arts Center, Nyack, followed by productions in South Africa, North Shore Music Theatre in Massachusetts and Israel. Honk! went on a tour of the UK in Spring 2001, with productions planned worldwide, including the US, Canada, Scandinavia and Japan.

In autumn 1999 George and Anthony completed work on a new musical adaptation of Peter Pan , which received its World Premiere at the Det Ny Teater in Copenhagen. The score for Peter Pan has won two awards - The Orchestra's Prize for Best Musical as well as Best Song at the 1996 Musical of the Year Awards in Aarhus, Denmark - and was chosen to open the BBC Radio 2 series In Company With Sondheim.

With lyricist Paul Leigh, George composed the scores of Tom Jones (1996) and Moll Flanders (1995), Best Musical winner in the 1995 TMA Regional Theatre Awards. Their collaboration with bookwriter Peter Raby on The Three Musketeers yielded further accolades. A prize-winner at the Musical of the Year Awards in 1996, the show also toured Denmark in 1997 in a concert version playing to an audience of over 45,000, as well as being broadcast on TV and Radio. The musical was showcased at the 1999 NAMT International Festival of New Musicals in New York and received its European premiere at the Stadttheater St Gallen in Switzerland in February 2000.

George has contributed music and songs to many other theatre and television productions, including the BBC's sitcom Office Gossip, the RSC's Shakespeare Revue, Habeas Corpus at the Donmar Warehouse and Barry Humphries' Look At Me When I'm Talking To You! for which he was also Dame Edna Everage's Musical Director. Recent work includes the highly acclaimed Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night at the Donmar Warehouse (directed by Sam Mendes).

George sits on the judging panel of the Vivian Ellis Prize and is currently working on two new musicals with lyricist Anthony Drewe.