Margo Lion, a theater producer who was largely responsible for bringing “Jelly’s Last Jam” and “Hairspray” to Broadway and played a major role in other important shows, including “Angels in America,” died on Friday in Manhattan. She was 75.
Her son, Matthew Nemeth, said the cause was a brain aneurysm. She had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, one of several causes she supported, and had a lung transplant in 2018.
In an era when big-budget theater was an increasingly corporate affair, bankrolled by companies like Disney Theatrical Productions, Ms. Lion was an independent producer, putting up her own money and recruiting other investors to get a show mounted.
“She was passionate,” the producer Rocco Landesman, who worked with her on “Angels in America” and other shows, said in a telephone interview, “and she was always all-in.”
Unlike some producers, who commit to a show only after it has proved itself in workshops or out-of-town trial runs, she was known for getting on board early — often initiating a project, as she did with “Jelly’s Last Jam” (1992) and “Hairspray” (2002). And she stuck with shows she believed in despite the considerable risk of losing money, as most Broadway productions do. She often put up her West Side apartment as collateral in support of a project.
“People think I’m nuts,” Ms. Lion told The New York Times in 2002. “But once you get going on these shows, you have so much invested in them emotionally, you have to believe completely in the purpose of what you’re doing, so you risk the farm.”
People who worked on her productions knew her to be interested more in the art than in the bottom line. One admirer was Susan Birkenhead, the lyricist for “Jelly’s Last Jam,” a show about the jazz pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton that Ms. Lion began developing in the mid-1980s. Where other producers might be cautious, Ms. Birkenhead found Ms. Lion to be encouraging and open.
“It was a nurturing I’d never experienced in a producer,” Ms. Birkenhead told The Baltimore Sun in 1993. “She allowed us to fail, and she allowed us to experiment, and the more innovative and dangerous it became, the more willing she was.”
Margo Allison Lion was born on Oct. 13, 1944, in Baltimore to Albert and Gloria (Amburgh) Lion. Her father was chairman of Lion Brothers, a company that made embroidered emblems, and her parents were supporters of arts institutions in Baltimore. Both were killed in a plane crash in Egypt in 1963 when Margo was finishing her freshman year at Mills College in Oakland, Calif.
Ms. Lion transferred to George Washington University and earned a bachelor’s degree in history and politics before going to work on Capitol Hill for Senator Daniel B. Brewster, Democrat of Maryland, and then for Senator Robert F. Kennedy in his New York office. After Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, “I just said I never wanted to do politics again,” she said.
She became a teacher at the Town School in Manhattan, but when her husband at the time, Ted Nemeth, enrolled in the playwriting division of the Iowa Writers Workshop, she followed him there and rediscovered a love of theater she had nursed in school productions as a girl.
“I loved hanging out with the playwrights, the theater world,” she said.
She and her husband soon separated and later divorced, and, back in New York, she grew more serious about theater.
“I really thought I would have three kids, four dogs and be the woman behind the man,” she said. “But I found when Ted and I separated that I had all of this energy and this passion to do something.”
A second cousin, the choreographer Martha Clarke, introduced her to Lyn Austin, who had founded the nonprofit Music-Theater Group, which produced idiosyncratic performance works. Ms. Austin brought Ms. Lion aboard. She eventually became a producing director alongside Ms. Austin.
“She was the perfect person for me to learn from,” Ms. Lion said. “She was a gambler.”
After five years there she struck out on her own, and by 1984 she was working on a musical tentatively titled “Mr. Jelly Lord.” The show, retitled “Jelly’s Last Jam,” didn’t make it to Broadway until eight years later — a measure of how long it can take before a new musical reaches the stage. Gregory Hines played Jelly Roll Morton; his wife at the time, Pamela Koslow, was Ms. Lion’s co-producer.
To keep the show afloat during its development, Ms. Lion put up as collateral a Matisse sculpture she had inherited from her parents.
“She put that in hock to meet the payroll on ‘Jelly,’” Mr. Landesman recalled, and it wasn’t the last time. “She must’ve pawned it half a dozen times. If she was determined to do something, she did it and worried about how later.”
The show ran for 569 performances. It was nominated for 11 Tony Awards and won three, although it lost out on the prize for best musical to “Crazy for You.”
By then Ms. Lion already had three Broadway credits, as associate producer on two shows and a producer on one, “I Hate Hamlet” (1991). Her Broadway credit after “Jelly’s Last Jam” was atypical, in that it was not a project she had been with from the beginning; it had been developed in productions in San Francisco, London and Los Angeles.
The show was Tony Kushner’s two-part work about AIDS and homosexuality, “Angels in America.” Mr. Landesman’s company, Jujamcyn Theaters, had won the competition to bring it to New York, and Ms. Lion bought in, becoming a significant voice in the still-evolving work as it headed to Broadway.
“She really loved discussion,” Mr. Kushner said in a phone interview. “And she would have ideas and make suggestions, but they were done with the utmost respect, and always with the preface of, ‘I don’t know if you’re going to want to do this, but here’s what I’m thinking.’”
Perhaps her biggest contribution to “Angels” was to help recruit George C. Wolfe — the young director she had used on “Jelly’s Last Jam” — to direct the New York production. He had been nominated for the best-director Tony for “Jelly,” his first Broadway credit, and he went on to win the award for each of the two parts of “Angels in America.”
“Because of Margo, I had my first Broadway show,” Mr. Wolfe said by email. “She was the first person to suggest I direct ‘Angels in America.’ I was on President Obama’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities because of her. The list goes on and on. She was a true friend, protective, caring, loving, loyal.”
Ms. Lion had her share of failures, perhaps none bigger than “Triumph of Love,” a musical that died on Broadway 85 performances after opening in 1997. But it wouldn’t be long before she was struck by the brainstorm that would become her biggest hit.
Ms. Lion had seen the movie “Hairspray” (1988), directed by her fellow Baltimorean John Waters, soon after it came out, but admitted that she didn’t embrace it initially.
“To be candid,” she told The Sun in 2002, “I think I wasn’t sophisticated enough when I first saw ‘Hairspray’ to appreciate its many virtues.”
But in 1998 she rented the video and watched the movie again while recovering from a cold.
“Halfway through,” she recalled in the 2002 interview with The Times, “I literally said: ‘Yes, this is it. I found it.’”
She had not yet met Mr. Waters. By the time she did, she had acquired the rights and had sent him the first few songs for the musical, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. When they finally did meet, Mr. Waters said in a phone interview, she promised him that she would make sure that the musical, about a chubby Baltimore teenager who wins a spot on a local television dance show, stayed true to his voice and vision.
“She stuck to her word,” he said, “and we were lucky. It went right, right from the beginning. She honored everything about the original intentions of the movie.”
The musical version of the Waters movie, with a book by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, opened on Broadway on Aug. 15, 2002, and ran for almost six and a half years, a total of 2,642 performances. It won eight Tony Awards, including best musical.
Ms. Lion’s other Broadway producing credits included the August Wilson plays “Seven Guitars” (1996) and “Radio Golf” (2007), as well as “Elaine Stritch at Liberty” (2002), “Caroline, or Change” (2004), “The Wedding Singer” (2006) and “Catch Me if You Can” (2011).
Ms. Lion was an early supporter of Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy. In 2009 he named her to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.
In addition to her son, she is survived by two grandchildren.
In a 1997 interview with The Associated Press, Ms. Lion described what drew her to producing despite the long odds of making money.
“There is something that is very compelling about the live theater,” she said. “It’s a family. You create this very warm community within the production. And, of course, you have the satisfaction of actually making something that may last.”
Mr. Kushner commended both her nuts-and-bolts knowledge and her passion.
“She was one of those people who really knows how to get things done,” he said. “A fantastic practical mind married to a great love.”
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
