Say Hello to Sherman’s ‘Hello, Muddah!’ on Stage : Theater: The revue, featuring two dozen of Allan Sherman’s parodies, is now playing at the Circle in the Square in Greenwich Village.

NEW YORK —  Hello, Muddah! Hello, Fadduh!

Here I am at Camp Grenada.

Camp is very entertaining.

And they say we’ll have some fun if it stops raining.

As pop phenomena go, Allan Sherman may have been no Madonna. For one thing, it is unlikely that many folks would flock the bookstores for erotic photos of a 5-foot-6, 225-pound balding man with nerdy, heavy black glasses.

But for a while there in the mid-1960s, Sherman was as hot as it got in the record business, his albums of parodies of folk and popular songs selling at phenomenal rates. His first, “My Son, the Folksinger,” sold 400,000 copies in five weeks, faster than any album to that point. There were Sherman wanna-bes, nerdy kids with heavy black glasses attempting to match his parodying wit. People were just getting comfortable with the suburbs, crabgrass, polyester blends, traffic and shopping centers Sherman lampooned in his songs.

“It was a time of innocence and the songs hit just the right note,” said Doug Bernstein, who with his old Bronx junior high school buddy, Rob Krausz, has written, “Hello, Muddah! Hello, Fadduh!,” a revue using two dozen of Sherman’s parodies now playing at Circle in the Square. The five-person cast at the Greenwich Village theater includes three-time Tony nominee Tovah Feldshuh, Paul Kreppel, Mary Testa, Jason Graae and Stephen Berger.

The play’s title song was Sherman’s most popular, a boy’s lament about his first day at summer camp to the tune of the classical “Dance of the Hours” by Ponchielli. “Hello, Muddah! Hello, Fadduh!” was No. 3 on the Billboard Top 40 for three weeks in the summer of 1963 (behind Little Stevie Wonder’s first hit, “Fingertips, Part II”), when Bernstein and Krausz were but 6 years old.

“I think I knew these songs before I knew English,” said Krausz, who graduated from Duke University Law School before becoming a writer. (He has somewhat melded the two together by writing and appearing on “Divorce Court.”) “And there must be a lot of other people who did as well. This is a pretty funky neighborhood and I’ve seen tough kids in leather with pink spiked hair and nose rings walk by, see the ‘Hello, Muddah! Hello, Fadduh!’ sign and start singing the song.”

I went hiking with Joe Spivey.

He developed poison ivy.

You remember Leonard Skinner.

He got ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner.

Bernstein and Krausz admit that the book of “Hello, Muddah! Hello, Fadduh!” is a contrivance to fit the Sherman songs. It is the story of Barry Bockman and Sarah Jackman, characters in one of the first Sherman parodies, “Sarah Jackman” (to the tune of “Frere Jacques”). They are born, go to school, marry, grow old and, oddly for a comic piece, die. Along the way, they become entrapped by and somehow escape the pitfalls of average existence: tyrannical teachers, boring principals, uncomfortable first dates, loud in-laws, rebellious kids, implacable bosses, odd friends.

“The humor today seems to be so hard-edged,” said Bernstein. “One of the reasons we think the show is successful is because Allan Sherman wrote about the parts of a man’s life. It is one of those things that really does harken back to a simpler time. And the songs themselves are brilliantly written.”

They include: “One Hippopotami,” to the tune of “What Kind of Fool Am I?”--a tribute to the peculiarities of English plurals (“One hippopotami cannot get on a bus. For one hippopotami is two hippopotamus.”); “Harvey Bloom,” to the tune of “Harvest Moon,” a father singing to his son, the astronaut (“Shine on, Harvey Bloom, up in the sky. Under separate cover, I’m sending you some pickles and a corned beef on rye.”); and “Grow, Mrs. Goldfarb,” to the tune of “Glow, Little Glow Worm,” a paean to a hefty woman by her husband (“Grow, Mrs. Goldfarb, daily, nightly. Grow, though your chair is bending slightly.”).

While many of the songs have a middle-class Jewish male tinge to them, Bernstein and Krausz said that doesn’t strike them as an impediment. Still, they include in the Playbill an “Allan Sherman Glossary” with definitions of things like “Liverwurst” (“A cold cut that has been around forever but nobody seems to eat”) and “Grand Concourse” (“Large avenue in the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium. Your grandmother used to live there.”).

“Our musical director when the show was in Phoenix was a female Mormon and she knew all the songs,” said Krausz. “All those albums weren’t bought by Jewish people. It’s just good, silly stuff, something we don’t have enough of in comedy these days.”

Dearest Fadduh, Darling Muddah,

How’s my precious little bruddah.

Let me come home if you miss me.

I would even let Aunt Bertha hug and kiss me. Sherman himself had a manic career. In his 20s, he helped create the enormously successful game show “I’ve Got a Secret.” He wrote comedy and produced shows for such folks as Steve Allen, Jackie Gleason and Joe E. Lewis. He was out of work and renting a house in Los Angeles when he played, impromptu, his folk song parodies at a party given by his next-door neighbor, Harpo Marx. Marx introduced him to an agent who helped get Sherman a $1,500 advance for a recording session, most of which went to studio cost and a back-up singer.

Within weeks, he was a rich and famous man. He was a guest-host on “The Tonight Show,” won a Grammy and made his shtick last through four years and eight albums. But by 1966, his marriage of 21 years was over due to his drinking and carousing. He tried to turn that tragedy into an advantage by writing a musical based on his divorce, “The Fig Leaves Are Falling,” three of whose songs are reprised in “Hello Muddah! Hello, Fadduh!” Despite winning a Tony nomination for star Dorothy Loudon and being directed by Broadway legend George Abbott, it closed in two nights.

“We worked three or four years together, one of the more extraordinary, volatile times of my life,” said Albert Hague, who wrote the music for “The Fig Leaves Are Falling” (as well as “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and the Broadway hit “Redhead”), but is better known for his role as Professor Shorofsky, the music teacher on the TV show “Fame.”

“Allan would start, say, 26 songs, but never finish them,” said Hague. “His mind was just so fast. He was so enormously quick that he was always going to the next thing. Such geniuses sometimes trip themselves up. He was compulsive in everything he did. When he was drinking, he was really drinking. When he was on the wagon, he was really dry. He had no constitution for criticism and no self-discipline, but was one brilliant guy.”

His lifestyle apparently killed Sherman. He collapsed and died from respiratory failure while entertaining friends at his Hollywood apartment in 1973 at age 49.

Until now, his son Robert, a TV producer, has held tight rein on the rights to Sherman’s parodies. But Krausz said he pestered the younger Sherman long enough to convince him it was time for an Allan Sherman revival.

“I think he finally relented when he knew this wouldn’t be ‘The Allan Sherman Story,’ which would probably be touchy for him,” said Krausz.

“There had been a number of producers who had expressed interest before,” said Robert Sherman. “In a way, I’m surprised that anyone finds the songs still funny, what with the way humor has such cynicism now. But I’m sure my father was just as surprised it was successful back then. There had been song parodies ever since there were songs, but before then, they tended to be naughty. He legitimized parodies the whole family could enjoy.”

“It’s hard to believe it, but there was a time when people bought comedy albums and sat around listening to them,” said Bernstein. “Besides Allan Sherman, there were Bill Cosby and Woody Allen and Stan Freberg and Tom Lehrer’s funny folk songs.

“This is a show with that up-beat, only somewhat sardonic spirit,” said Bernstein. “Even though Barry Bockman dies in the end, he has come to believe he has lived a good life. That’s how most of Allan Sherman’s songs go. Even the sad kid in the song ‘Hello, Muddah! Hello, Fadduh!’ ends up liking camp after all.”

Wait a minute. It stopped hailing.

Guys are swimming. Guys are sailing.

Playing baseball. Gee, that’s better.

Muddah, Fadduh, kindly disregard this letter.