Deaths (Obituaries)

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      in Television

      Alan Kalter, Longtime Voice of Letterman’s ‘Late Show,’ Dies at 78

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      Far more than just an announcer, he contributed all sorts of outlandish, incongruous comic bits to “Late Show With David Letterman.”Alan Kalter, the announcer for the “Late Show With David Letterman” for some 20 years and a participant in a ridiculous array of comic bits during that run, died on Monday at a hospital in Stamford, Conn., where he lived. He was 78.The death was announced by Rabbi Joshua Hammerman of Temple Beth El in Stamford, the synagogue Mr. Kalter attended. No cause was given.Mr. Kalter would welcome viewers with an opening quip (“From New York, home of mad cab disease … ”) and a recitation of the guest list. He would introduce the nonsensical “secret word” of the day and tell Mr. Letterman what was to be put to the “Will It Float?” test, a recurring comic bit. He would work himself into a lather over this or that and run off down the street shirtless.But, just as incongruously, he once sang a heartfelt version of “Send In the Clowns” for no particular reason, bolting offstage afterward overcome with emotion as the audience stood and applauded. Another time, he turned what at first seemed like some fatherly advice about attending the prom into a painful confessional about going to the prom with his own mother, “her middle-age body squeezed like a sausage into a sequined gown, her makeup and perfume a cruel mockery of the womanhood your hormones crave.”His transformation from announcer to all-purpose comic started early. On his first day, he said, Mr. Letterman, who had an Olympic diver as a guest, had Mr. Kalter jump into a pool while wearing his best suit.“I’m floating on my back, looking up at the cameraman, going, ‘This is what it’s like to announce on Letterman,’” he recalled in an interview on CBS New York in 2015, when Mr. Letterman ended the show.“If you’re going to have a talk show,” Mr. Letterman said on Tuesday in a telephone interview, “you’ve got to have a strong announcer, and he filled that way beyond what is required.”Mr. Kalter replaced Bill Wendell in September 1995, after Mr. Wendell retired. Mr. Letterman said that Mr. Kalter’s audition tape had left no doubt when he and his producer at the time, Robert Morton, heard it.“It was like, ‘Oh, my God, here we go,’” Mr. Letterman said.Mr. Kalter’s voice was already familiar to television viewers by then; he had announced on game shows like “To Tell the Truth” and “The $25,000 Pyramid” and provided voice-overs for numerous commercials. Mr. Letterman’s “Late Show,” though, brought him an entirely different kind of fame. His red hair and rumpled good looks made him instantly recognizable, and Mr. Letterman gave him ample opportunities to display his aptitude for both deadpan and over-the-top comedy.Mr. Kalter in 2015. “I don’t recall the guy ever saying no to anything,” David Letterman said in an interview.John Palmer/MediaPunch /IPX via Associated PressBarbara Gaines, the longtime “Late Show” producer, said Mr. Kalter had fit right into the show’s zaniness.“Alan would good-naturedly do almost anything we asked of him,” she said by email, “which is how we like our people.”Mr. Kalter said that he had always been given the option of declining to do a particularly nutty stunt or asking that it be modified, but Mr. Letterman remembered him as being perpetually game.“I don’t recall the guy ever saying no to anything,” he said, “and I guess that tells us something about his judgment.”And, he added, “it wasn’t begrudgingly — it was, ‘I’m all in.’”But Mr. Letterman also noted that, for him, Mr. Kalter and his music director, Paul Shaffer, were steadying influences.“He and Paul, to me, they were fixtures every night,” he said. “You’d look over and see Alan and see Paul and know that it’s going to be OK just like last night.”Guests, too, found Mr. Kalter to be a calming force.“Appearing with Dave triggered its own unique set of nerves,” Brian Williams, a frequent “Late Show” guest, said on Monday night on his MSNBC news program. “But seeing the smiling face of a nice man like Alan Kalter backstage was always the tonic needed in that moment.”The show may have made Mr. Kalter a celebrity, but he kept a low profile when off the set and at home in Stamford, where he had lived since the 1970s.“I played cards in a poker group for a year and a half,” he told The Stamford Advocate in 2003, “before somebody said, ‘Somebody told me you were in broadcasting.’”As for his “Letterman” job, Mr. Kalter was grateful for the opportunity and the long run.“I loved what they let me be,” he told The Pulteney Street Survey, the magazine of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where he was once a student, “a 10-year-old, paid for doing stuff my mom would never have let me get away with.”Alan Robert Kalter was born on March 21, 1943, in Brooklyn. He started announcing on WGVA radio in Geneva, N.Y., while at Hobart. The radio job had a fringe benefit.“In my off hours,” he said, “I would create the music tapes for all our fraternity parties from the 45’s that came in to the radio station.”After graduating in 1964 he studied law at New York University, then taught high school English for three years, at the same time recording educational tapes and working weekends in radio in the New York suburbs. The pull of radio eventually proved irresistible.“I left teaching for an afternoon radio show at WTFM,” he told the college magazine, “and was hired to be a newsman at WHN Radio in New York, which quickly became a four-year gig interviewing celebs who came into town for movie and Broadway openings, as well as covering nightclub openings three or four nights a week.”When WHN went to a country format in 1973, he turned to making commercials, and then got into game shows.He is survived by his wife, Peggy; a brother, Gary; two daughters, Lauren Hass and Diana Binger; and five grandchildren.Mr. Kalter’s do-almost-anything commitment to “Late Show,” Mr. Letterman said, was a nice counterpoint to Mr. Letterman’s more laid-back style.“I never liked to put on funny hats,” he said. “Alan would dress like a Martian and make it work.”“He filled in so many blanks on that show,” Mr. Letterman added, joking, “he probably deserved more money.” More

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      Debby King, 71, Backstage Aide Known as ‘Soul of Carnegie Hall,’ Dies

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      From Sinatra to Isaac Stern to Sting, she attended to the needs of the star performers in the Maestro Suite and helped calm their nerves.Paparazzi, fans and police officers filled the street outside Carnegie Hall one fall day in 1987, waiting for Frank Sinatra to arrive for a show. Inside, a backstage attendant named Debby King was on edge, worried about Sinatra’s reputation for being difficult.As Carnegie Hall’s artist liaison, Ms. King worked one of the more rarefied jobs in New York showbiz. Like a one-night personal assistant, she was responsible for taking care of the maestros, soloists and artists who performed there, and she doted on everyone, whether Itzhak Perlman or Sting, Audra McDonald or André Previn.When Sinatra arrived, his limousine inching through the crowd, Ms. King went to fetch him. He lowered his car window.“You can’t sing from the limo,” she said. “Do you plan on coming out?”“I’m coming out,” he said.He stepped out.“You’re not that tall,” she said.“Shh,” he replied. “Don’t tell everybody.”They started laughing, and Ms. King escorted him to his dressing room, where she had prepared provisions including a bottle of Chivas Regal, chilled jumbo shrimp and Tootsie Rolls. She escorted him to the stage at showtime. Afterward, he gave her a jacket emblazoned with his name, a generous tip tucked inside.Ms. King died on Sept. 20 at a hospital in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. She was 71. Her granddaughter Sonrisa Murray said the cause was liver cancer.Although conductors and soloists receive the standing ovations at Carnegie Hall, their performances are supported by a corps of ushers, doorkeepers and backstage attendants. And for 34 years, Ms. King played her part.Specifically, she was responsible for the needs of the stars who used the Maestro Suite, a regal dressing room on the second floor.“She’s the soul of Carnegie Hall,” the cellist Yo-Yo Ma said in a phone interview. “She enables the transition that takes place between a person backstage getting ready to perform and then going onstage to share everything that is important to them. That transition for an artist is often when they’re at their most vulnerable.”Ms. King called herself a professional nerve-calmer, and made it her business to know the preperformance rituals of her charges.The conductor Riccardo Muti and Ms. King after his final concert at Carnegie Hall as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, in 1992. “When he gets here the first thing he wants is his coffee,” Ms. King said of the maestro, “and I must be sure that he drinks it before he goes onstage.”Steve J. Sherman/Carnegie HallShe knew, for instance, that the violinist Kyung Wha Chung liked strongly scented flowers to be placed just outside her dressing room; that the soprano Jessye Norman wanted a thermometer and humidifier in her quarters; and that the conductor Riccardo Muti needed strong coffee waiting for him. When The Wall Street Journal interviewed Ms. King before Mr. Muti conducted a concert at Carnegie Hall in 1990, she stressed this detail.“My honey’s not here yet,” she said. “When he gets here the first thing he wants is his coffee, and I must be sure that he drinks it before he goes onstage.”At what proved to be his last concert at Carnegie Hall, Leonard Bernstein gave Ms. King a pin in gratitude.Ms. King also glimpsed vulnerability.When Sinatra played Carnegie Hall that fall in 1987, in Ms. King’s telling, he kept missing his lines as he struggled to read the teleprompter. During intermission, Sinatra’s handlers were hesitant to approach him, but Ms. King took him aside.“You look like you’re having a tough time out there,” she told him. “But listen, you’re Frank Sinatra. You can do anything. They will always love you out there no matter what. If you’re in trouble again, just smile, or say hello to a pretty lady on the balcony.”Back onstage, Sinatra took her advice, and he crooned with confidence.Ms. King, who raised a daughter on her own, had a second full-time job, far from the bright lights of Carnegie Hall.After the evening’s concert ended, she would rush downtown to the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner, where she worked until the early morning as an administrator, dealing with matters of the dead. Then it was back to her apartment in Harlem for some sleep before picking up her granddaughters, Oni and Sonrisa, from school and heading down to Carnegie in the late afternoon. She joined the city’s morgue as a clerk in the 1970s, then went to work at Carnegie, initially as an usher, in the mid-1980s. She juggled both jobs for years.In 2004, her jobs collided when the executive director of Carnegie Hall, Robert Harth, died suddenly at 47. A co-worker called Ms. King to tell her that his body was on its way to the morgue, but she already knew.“I’m sitting right here now taking care of him,” she responded. “I’m holding his hand so he’s not alone tonight.”Ms. King with the violinist Isaac Stern at Carnegie for a 2000 screening of the American Masters documentary “Isaac Stern: Life’s Virtuoso.” Ms. King called herself a professional nerve-calmer.Steve J. Sherman/Carnegie HallDeborah King was born on Oct. 4, 1949, in Manhattan and was raised in Harlem. Her father, John, was a deacon. Her mother, Margo (Shaw) King, was a homemaker. Deborah aspired to become a cosmetologist, and in high school she applied for an internship at a salon. But because of a clerical error, she ended up at the morgue instead. In addition to her granddaughters, Ms. King is survived by a grandson and a daughter, Cheryl Leak-Fox-Middleton. Ms. King took pride in putting both her granddaughters through college.She retired from the medical examiner’s office in 2016 and was diagnosed with liver cancer a few years later. She retired from Carnegie Hall last spring.Staff and family members gathered at Carnegie to commemorate the occasion. Cake was served, letters of appreciation from musicians were read out loud, and Ms. King told tales of her backstage adventures. A plaque honoring her was unveiled.Just outside the Maestro Suite, near pictures of greats like Gershwin and Tchaikovsky, her smiling portrait hangs on its very own wall. More

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      in Music

      Roberto Roena, Salsa Percussionist and Bandleader, Dies at 81

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      His albums and performances with Apollo Sound brought new complexity to the genre in the 1970s. His group was still getting the crowds dancing decades later.Roberto Roena, a dancer who became a bongo player who then became a bandleader, along the way establishing himself as a leading figure in salsa and some of its best-known bands, died on Sept. 23 in Puerto Rico. He was 81.Andrés Waldemar, a singer in Mr. Roena’s orchestra, announced his death on social media but did not specify a cause. Local news reports said he died at a hospital in Carolina, outside San Juan.Mr. Roena was best known as the founder of Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound, which released a string of well-regarded albums in the 1970s, salsa’s heyday. He was also a member of the Fania All-Stars, a group formed about the same time to showcase stars of the Fania record label, which was often described as the Motown of salsa.Onstage Mr. Roena was a whirlwind, dancing out front while banging a cowbell when he wasn’t playing bongos. Apollo Sound was still getting crowds dancing decades later.“The music always darted forward, driven by the sound of metal being struck by wood,” Peter Watrous wrote in The New York Times in 1998, reviewing an Apollo Sound show at the Copacabana in Manhattan. “Mr. Roena’s placement of notes, the way they fit into patterns, brought the audience and the musicians together in a form of personal rhythmic transcendence. Mr. Roena has that kind of power.”Pedro Pierluisi, the governor of Puerto Rico, where Mr. Roena was born, declared last Saturday to be a day of mourning in Mr. Roena’s honor. He called the death “an irreparable loss for Puerto Rico and the whole world, but especially for salsa lovers.”“Iconic songs like ‘El Escapulario,’ ‘Cui Cui,’ ‘Mi Desengano,’ ‘Marejada Feliz’ and many more transcended generations,” the governor said in a statement. “His musical legacy of more than 60 years will remain with us.”Mr. Roena started Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound, which released a string of well-regarded albums in the 1970s, salsa’s heyday.FaniaRoberto Roena was born on Jan. 16, 1940, in Mayagüez, on the island’s west coast. His family later moved to the Santurce district of San Juan, where as a boy he and a brother worked up some cha-cha and mambo dance routines that garnered enough acclaim to get them onto a local television show.After catching the act, the Puerto Rican musician and bandleader Rafael Cortijo invited Mr. Roena, who was only 15 or 16, to join his orchestra, Cortijo y Su Combo, as a dancer and chorus member. Mr. Cortijo, a percussionist, began schooling him on the bongos, and soon Roberto was part of the band.When Mr. Cortijo’s group dissolved, Mr. Roena became part of the salsa orchestra El Gran Combo, recording and touring internationally. It was in 1969 that he formed Apollo Sound — named, some versions of the tale go, because its first rehearsal coincided with the launch of Apollo 11, the first mission to land astronauts on the moon. The group almost had a different name.“First I wanted to put Apollo 12, because we were 12 musicians,” he told La Opinión in 1996, “but then I thought, if the United States launches Apollo 13, we are obsolete.”With Apollo Sound, Mr. Roena took salsa to a new level of sophistication, working in two or even three trumpets and a complex rhythm section to create a propulsive sound that drew on the music of jazz-rock groups like Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears. Its live shows were wild, with Mr. Roena setting the tone, and its albums for Fania were steady sellers.In an interview with The Times in 2014, when he was part of the lineup for a Fania Records tribute concert in Central Park, Mr. Roena credited the label’s founders, Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci, with creating the salsa phenomenon.“Jerry and Johnny gave you the freedom to do your own thing,” he said. “They allowed the musicians to express themselves the way we wanted, and that led to a lot of hit records.”His survivors include his wife, Antonia María Nieves Santos, and four children, Brenda, Gladys, Ivan and Francisco.Mr. Roena was still performing well into his 70s. He had a minor heart attack in 1995, but, he said in the 1996 interview, that wasn’t going to keep him off the stage.“I get tired,” he said, “but when I climb onto a platform, I am a different person.” More

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      Richard H. Kirk, Post-Punk Pioneer of Industrial Music, Dies at 65

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      Cabaret Voltaire, of which he was a founder, began as a band of experimental provocateurs and later moved to the dance floor.Richard H. Kirk, a founding member of the English group Cabaret Voltaire and a major figure in the creation of the post-punk style known as industrial music, has died. He was 65.His death was confirmed by his former record label, Mute, in an Instagram post on Sept. 21. The post did not say when or where he died or cite the cause.Mr. Kirk formed Cabaret Voltaire in 1973 in Sheffield, England, with Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson. They borrowed the name from the Zurich nightclub where Dada, an art movement that responded to society’s ills with irrationality, was born in the early years of the 20th century.“When we started, we wanted to do something with sound, but none of us knew how to play an instrument,” Mr. Kirk said in an interview for a 1985 New York Times article about industrial music. “So we started using tape recorders and various pieces of junk and gradually learned to play instruments like guitars and bass.” Despite his claim, Mr. Kirk was initially a clarinetist, and he developed a scratching, slashing style as a guitarist.The members of Cabaret Voltaire created the template for what would become known as industrial music: hectoring vocals, mechanical rhythms, scraps of recorded speech snatched from mass media, conventional instruments rendered alien with electronic effects.On early-1980s recordings like “Three Mantras,” “The Voice of America” and “Red Mecca,” the group embraced the literary cutup techniques of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, the British author J.G. Ballard’s dystopian provocations and punk rock’s abrasive stance. Musical influences included Brian Eno, the German band Can and Jamaican dub.Mr. Watson left the group in 1981, and Mr. Kirk and Mr. Mallinder pursued a more commercial direction that brought them to the cusp of mainstream success. Cabaret Voltaire disbanded in 1994, after which Mr. Kirk pursued a bewildering range of solo projects and collaborations. He revived Cabaret Voltaire as a solo effort in 2009, focusing exclusively on new material, and released three albums in 2020 and 2021.“Three Mantras,” released in 1980, was one of Cabaret Voltaire’s first albums.Mr. Kirk was born on March 21, 1956, and grew up in Sheffield, a steel town. “You looked down into the valley and all you could see was blackened buildings,” he told the author and critic Simon Reynolds in an interview for his book “Rip It Up and Start Again” (2005), an authoritative post-punk history.Sheffield was a bastion for Labour Party and radical-left politics, and as a teenager Mr. Kirk was a member of the Young Communist League. “My dad was a member of the party at one point, and I wore the badge when I went to school,” he told Mr. Reynolds. “But I never took it really seriously.”Mr. Mallinder, in a 2006 interview on the Red Bull Music Academy website, said that he and Mr. Kirk had been drawn to Black American music from an early age. “We used to go to soul clubs from when we were about 13 or 14,” he said. “We were both working-class kids; we grew up with that. And anything else that was in our world at that moment, it didn’t really matter to us.”But local performances by Roxy Music, then an up-and-coming art-rock band that included Mr. Eno on primitive synthesizers and tape effects, suggested new possibilities.“People like Brian Eno were a massive influence on us, because he was actually integrating things that were nonmusical, and that appealed to us,” Mr. Mallinder said. “We didn’t really want to be musicians. The idea of being technically proficient or learning a traditional instrument was kind of anathema to us.”Mr. Kirk attended art school and completed a one-year program in sculpture. He joined Mr. Mallinder and Mr. Watson, a Dada-besotted telephone engineer, in Cabaret Voltaire, which was initially an amorphous, boundary-pushing workshop project based in Mr. Watson’s attic.“We studiously went there Tuesdays and Thursdays every week and experimented for two hours or so, during which time we’d lay down maybe three or four compositions,” Mr. Kirk told Mr. Reynolds. Less musicians than provocateurs at first, the members of Cabaret Voltaire were soon swept up in England’s punk-rock revolution. In 1978, the group established Western Works, a rehearsal and recording studio based in what had previously been the offices of the Sheffield Federation of Young Socialists.“Western Works gave us the freedom to do what we wanted,” Mr. Kirk said. An advance from the independent label Rough Trade helped the band outfit the studio with a four-track recorder and mixing desk. Rough Trade proceeded to issue some of the band’s most influential and enduring work.After Mr. Watson left the group, Mr. Kirk and Mr. Mallinder moved increasingly toward unambiguous dance-floor rhythms, drum machines and lush synthesizer sounds, scoring underground hits like “Sensoria,” “James Brown” and “I Want You.” A major-label contract with EMI resulted in a collaboration with the influential producer Adrian Sherwood on the group’s album “Code” (1987), and a 1990 collaboration with Chicago house-music producers, “Groovy, Laidback and Nasty.” But audience indifference and mounting debt led to the group’s dissolution four years later.Mr. Kirk plunged into an array of pseudonymous side projects and collaborations. Performing with Richard Barratt (a.k.a. DJ Parrot) in a duo called Sweet Exorcist, he was among the earliest artists documented by the fledgling Warp label. He had another potent collaboration, with the Sheffield recording engineer Robert Gordon, as the techno duo XON.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Kirk rejected lucrative offers by festivals like Coachella to revive the original Cabaret Voltaire. “Some people might think I’m daft for not taking the money, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable within myself doing that,” he said in a 2017 interview with Fact magazine. “Cabaret Voltaire was always about breaking new ground and moving forward.”He bolstered that impression by declining to perform any older Cabaret Voltaire material. “I always make it really clear that if you think you’re going to come and hear the greatest hits, then don’t come because you’re not,” he told Fact. “What you might get is the same spirit.” More

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      in Theater

      George Ferencz, Innovative Theater Director, Dies at 74

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      He directed works by Sam Shepard, Amiri Baraka and others at La MaMa and similar theaters known for experimentation.George Ferencz, a director who was a fixture at theaters known for experimental work like La MaMa E.T.C. in Manhattan, died on Sept. 14 in Brooklyn. He was 74.His family said the cause was cardiac arrest.Mr. Ferencz (pronounced FAIR-ents) directed pieces by unknowns as well as name writers like Sam Shepard, Amiri Baraka and Mac Wellman. One specialty was giving startling new interpretations to previously staged works, both classic and contemporary. Another was infusing productions with music in unusual ways; he collaborated a number of times with the jazz drummer Max Roach.Mr. Ferencz first drew attention in the New York theater world as a founder and co-artistic director of the Impossible Ragtime Theater, known as I.R.T., which presented a wide range of productions in small spaces beginning in the mid-1970s. His 1976 staging of “The Hairy Ape,” a 1922 Eugene O’Neill play, gave that work a visceral immediacy.“The main reason one attends off-off-Broadway shows is in the one chance in a thousand of finding a production as good as the Impossible Ragtime Theater’s version of Eugene O’Neill’s ‘The Hairy Ape,’” Glenne Currie of United Press International wrote.Mr. Ferencz scored another success soon after with a more obscure O’Neill play, “Dynamo.”“If lesser plays by great playwrights are to be seen,” Mel Gussow wrote in a review in The New York Times, “then Mr. Ferencz’s productions could serve as models.”Mr. Ferencz left the I.R.T. in 1977 but continued to direct Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway, including a mini-festival of Shepard plays at Columbia University in 1979, shortly after Mr. Shepard had won the Pulitzer Prize for “Buried Child.”Two years later Mr. Ferencz mounted a full production of one of those pieces under the title “Cowboy Mouth (in Concert).” Here he revisited “Cowboy Mouth,” which Mr. Shepard and Patti Smith had written and first performed in 1971. Mr. Ferencz’s production, with Brooks McKay and Annette Kurek in the roles originated by Mr. Shepard and Ms. Smith, imagined their back-and-forth exchanges as a rock concert.“The result,” Mr. Gussow wrote in The Times, “is a sizzling, surrealistic 70 minutes that in its own stark way comes closer to the anarchic spirit of Shepard than some elaborate productions of more complete plays.”Mr. Ferencz’s collaborations Mr. Baraka included directing his “Boy and Tarzan Appear in Clearing” at the Henry Street Settlement’s New Federal Theater in 1981.The next year Mr. Ferencz began a long association with Ellen Stewart and her influential experimental theater, La MaMa, in Lower Manhattan, directing a portion of “Money, a Jazz Opera,” composed by George Gruntz with a book by Mr. Baraka. He founded La MaMa’s Experiments reading series for experimental works in 1998 and ran it for 16 years.Mr. Ferencz in 1982 with Ellen Stewart, the founder of the experimental theater La MaMa in Lower Manhattan. They had a long artistic association. Courtesy of La MaMa ArchiveMr. Ferencz directed well beyond New York’s downtown scene, staging productions at Actors Theater of Louisville in Kentucky, the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, San Diego Repertory Theater and numerous other venues.“I look at the theater as a hammer,” he told The Bangor Daily News in 1979, when he was guest director for a production of Donald Freed’s “Inquest” at the University of Maine, “aggressive and highly theatrical, something you can’t get by flicking on the television switch. It has got to have spectacle and shock value.”George Michael Ferencz was born on Feb. 3, 1947, in a Hungarian Catholic neighborhood of Cleveland. His father, George John Ferencz, owned an auto-parts store, and his mother, Anne (Haydu) Ferencz, was a homemaker and a former beauty queen.He studied journalism at the University of Detroit but transferred to Kent State University in Ohio, where he pursued theater, directing plays by Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit and others. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1970 and settled in New York soon after.In 1969 he married Pam Mitchell, who became a founder of I.R.T. along with him, Ted Story and Cynthia Crane. The couple divorced in 1978, and in 1986 he married Sally Lesser, a noted costume designer he had worked with for years; they collaborated on some 65 productions.She survives him, as does their son, Jack.In addition to his La MaMa work, Mr. Ferencz was a favorite of Crystal Field, the co-founder and artistic director of Theater for the New City.“He had the political and historical understanding that is a necessity for socially relevant theater,” she said in a statement. “He was a Brechtian director whose mission was not only to engage you emotionally, but also to make you think and think hard about the world in which the story lives.”Among Mr. Ferencz’s frequent collaborators was Mr. Roach, whom he met at a party at Mr. Baraka’s house; they joined forces in 1984 for a staging of three Shepard plays performed in repertory, with Mr. Roach providing original music. Among their later efforts was a jazz-infused version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” staged at San Diego Rep in 1987.“George loves jazz and directs like that,” Mr. Roach, who died in 2007, told The San Francisco Examiner in 1987. “He kind of lets things unfold the way folks like Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington would do. He knows where he wants to go, but he gives everybody a chance to make a contribution.” More

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      Carlisle Floyd, Whose Operas Spun Fables of the South, Dies at 95

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      His celebrated works drew from the musical traditions of revival meetings and country hoedowns, telling stories of intolerance.Carlisle Floyd, the composer-librettist whose operas explored the passions and prejudices of the South in lyrical tales that drew on rural fundamentalism, the Great Depression, the aftermath of the Civil War and other regional themes, died on Thursday in Tallahassee, Fla. He was 95. His death was announced by his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Among the leading 20th-century American opera composers, Mr. Floyd is often cited with Ned Rorem, Philip Glass, John Coolidge Adams, the Italian-American Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber and others whose works have joined the standard repertory, including George Gershwin, who called his “Porgy and Bess” a folk opera, and Leonard Bernstein, whose “Candide” was an operetta.The son of an itinerant South Carolina preacher, Mr. Floyd grew up with the music of the South: revival meeting hymns, square dance fiddlers, rollicking country hoedowns and folk songs. He wrote them into many of his operas, whose plots were largely derived from classics of literature, featuring social outcasts and narrow-minded neighbors who ostracized them.Mr. Floyd said his exposure to religious bigotry early in life had shaped his operatic themes. “The thing that horrified me already as a child about revival meetings,” he told The New York Times in 1998, “was mass coercion, people being forced to conform to something against their will without ever knowing what they were being asked to confess or receive.”His best-known opera was “Susannah,” based on the Apocrypha story of Susanna and the Elders. Taken from the Book of Daniel to the Tennessee hills and rendered in Smoky Mountain dialect, it portrays a young woman wrongly accused of promiscuity and a traveling preacher who incites a mob, then seduces her. The preacher is slain by her brother, and Susannah stands defiant, holding off the mob with a shotgun.With hymns, square dances and arias simulating folk songs, “Susannah” leapt to national renown at the New York City Opera under Erich Leinsdorf in 1956. It won the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award, was entered at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958 as an outstanding example of American opera, and over the years became a favorite of regional companies, one of the most performed operas of the American musical stage.Other notable Floyd operas included “Of Mice and Men,” his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s story of two tragic migrant farm workers in the Dust Bowl; “Willie Stark,” his treatment of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” about a ruthless politician modeled on Louisiana’s Huey P. Long; and “The Passion of Jonathan Wade,” about a Reconstruction-era love affair destroyed by intolerance and hate.American audiences flocked to regional performances of Mr. Floyd’s work, especially “Susannah” and “Of Mice and Men.” But New York critics were negative about his music, if not his storytelling. In 1999, four decades and some 800 regional performances after it opened, “Susannah” was finally performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Valhalla of grand opera in America.Renee Fleming as Susannah Polk and Samuel Ramey as Olin Blitch in the Met Opera’s 1999 production of “Susannah,” composer Carlisle Floyd’s best-known work.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Amiable, direct, wholly without guile, Carlisle Floyd’s American heroine and the work that bears her name arrived at the halls of grand opera on Wednesday night, looking like some lonely tourist lost in the vastness of Grand Central Terminal,” Bernard Holland wrote in The Times.He added: “The piece is perfect in size and difficulty for the regional opera house or the amateur production, but lesser singing, I suspect, reveals its thinness even more. Mr. Floyd has a nice way with hoedowns, countrified modal melody and drumroll crescendos, but there is amazingly little going on at the musical end of this opera.”Other critics disparaged his operas as narrowly drawn. But Mr. Floyd insisted that his stories reflected larger realities and that his characters — insular people fearful of outsiders and anyone different — were universal. And he scoffed at perceptions of his music as folk opera, implying that its tonal country sounds were naïve.“A lot of critics don’t like to acknowledge that there are no absolutes in taste, which is intensely personal and which governs a composer’s choice of idiom,” he told Opera News in 1999.Mr. Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men,” based on the John Steinbeck novel, at the New York City Opera in 2003. From left: Rod Nelman as George Milton, Anthony Dean Griffey as Lennie Small and Peter Strummer as Candy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Floyd never sought to join the New York-Northeast musical establishment. He devoted much of his life to teaching, starting at Florida State University in 1947, and over 30 years wrote most of his operas in Tallahassee. From 1976 to 1996, he was a professor at the University of Houston, where he wrote several of his last operas, including “Cold Sassy Tree,” based on a novel by Olive Ann Burns about the romance between an aging widower and a young northerner that scandalizes a small Georgia town.His last opera, “Prince of Players,” was premiered by the Houston Grand Opera in March 2016, months before his 90th birthday, and was performed by the Little Opera Theater of New York at Hunter College in February 2017.Adapted from a Jeffrey Hatcher play (and subsequent 2004 film) about Edward Kynaston, one of the last actors of Restoration England to play female roles, “Prince of Players” centers on Kynaston’s crisis in 1661, when Charles II declares that all female roles on London stages must be played by women.Reviewing the Houston production, Opera News said it revealed “Floyd’s deep understanding and sympathy for issues that pervade our culture today — the complexities and subtleties of gender identity, sexual preference and their social consequences — played out in a story from 17th-century England.”Anthony Tommasini, in a review of the New York production for The Times, said: “It’s miraculous that a composer whose reputation dates to his 1955 ‘Susannah,’ one of the most performed American operas, is still working with assurance and skill.”Carlisle Sessions Floyd was born in Latta, S.C., on June 11, 1926, one of two children of Carlisle and Ida (Fenegan) Floyd. He and his sister, Ermine, were schooled in a succession of South Carolina towns where their father was a Methodist preacher. Their mother nurtured Carlisle’s creative instincts, giving him piano lessons and encouraging him to write short stories.After graduating from high school in North, S.C., he entered Converse College in Spartanburg in 1943. He studied music and piano under the composer Ernst Bacon. In 1945, when Mr. Bacon became director of the music school at Syracuse University, Mr. Floyd followed him there and earned a bachelor’s degree in music in 1946.He began teaching at Florida State and was soon composing. In 1949, he earned a master’s degree at Syracuse. His first two operas sputtered, but “Susannah,” his third, thrived. It opened at Florida State in 1955, and its New York City Opera premiere was hailed a year later. Ronald Eyer, in Tempo, called it an “unadorned story of malice, hypocrisy and tragedy of almost scriptural simplicity.”In 1957, Mr. Floyd married Margery Kay Reeder. She died in 2010. No immediate family members survive.Mr. Floyd’s only non-American subject, an interpretation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” premiered at the Santa Fe Opera in 1958.After a long gestation, “Of Mice and Men” opened at the Seattle Opera in 1970. It was widely performed by regional repertory companies. But when it finally landed at the New York City Opera in 1983, Donal Henahan of The Times said it “failed ultimately because it is a feeble score too dependent on gray declamatory lines and melodramatic clichés of the sort that no longer turn up even in television serials.”Composer/librettist Carlisle Floyd, right, talks with conductor Patrick Summers about the music for Floyd’s upcoming opera “Cold Sassy Tree” during rehearsals Thursday, April 6, 2000, in Houston. “Cold Sassy Tree,” set to open Friday, April 14 in Houston, is Floyd’s latest and perhaps final opera.BRETT COOMER/Associated PressIn 1999, David Gockley, then general director of the Houston Grand Opera and a longtime admirer of Mr. Floyd’s work, told Opera News that New York reviewers were unfair to composers like Mr. Floyd.“Carlisle Floyd is America’s foremost opera composer,” Mr. Gockley was quoted as saying. “If you’re not part of the Northeastern establishment, specifically the New York scene, you have no status. Because Floyd always lived and taught in Florida or Houston, he has been regarded as a regional figure, when in fact he is a national one.”Mr. Floyd, who lived in Tallahassee, received the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush at the White House in 2004. In 2008 he was named, along with the conductor James Levine and the soprano Leontyne Price, as among the first honorees of the National Endowment for the Arts for lifetime achievement in opera.“Falling Up: The Days and Nights of Carlisle Floyd, the Authorized Biography” by Thomas Holliday, was published in 2013. More

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      George Frayne, a.k.a. Commander Cody, Alt-Country Pioneer, Dies at 77

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      With his band the Lost Planet Airmen, he infused older genres like Western swing and boogie-woogie with a freewheeling 1960s spirit and attracted a devoted following.George Frayne, who as the frontman for the band Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen melded Western swing, jump blues, rockabilly and boogie-woogie with a freewheeling 1960s ethos to pave the way for generations of roots-rock, Americana and alt-country musicians, died on Sunday at his home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He was 77.John Tichy, one of the band’s original members, who is now a professor of engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said the cause was esophageal cancer.Though the band lasted only a decade and had just one Top 10 hit, Mr. Frayne’s charisma and raucous onstage presence — as well as the Airmen’s genre-busting sound — made them a cult favorite in 1970s music meccas like the San Francisco area and Austin, Texas.Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen was not the only rock band exploring country music in the early 1970s. The Eagles, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Poco and others mined a similar vein and were more commercially successful. But fans, and especially other musicians, took to the Airmen’s raw authenticity, their craftsmanship and their exuberant love for the music they were making — or, in many cases, remaking.“He said, ‘We’re gonna reach back and get this great old music and infuse it with a ’60s and ’70s spirit,’” Ray Benson, the frontman for Asleep at the Wheel, one of the many bands inspired by Mr. Frayne, said in a phone interview. “He saw the craft and beauty of things America had left behind.”Mr. Frayne and his band were more comfortable onstage than in the recording studio. They often performed 200 or more shows a year, and they were widely considered one of the best live bands in America; their album “Live From Deep in the Heart of Texas” (1974), recorded at Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, was once ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the top 100 albums of all time.“He was a comic-book character come to life,” Mr. Benson said of Mr. Frayne. “He looked the part of the wild man, chomping on a cigar and banging on a piano. But he was also an artist, who happened to use the band as a way to express a much bigger picture.”Mr. Frayne in performance with a later version of the Lost Planet Airmen in 2016.John Atashian/Getty ImagesGeorge William Frayne IV was born on July 19, 1944, in Boise, Idaho, where his father, George III, was stationed as a pilot during World War II. Soon afterward the family moved to Brooklyn, where his father and his mother, Katherine (Jones) Frayne, were both artists. The family later moved to Bay Shore on Long Island, near Jones Beach, where George worked summers as a lifeguard.Mr. Frayne’s first marriage, to Sara Rice, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Sue Casanova, and his stepdaughter, Sophia Casanova.Having learned to play boogie-woogie piano while at the University of Michigan, Mr. Frayne used his musical talent to make beer money, joining a series of bands hired to play frat-house parties. He soon fell in with a group of musicians, including Dr. Tichy, who played guitar, and who introduced Mr. Frayne to classic country, especially the Western swing of Bob Wills and the Bakersfield sound of Buck Owens.Both Mr. Frayne and Dr. Tichy stayed at Michigan for graduate school and continued to play in clubs around Ann Arbor. Although they offered throwback country to students otherwise keen on protest songs, they were a hit. They just needed a name.Mr. Frayne was a big fan of old westerns, especially weird ones like the 1935 serial “The Phantom Empire,” in which Gene Autry discovers an underground civilization. Something about sci-fi and retro country clicked for him. He took the stage name Commander Cody, after Commando Cody, the hero of two 1950s serials, and named his band after the 1951 movie “Lost Planet Airmen.”He received his master’s degree in sculpture and painting in 1968 and that fall began teaching at Wisconsin State College-Oshkosh, today the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. But he was restless; he flew back to Ann Arbor on weekends for gigs, and when Bill Kirchen, the lead guitarist for the Lost Planet Airmen, moved to Berkeley and encouraged the rest to follow, Mr. Frayne quit academia and headed west.The San Francisco scene was still in the thrall of acid rock, but the East Bay was more eclectic. Soon the band was opening for acts like the Grateful Dead and later Led Zeppelin and Alice Cooper.The Lost Planet Airmen grew to eight core members, several of them sharing lead-singer duties; there would often be 20 or more others onstage, dancing, playing kazoo and even, at certain adults-only shows, stripping. Their music was bright and up-tempo, centered on Mr. Frayne, who sat — or just as often stood — at his piano, longhaired and shirtless, pounding beers and keys.A 1970 profile in Rolling Stone, a year before the band released its first album, called Commander Cody and His Lost Airmen “one of the very best unknown rock ‘n’ roll bands in America today.”At first the Lost Airmen’s rockin’ country didn’t really fit in anywhere — neither in the post-hippie Bay Area nor in Nashville, where they were booed off the stage at a 1973 concert, the crowd yelling “Get a haircut!”“We didn’t think of appealing to anybody,” Mr. Frayne told Rolling Stone. “We were just having a good time, picking and playing and making a few dollars on the side.”In 1971 the band released its first album, “Lost in the Ozone.” It spawned a surprise hit single, a cover of Charlie Ryan’s 1955 rockabilly song “Hot Rod Lincoln,” with Mr. Frayne speed-talking through the lyrics:They arrested me and they put me in jailAnd called my pappy to throw my bail.And he said, “Son, you’re gonna’ drive me to drinkin’If you don’t stop drivin’ that hot … rod … Lincoln!It was that song, and the band’s frequent trips to Austin, that allowed them room to find their place, nestling in among the seekers and weirdos piling into the city and building its music scene.“They were plowing new turf, even if they were doing it with heritage seeds,” the Austin journalist Joe Nick Patoski said in an interview.But the success of “Hot Rod Lincoln” haunted them, especially when they tried to reach too far beyond their fan base.“Their success got them pigeonholed as a novelty band, and so the suits at the record company were looking for the next ‘Hot Rod Lincoln,’” Mr. Patoski said.In 1974 they signed with Warner Bros. Records, but the relentless pressure to produce new music, and the band’s lackluster album sales, eventually broke them apart — a story documented in the 1976 book “Starmaking Machinery: The Odyssey of an Album,” by Geoffrey Stokes.“The only thing worse than selling out,” Mr. Frayne told Mr. Stokes, “is selling out and not getting bought.”After the band broke up in 1977, Mr. Frayne continued to perform with a variety of backup bands, always as Commander Cody. In 2009 he re-formed the Lost Planet Airmen, mostly with new members, and released an album, “Dopers, Drunks and Everyday Losers.”He also returned to art, making Pop Art portraits of musicians like Jerry Garcia and Sarah Vaughan — collected in a 2009 book, “Art, Music and Life” — and experimenting with video production.As a musician, he had one more minor hit, “Two Triple Cheese, Side Order of Fries,” in 1980. But it was the song’s video, directed by John Dea, that really stood out: A fast-paced, low-tech (by today’s standards) mash-up of 1950s lunch-counter culture and hot-rod mischief, it won an Emmy and is now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art. More

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      Ruth Sullivan, Advocate for People With Autism, Dies at 97

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      After her son was found to be autistic, she started organizations to help children and adults. She also consulted on the making of the movie “Rain Man.”Ruth Sullivan, a public health nurse who became an influential advocate for autistic children and adults after one of her sons was diagnosed with the disorder in the early 1960s, died on Sept. 16 at an assisted-living facility in Huntington, W.Va. She was 97.Her daughter Lydia Sullivan said the cause was atrial fibrillation, an abnormal heart rhythm.For more than 40 years, Dr. Sullivan was a tireless champion for educational and other opportunities for people on the autism spectrum. She was a founder of the Autism Society, a national grass-roots organization, and secured state funding to open the West Virginia Autism Training Center at Marshall University.She started and ran the Autism Services Center, which provides residential, therapeutic and community services, and for several years offered information and referrals by telephone from her home in Huntington, where she and her husband, William, raised seven children.“Our dinners were often interrupted by hysterical parents calling,” Lydia Sullivan said in a phone interview, “and my mother would spend the evenings talking to desperate parents from around the world.”Dr. Sullivan was once that parent desperate for information about autism. When her son Joseph received his diagnosis in 1963, at the age of 3, autism was a mysterious disorder that most pediatricians knew little about. She took Joseph to a doctor in Lake Charles, La., where the family was living at the time, and he quickly recognized that Joseph was autistic.“I said, ‘What is that?’” she recalled when she was interviewed on a podcast in 2016 by Marc Ellison, the executive director of the Autism Training Center and one of her protégés. “He said he will always be odd. But he couldn’t offer anything else.”Nearly as disturbing to Dr. Sullivan was a prevailing psychological theory that cold and distant parents — most notably those who were referred to as “refrigerator mothers” — were responsible for causing their children’s autism.“I knew it wasn’t true,” she said on the podcast. “I didn’t love Joseph any less than the others. I treated him differently because he didn’t behave like the others.” She added: “I’m the oldest of seven. I have seven children. I was a nurse. I knew something about children.”Research led her to read the book “Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior” (1964), by Bernard Rimland, a psychologist with an autistic son. He rebutted the claim that neglectful parents caused autism in their children and argued that autism was a result of genetics and possibly environmental factors.Dr. Sullivan wrote to Dr. Rimland about starting a national network of parents that would receive the latest research about autism. In 1965, the two of them and a group of parents who had also written to Dr. Rimland met at a house in Teaneck, N.J., and founded the National Society for Autistic Children (now the Autism Society), a support group that would have numerous local chapters throughout the country. Dr. Sullivan was elected its president in 1969.Around that time she was also trying to overcome a local school board’s resistance to providing an education to autistic children like Joseph. She brought a prepared statement to a school board meeting, and local newspapers wrote about her campaign to educate Joseph.“For almost six weeks I was on the phone every day trying to persuade them to set up a special class,” Dr. Sullivan told The Sunday Gazette-Mail of Charleston, W.Va., in 1972. “The next week,” she added, “there was a class for Joseph and 12 other children. With the help of some dedicated teachers, they’ve been attending school ever since.”Dr. Sullivan lobbied for the passage in 1975 of what came to be called the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, which required public schools that received federal money to provide equal access to children with disabilities. When the law was amended 15 years later, she helped write the language to include autistic children.She also became a technical adviser to “Rain Man,” Barry Levinson’s 1988 film about an autistic man (Dustin Hoffman) and his brother (Tom Cruise). To prepare for the role, Mr. Hoffman studied two documentary films featuring Joseph as well as outtakes from one of them, “Portrait of an Autistic Young Man” (1986), which was shown on PBS stations.“That’s where I met Joe, in a sense,” Mr. Hoffman told The Associated Press in 1988 at a showing of “Rain Man” in Huntington that, at Dr. Sullivan’s request, was a fund-raiser for the Autism Services Center. “I buried myself there for the first two months.”Joseph’s favorite scene in the film was when Mr. Hoffman’s character, Raymond Babbit, quickly counted spilled toothpicks.Mr. Hoffman thanked Dr. Sullivan and Joseph from the awards ceremony stage when he accepted the Oscar for best actor. She believed that the film helped broaden the public’s understanding of autism.Dr. Sullivan in 2018. For more than 40 years, she fought for educational and other opportunities for people on the autism spectrum.Rick Lee/Huntington QuarterlyRuth Marie Christ was born on April 20, 1924, in Port Arthur, Texas, 90 miles east of Houston. Her father, Lawrence, worked in oil refineries, then turned to farming after he and his family moved to Mowata, La., when Ruth was very young. Her mother, Ada (Matt) Christ, worked in a department store.After graduating from the nursing program at Charity Hospital in New Orleans in 1943, Dr. Sullivan served in the Army Nurse Corps, treating soldiers during World War II at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio (now Joint Base San Antonio).After the war ended, she moved to Lake Charles for four years, then attended Teachers College at Columbia University on the G.I. Bill. After receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees in public health, she worked as a nurse in Manhattan. She married William Sullivan, an English professor, in 1952 and accompanied him to teaching posts in Columbia, Mo., Lake Charles and Albany, working part time as a nurse until her fourth child was born, in 1958.Joseph, her fifth child, was born in 1960. He started speaking early but began to withdraw at 18 months. By his second birthday, Dr. Sullivan wrote in her journal — which was quoted by The Gazette-Mail in 1972 — “he could say only eight words. He would indicate what he wanted by grunts, guiding our hands to what he wanted.”In 1984, at 60, she earned a Ph.D. in special education, speech pathology and psychology from Ohio University, which gave her greater standing with the people she lobbied.Her relentless but gentle style of advocacy continued until her retirement in 2007.“Providing guidance to families nationally was obviously spectacular,” said Stephen Edelson, executive director of the Autism Research Institute. “But she was also one of the first people to talk about medical comorbidities associated with autism, like seizures, sleep problems and gastrointestinal problems. And she was one of the first to point to the importance of providing services to adults with autism.”Jimmie Beirne, chief executive of the Autism Services Center (the position Dr. Sullivan held from 1979 to 2007), was hired 33 years ago to work part time with Joseph on developing his social skills.“The philosophy that she worked so hard to instill in us was to have a parent’s perspective, to think as if this is our child receiving these services,” Dr. Beirne said by phone. “She’d say that the difference between good and excellent services is in the details, and, like a good coach, she had an eye for details.”Today, Joseph lives in a group home run by the Autism Services Center and works at the Autism Training Center.In addition to Joseph and her daughter Lydia, Dr. Sullivan is survived by her other sons, Larry, Richard and Christopher; her other daughters, Eva Sullivan and Julie Sullivan, who is writing a book about her mother; her sisters, Geraldine Landry, Frances Buckingham and Julie Miller; her brother, Charles; 12 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.Dr. Sullivan’s influence was international. She received letters from parents around the world in search of solutions for their children, and she traveled widely to speak about autism.“She was invited to a conference on autism in Argentina in the 1990s,” her daughter Julie said by phone. “At the time, Argentina was in the grips of the ‘refrigerator mother’ thing, and she got together with parents and told them they needed to start their own group. So she’s the godmother of an autism parents’ group in Argentina.” More