Arts educator, singer, actress, and entrepreneur Sulie Harand passed away peacefully in her sleep on Saturday, August 6, four days after her 97th birthday. Sulie, born August 2, 1919, was cofounder of Harand Camp of the Theatre Arts, a summer camp devoted to offering youngsters experience in musical theatre, grounded in the traditional summer-camp experience of sports, arts and crafts, and social activities—”fun in the sun,” but also behind the footlights.
Daughters of Ukrainian immigrants, Sulie and Pearl Harand grew up in the 1920s and ’30s in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, then heavily populated by Russian and Polish Jews. Introducing youngsters to the classic works of the “Golden Age” of American musical theater as well as contemporary fare, the Harands shared not only the artistry of such writers as George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Leonard Bernstein, but also the progressive humanist optimism those writers projected. As Reader contributor Craig Keller wrote in a 1996 cover story on the Harand sisters, “Sister Act,” “show tunes are a means, not an end. [The] sisters use musical theater as a vehicle to teach larger life lessons about the worth of the individual and the interdependence of all people.” Keller also noted, “That lesson extended to everyone—from talented mini-stars used to getting the lead in every school play to insecure children accustomed to being told they should move their lips while the rest of the class sang.”
