Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Les McKeown, Lead Singer of the Bay City Rollers, Dies at 65

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      Known for their catchy pop songs and their distinctive tartan outfits, the Rollers attracted a fanatical teenage following after Mr. McKeown joined in 1973.Les McKeown, the lead singer in the classic lineup of the Bay City Rollers, the Scottish pop group that enjoyed phenomenal worldwide success in the 1970s, died on Tuesday. He was 65.His family announced the death in a statement on social media. The statement said he died at his home, but did not say where that was or specify the cause.The Rollers — who were said to have gotten their name when they threw a dart at a map and it landed on Bay City, Mich. — were formed in the late 1960s but began attracting a fanatical teenage following only after Mr. McKeown joined in 1973, replacing the original lead singer, Nobby Clark.Known for their catchy, upbeat songs (many of them American oldies) and their distinctive tartan outfits, the Rollers sold more than 100 million records and were promoted as the biggest thing since the Beatles. Sid Bernstein, the American promoter who presented the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965, brought the Rollers to the United States in 1976.But they were never critical favorites, and they proved far less versatile and more musically limited than the Beatles. Their string of hits ended in 1978, the year Mr. McKeown left the band.The Bay City Rollers began their assault on the British charts in 1974 with “Remember (Sha-La-La-La).” Other hits, like “Shang-a-Lang,” “Bye Bye Baby” and “Give a Little Love,” soon followed.They had success far beyond Britain. It took them a little longer to crack the American market, but their first American hit, “Saturday Night,” reached No. 1 in late 1975. They went on to have five more Top 40 hits in the U.S. and appeared frequently on American television; they even briefly had their own Saturday-morning TV show.After Mr. McKeown’s departure to pursue a solo career, the Bay City Rollers shortened their name to the Rollers and continued performing and recording, but with little success. Various versions of the band, with and without Mr. McKeown, have done occasional reunion tours since then; three members of the classic lineup, Mr. McKeown, Stuart Wood and Alan Longmuir, reunited briefly in 2015. Mr. Longmuir died in 2018.A band billed as “Les McKeown’s Legendary Bay City Rollers” had announced a post-pandemic British tour beginning in July.Leslie Richard McKeown was born in Edinburgh on Nov. 12, 1955, to Irish parents, Francis and Florence (Close) McKeown. He is survived by his wife, Keiko, and their son, Jubei.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      Shock G, Frontman for Hip-Hop Group Digital Underground, Dies at 57

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      The group had a string of hits in the 1990s, including “The Humpty Dance,” and helped introduce a little-known rapper named Tupac Shakur.Gregory Edward Jacobs, known as Shock G, the frontman for the influential hip-hop group Digital Underground, was found dead on Thursday at a hotel in Tampa, Fla. He was 57.His death was confirmed by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, which did not provide a cause .Digital Underground had a string of hits in the early 1990s and introduced its audience to a little-known rapper named Tupac Shakur. The group’s name sounded like “a band of outlaws from a cyberpunk novel,” with a sound that “straddles the line between reality and fantasy, between silliness and social commentary,” The New York Times wrote in 1991. “Digital Underground is where Parliament left off,” Shock G said at the time, referring to the groundbreaking George Clinton band.Shock G had been shuttling from his home in Tampa to Northern California in 1987 when the group made a self-released single, “Underwater Rimes.” That helped get the attention of Tommy Boy Records, which released Digital Underground’s first album, “Sex Packets.” It sold a million copies and featured the hit single “The Humpty Dance.”The album stood out for melding funk and jazz riffs on top of catchy drumbeats. And with Shock G’s lanky frame and toothy grin, the group had a visual aesthetic ripe for the dawn of the music video generation. Shock G, who produced music in addition to rapping, was known for spinning different personas, depending on his surroundings. In the video for “The Humpty Dance,” Shock G took on the persona of Humpty Hump, the title character, donning a pair of dark-rimmed glasses with an obviously fake nose, a fur hat and tie. “I’m sick wit dis, straight gangsta mack / But sometimes I get ridiculous,” he raps on the song. “I’ll eat up all your crackers and your licorice / Hey yo fat girl, come here — are ya ticklish?” Part of the hook for the song: “Do the Humpty Hump, come on and do the Humpty Hump.”Shock G can be seen in a similar outfit, both goofy and suave, in the video for the group’s song, “Doowutchyalike,” where he encouraged listeners to let loose and enjoy themselves as a saxophone gently riffs over the beat.Shock G’s most lasting impact on hip-hop and music may have come when the group released the hit “Same Song,” which was Mr. Shakur’s “first vocal appearance on a song,” according to Genius.com. Shock G, who appears first on the song, once again cast himself as the good-time host. “I came for the party to get naughty, get my rocks on / Eat popcorn, watch you move your body to the pop song.”When it was Mr. Shakur’s turn, he quickly unleashed a thoughtful verse about the dangers of success: “Get some fame, people change.”Mr. Shakur had auditioned for Shock G and was hired to be a member of the group’s road crew. He eventually performed and recorded with Digital Underground, appearing on the group’s “This Is an EP Release” (Tommy Boy), and “Sons of the P” (Tommy Boy), which was nominated for a Grammy Award.In 1991, Mr. Shakur started a solo recording career with the album “2Pacalypse Now” (Interscope), which sold half a million copies. It included two modest hits, “Trapped” and “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” a song about an unwed teenage mother’s plight. Before the album was released, he also started a career as a movie actor, playing the violent, unpredictable Bishop in the Ernest Dickerson film “Juice.”By 1993, Mr. Shakur was a rising star. Shock G and another Digital Underground member, Money B, appeared on Mr. Shakur’s album, helping create his first major hit, “I Get Around,” a poolside anthem with scantily clad women and a laid-back beat. But now, it was Shock G, sporting an Afro and oversized purple T-shirt, with the message: “Now you can tell from my everyday fits I ain’t rich / So cease and desist with them tricks / I’m just another Black man caught up in the mix / Tryna make a dollar out of 15 cents.”Shock G’s musical instincts were forged by a childhood spent moving around the country. His mother worked as a television producer and his father worked as an executive in computer management. After the couple divorced, “I spent my biggest chunk of time in Tampa but I also lived in New York, Philly and California,” Shock G had told The Times. “I have always been into music and played in bands starting when I was 10 or 11.”His grandmother, Gloria Ali, was a pianist and cabaret singer in Harlem in the 1950s. She taught him how to play “Round Midnight” on the piano. Then, as hip-hop began to gain traction in New York in the late 1970s, Shock G, who was living there at the time, recalled, “All of my friends and I sold our instruments to buy mixers and turntables.”Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Shock G saw music as expansive, inclusive and experimental. “Funk can be rock, funk can be jazz and funk can be soul,” he told The Times. “Most people have a checklist of what makes a good pop song: it has to be three minutes long, it must have a repeatable chorus and it must have a catchy hook. That’s what makes music stale. We say ‘Do what feels good.’ If you like it for three minutes, then you’ll love it for 30.”Christina Morales More

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      Bob Porter, Jazz Producer and Broadcaster, Dies at 80

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      Hundreds of albums bore his name, notably reissues of classic material. And he helped make WBGO the biggest jazz radio station in the New York area.Bob Porter, who as a record producer guided the reissue of vast swaths of the classic jazz canon, and who as a broadcaster helped build WBGO into the largest jazz radio station in the New York City area, died on April 10 at his home in Northvale, N.J. He was 80.The cause was complications of esophageal cancer, his wife, Linda Calandra Porter, said.Rock ’n’ roll had mostly eclipsed jazz in the public ear by the time Mr. Porter produced his first album for Prestige Records, the organist Charles Kynard’s “Professor Soul” (1968), for which he also wrote the liner notes. Mr. Porter began regularly producing sessions for the label, mostly in the soul-jazz style of the day, including outings by the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt, the organists Jimmy McGriff and Charles Earland and the guitarist Pat Martino, among many others.He went on to take part in the creation of hundreds of albums as a producer and author of liner notes for a variety of labels. Much of that work was on boxed sets and reissues of archival material.He won a Grammy in 1978 for his liner notes to the five-disc “Charlie Parker: The Complete Savoy Studio Sessions,” which he also produced. He later won the best historical album Grammy in 1986, for producing the compilation “Atlantic Rhythm and Blues 1947-1974, Vols. 1-7.”Interviewed that year by Rolling Stone, Mr. Porter recalled putting together the Atlantic box alongside Ahmet Ertegun, the label’s famed co-founder. Some of Atlantic’s original master tapes had burned in a fire, so Mr. Porter drew upon his network of fellow vinyl collectors to track down original pressings. His main goal, he said, was accuracy and completeness.“We tried to list in copious detail everything we could about the original recording date — the singers, the bands, every piece of information we could unravel,” he said. “The most important thing in doing any work of this nature is that you get it right.”But he also wanted to make a historical point about how social history shapes genre. “We decided to stop in 1974 because that, in a sense, marked the end of an era,” he said. “When you get into disco and rap music, you’re really talking about something that’s very different. The conditions in the country were a lot different when this music was being made. I think that the demise of soul and R&B may ultimately be viewed as a casualty of integration.”In the 1980s, jazz’s commercial fortunes perked up, in thanks partly to the advent of compact discs, which led listeners to buy reissues of old albums. Working most often with Atlantic, Mr. Porter led the remastering process for CD reissues by the likes of Duke Ellington, Ray Charles and Lester Young.As soon as WBGO hit the airwaves at 88.3 FM in 1979, broadcasting out of Newark but reaching across New York City, Mr. Porter started volunteering as a host. Two years later he began a daily show, “Portraits in Blue,” which went on to be syndicated by NPR stations around the country and would continue for the next 40 years. He later hosted two additional shows: “Saturday Morning Function,” which focused on R&B and jump blues, and “Swing Party,” heard on Sunday mornings.On his own podcast earlier this month, Nate Chinen, the director of editorial content at WBGO, called Mr. Porter “a Mount Rushmore figure when it comes to Newark public radio — someone who was on the air, really, from Day 1.”Robert Sherwin Porter was born in Wellesley, Mass., on June 20, 1940, to David Porter, who ran the financial advisory firm David L. Babson & Company, and Constance (Kavanaugh) Porter, a homemaker. The eldest of four siblings, Bob attended Whittier College in California, where he studied English before serving in the Army, stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his brothers, John and William Porter; a sister, Linda (Porter) Owens; a son from a previous marriage, David Porter; two stepsons, Michael and Rick Tombari; and a granddaughter.After his military service, he returned to Whittier to complete his degree. While still in school he began contributing to DownBeat magazine. His articles caught the attention of Bob Weinstock, the head of Prestige, who was impressed by Mr. Porter’s erudition and offered him a job with the label.Mr. Porter’s passion for the artistic and cultural history of African-American music stretched back to its earliest known recordings, and he was deeply knowledgeable about blues as well as jazz.He received awards from various music societies and foundations. In addition to his two Grammys, those included a 1986 W.C. Handy Award (now known as the Blues Music Award) from the Blues Foundation and a 2003 Community Service Award from the Bergen County chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. In 2009, he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.Mr. Porter became a published author late in life, self-releasing “Soul Jazz: Jazz in the Black Community, 1945-1975” in 2016. That book gave a detailed history of the jazz musicians who were especially popular in Black communities just after World War II, but who at the time had rarely come under the gaze of white critics.A white writer himself, Mr. Porter felt compelled to redress the omission. “Black communities had their own heroes, and Black fans of jazz had their own way of responding to the music,” he wrote in the book’s preface. “I have helped dozens of researchers and writers through the years, and I always hoped that one of them would tackle this untold story. Nobody did, and now most of the greatest players are gone. Thus, I decided to do this myself.” More

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      Monte Hellman, Cult Director of ‘Two-Lane Blacktop,’ Dies at 91

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      Part of Roger Corman’s army of young and hungry actors and filmmakers, he made terse, spare action movies and became a cult hero of the American independent film movement.Monte Hellman, whose terse action films, epitomized by the 1971 road movie “Two-Lane Blacktop,” made him a cult hero of the American independent film movement, died on Tuesday in California. He was 91.His death was confirmed by his daughter, Melissa, who said he had been admitted a week before to Eisenhower Health Hospital in Palm Desert, Calif., after a fall at his home. Mr. Hellman was the unknown director of several low-budget films for Roger Corman, most of them with Jack Nicholson in a starring role, when Esquire magazine put “Two-Lane Blacktop” on the cultural map.In an act of cultural provocation, Esquire devoted most of its April 1971 issue to the film, about a cross-country car race. The cover showed a young woman hitchhiking on a desolate stretch of road, with two muscle cars just visible in the distance behind her, poised to race. “Read it first!” the magazine’s cover trumpeted. “Our nomination for the movie of the year: ‘Two-Lane Blacktop.’”Inside, the editors ran the movie’s entire script, by the underground novelist Rudy Wurlitzer from an idea by Will Corry, who was also given screenwriting credit. It was a series of laconic verbal exchanges between obscurely motivated characters identified only as “The Driver” (played by the singer James Taylor), “The Mechanic” (Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys), “the Girl” (Laurie Bird) and “G.T.O.” (Warren Oates), named for his car.Sample dialogue:G.T.O.: “Well, here we are on the road.”The Driver: “Yeah, that’s where we are, all right.”The film, shot entirely on locations from Arizona to Tennessee, has been called the ultimate American road film.Warren Oates, as G.T.O., confronting Dennis Wilson, James Taylor and Laurie Bird in a scene from the movie “Two-Lane Blacktop.”Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“Their universe is one that’s familiar in recent American films like ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ ‘Easy Rider’ and ‘Five Easy Pieces,’” the critic Roger Ebert wrote in The Chicago Sun-Times. “It consists of the miscellaneous establishments thrown up along the sides of the road to support life: motels, gas stations, hamburger stands. The road itself has a real identity in ‘Two-Lane Blacktop,’ as if it were a place to live and not just a way to move.”Made for $850,000, and intended to capitalize on the runaway success of “Easy Rider,” the film struggled at the box office after Lew Wasserman, the head of Universal, refused to promote it. Esquire sheepishly included its endorsement of the film in its annual Dubious Achievement Awards.“We thought it was good publicity,” Mr. Hellman said of the Esquire issue in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1999, when “Two-Lane Blacktop” finally made it to video. “In hindsight, we wouldn’t have done it. I think it raised people’s expectations. They couldn’t accept the movie for what it was.”French film critics did, and their enthusiasm spread to the United States. As the 1970s became recognized as a golden age of independent film, the film’s reputation, and its director’s, soared. In 2005, the journal Cahiers du Cinéma pronounced it “one of the greatest American films of the 1970s.”Monte Himmelbaum was born in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on July 12, 1929, and grew up in Albany, N.Y., where his father ran a small grocery store. When he was s6, the family moved to Los Angeles.He majored in speech and drama at Stanford, where he directed radio plays, and after graduating in 1951, he studied film at U.C.L.A. Around this time, he changed his last name.In 1952, Mr. Hellman helped found the Stumptown Players, a summer theater troupe, in Guerneville, Calif. Carol Burnett was a member. He directed numerous productions and filled in as an actor when required.His first marriage was to one of the theater’s actresses, Barboura Morris. The marriage ended in divorce. He was married three other times, his daughter said. He is survived by a brother, Herb, and two children, Melissa and Jared. In 1955, he moved to Los Angeles, where he began working as a film editor at ABC Studios and on the television series “The Medic.” Still drawn to the theater, he founded a new troupe, the Theatergoers Company, which staged the Los Angeles premiere of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” which Mr. Hellman presented as a Western.After the company’s theater was converted into a cinema, Mr. Corman, one of the company’s investors, invited Mr. Hellman to direct a low-budget horror film, “The Beast From Haunted Cave,” which Mr. Hellman later described as “a bit like ‘Key Largo’ with a monster.”As part of Mr. Corman’s loose army of young and hungry actors and filmmakers, Mr. Hellman helped edit the biker films “The Wild Ride,” during which he became friends with Mr. Nicholson, and “The Wild Angels.” He directed part of “The Terror” with Francis Ford Coppola and the opening sequence of Mr. Coppola’s “Dementia 13,” in which a hypnotist warns that audience members with a weak heart should not watch the film.”Road to Nowhere” won a Special Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival 2010. The award was presented by Quentin Tarantino.Claudio Onorati/ANSA, via EPAHis contribution to “The Terror” caught the attention of Robert Lippert, an executive at 20th Century Fox, who sent him to the Philippines with Mr. Nicholson to make “Back Door to Hell,” a war film, and the adventure thriller “Flight to Fury,” whose screenplay Mr. Nicholson wrote.Mr. Hellman reunited with Mr. Nicholson on two existential westerns, shot in six weeks in the Utah desert, that have added luster to his résumé. “They are sparse, austere, stripped of all necessary language, stripped and flayed until there is nothing left but white bones drying in the sun,” Aljean Harmetz wrote of the films in The New York Times in 1971.“Ride in the Whirlwind,” with a script by Mr. Nicholson, told the story of three cowhands who find themselves on the run after encountering a gang of bandits wanted for murder. In “The Shooting,” written by Carole Eastman, who later wrote the script for “Five Easy Pieces,” a former bounty hunter played by Mr. Oates pursues a mysterious figure on the run, dogged along the way by a sinister gunslinger played by Mr. Nicholson.“I had to shoot from the hip,” Mr. Hellman told Uncut magazine in 2003. “It became a way of life after that. I got confidence in myself. I felt I could walk onto a set and the set would tell me what to do.”Mr. Hellman made his last film for Mr. Corman, “Cockfighter,” in 1974 and worked sporadically thereafter, while teaching in the film directing program at the California Institute of the Arts. He directed the noir western “China 9, Liberty 37” (1978), with Mr. Oates and the director Sam Peckinpah in a rare acting role, and the Conrad-esque “Iguana.” When the director Paul Verhoeven fell behind schedule on the 1987 film “RoboCop,” Mr. Hellman was called in to do the action scenes.He returned to his beginnings in the horror genre with the 1980s slasher film “Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out!” before staging a comeback of sorts with the neonoir “Road to Nowhere” in 2010.The film won a Special Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The award was presented by Quentin Tarantino, who introduced Mr. Hellman as “a great cinematic artist and a minimalist poet.” Mr. Hellman had been an executive producer of Mr. Tarantino’s breakthrough film, “Reservoir Dogs.”“I have a reputation for ‘fighting the system,’ ‘not selling out,’ ‘doing my own thing,’ etc.,” Mr. Hellman told the reference work World Film Directors in 1987. “In reality, I have always been a hired gun. I have usually taken whatever job came my way.”Yan Zhuang More

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      Jim Steinman, ‘Bat Out of Hell’ Songwriter, Dies at 73

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      The rocker Meat Loaf’s interpretations of Mr. Steinman’s songs became one of the biggest-selling albums of all time.Jim Steinman, who wrote all the songs on “Bat Out of Hell,” Meat Loaf’s operatic, teenage-angst-filled 1977 debut album, which remains one of the most successful records of all time, died on Monday in Danbury, Conn. He was 73.His longtime manager, David Sonenberg, announced the death. He said that Mr. Steinman had a stroke four years ago and that his health had recently been declining.Mr. Steinman had a wide-ranging résumé that included writing Bonnie Tyler’s 1983 No. 1 hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and serving as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s lyricist on “Whistle Down the Wind” (1996). But his career-defining achievement was “Bat Out of Hell,” a record that no major label wanted but that has now sold tens of millions of copies.Although the various lists of the top sellers differ in how they compile the rankings and categorize albums, “Bat Out of Hell” routinely lands near the top of any such list, along with albums like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and the Eagles’ “Their Greatest Hits” and “Hotel California.”Appearing at a time when disco and punk were in vogue, “Bat Out of Hell” was defiantly different. It contained only seven songs, all of them heavy on drama and influenced by the opera music Mr. Steinman had loved since he was a boy.In an era of three-minute songs, the title track, which opens the record and is about a motorcycle crash, is a mini-opera in itself, clocking in at 9 minutes 48 seconds. Another track, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” is almost eight and a half minutes long and includes a segment in which Phil Rizzuto, the Yankee broadcaster and former star shortstop, narrates a sexual tug of war between Meat Loaf’s horny male character and a resistant female, a part sung by Ellen Foley.“Bat Out of Hell” sold slowly at first but eventually took off, propelled by Meat Loaf’s exhaustive touring and some favorable radio play in a few markets. It was one of Mr. Steinman’s earliest successes, and it had recently come full circle in a sense: “Bat Out of Hell: The Musical,” a stage production written by Mr. Steinman, opened in Manchester, England, in 2017. Its story, a sort of post-apocalyptic “Peter Pan,” was something Mr. Steinman had envisioned almost 50 years ago.“This was meant to be a musical,” Meat Loaf told The New York Times in 2019, when the show had a brief run at New York City Center in Manhattan. “I made it a rock show. Jimmy turned it around and made a musical. That’s what he wanted it to be.”Meat Loaf and Mr. Steinman collaborated again on “Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell,” a 1993 album that yielded another Meat Loaf hit, “I’d Do Anything for Love (but I Won’t Do That).” Among many other songs, Mr. Steinman also wrote “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” a Top 10 hit for Celine Dion in 1996.His works tended to be vivid in their imagery and heavy on drama. “Most people don’t like extremes,” he once said. “Extremes scare them. I start at ‘extreme’ and go from there.”Some detractors called his songs schlocky, but not Meat Loaf.“Every Jim Steinman song is alive,” he told The Lancashire Telegraph of England in 2016, when “Bat Out of Hell: The Musical” was preparing to open. “It’s not just pen on a piece of paper. It lives, it walks around, it haunts you, and it’ll eat at your heart and soul.”Andrew Polec, at the mic stand, in a special performance of Mr. Steinman’s “Bat Out of Hell: The Musical” at the London Coliseum in 2016. The show officially opened in Manchester the next year.Dave J Hogan/Getty ImagesJames Richard Steinman was born on Nov. 1, 1947, in Hewlett, N.Y., on Long Island. His father, Louis, owned a steel distribution warehouse — first in Brooklyn, then in California — and his mother, Eleanor, was a Latin teacher. He attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, where, he said, he was such a borderline student that people were betting money on whether he would graduate.“When I did graduate,” he told an audience at the college in 2013, when he returned there to accept an honorary doctorate, “I got a huge standing ovation from about 80 percent of the people, who had bet on me graduating.”In 1969, while at Amherst, he created a musical called “The Dream Engine,” which drew attention beyond Amherst; Joseph Papp of the New York Shakespeare Festival, he said, came to see it. After Mr. Steinman had graduated, Mr. Papp commissioned him to help write a musical called “More Than You Deserve,” which ran at the Public Theater in 1974. That introduced him to Meat Loaf (born Marvin Lee Aday), who was in the cast.While Meat Loaf went from that project to a role in the cult film “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” Mr. Steinman contributed music to another show at the Public, “Kid Champion,” which starred Christopher Walken. Then Mr. Steinman and Meat Loaf found themselves together again on a National Lampoon touring show.Mr. Steinman had by then begun playing around with his idea for the post-apocalyptic “Peter Pan,” writing several songs for it. When he couldn’t secure the rights to the elements of the “Peter Pan” story that he wanted, he channeled those songs into “Bat Out of Hell,” recruiting his friend to bring them to life.Todd Rundgren eventually agreed to produce the record, but no big label wanted it; Mr. Sonenberg often joked that he thought people were creating new record labels just for the purpose of rejecting “Bat Out of Hell.” Eventually Cleveland International Records, a small label distributed by CBS, took a chance.Mr. Steinman, who lived in Ridgefield, Conn., is survived by a brother, Bill.Meat Loaf and Mr. Steinman had their differences over the years, including legal ones, but they continued to work together. Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose,” released in 2006, wasn’t a pure collaboration like the previous two “Bat Out of Hell” albums, but it did include some Steinman songs. “Braver Than We Are,” Meat Loaf’s 2016 album, again consisted of Steinman songs.Mr. Steinman also wrote the score for “Tanz der Vampire,” a parody musical based on the 1967 Roman Polanski film “The Fearless Vampire Killers.” The show had its premiere in Vienna in 1997 and has enjoyed success in Europe. But a 2002 Broadway version, “Dance of the Vampires,” with Mr. Steinman providing the lyrics and contributing to the book, lasted less than two months.“The overall effect is of a desperately protracted skit from a summer replacement variety show of the late 1960s,” Ben Brantley wrote in The Times, “the kind on which second-tier celebrities showed up to make fun of themselves.”“Bat Out of Hell: The Musical” seemed on track to do better, but a United States tour was aborted in 2019 in a financing dispute. Mr. Sonenberg said the project was expected to get back on track once the Covid-19 pandemic lifts. More

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      Felix Silla, Cousin Itt on ‘The Addams Family’ Dies at 84

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      He made a strong impression in his best-known role, even though his face wasn’t seen and his voice wasn’t heard.Felix Silla, the actor best known for playing the hairy Cousin Itt on the sitcom “The Addams Family,” died on Friday. He was 84.The cause was cancer, Mr. Silla’s representative, Bonnie Vent, said in a statement. She did not say where he died.Mr. Silla, who stood less than four feet tall, appeared as Cousin Itt in 17 episodes of “The Addams Family,” although his face was not seen and his voice was not heard. Sporting a floor-length hairpiece, sunglasses and a bowler hat, Cousin Itt spoke in a high-pitched mumble (his voice was provided by someone else in postproduction), which was understood only by the other members of the family.“The Addams Family,” seen on ABC from 1964 to 1966, was based on Charles Addams’s New Yorker cartoons about a family that was (in the words of its theme song) “mysterious and spooky.” Cousin Itt, who became a fan favorite, was created specifically for the show.Mr. Silla in 1965 as the hairy Cousin Itt in “The Addams Family.” With him, from left, were John Astin (as Gomez Addams), Carolyn Jones (Morticia Addams) and Ted Cassidy (the butler Lurch).Walt Disney Television, via Getty ImagesMr. Silla’s face also went unseen in other roles, including the robot Twiki on the 1979-81 NBC science fiction series “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.” He was unheard there as well; Twiki’s voice was provided for most of the show’s run by Mel Blanc.He played an Ewok who rode a hang glider in the “Star Wars” film “Return of the Jedi” (1983). Four years later he was in Mel Brooks’s “Star Wars” parody, “Spaceballs.”“Felix knew a lot about making characters come to life with no dialogue,” Ms. Vent said.Viewers had a chance to see Mr. Silla’s face in the 1975 film “The Black Bird,” a comedic sequel to “The Maltese Falcon,” in which he played a villain named Litvak who menaces Sam Spade Jr. (George Segal).Mr. Silla did stunt work in “E.T.” “Poltergeist,” “The Golden Child” and other films. His many TV appearances, in addition to “The Addams Family” and “Buck Rogers,” included roles on “Bewitched,” “Bonanza” and “H.R. Pufnstuf.”His final big-screen role was in “Characterz,” a 2016 film about costumed mascots.Felix Silla was born on Jan. 11, 1937, in Abruzzo, Italy, and came to the United States in 1955. He toured with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus as a bareback rider, trapeze artist and tumbler. He began working in Hollywood as a stuntman in 1962.He is survived by his wife, Sue, and his daughter, Bonnie. His son, Michael, died last year.The New York Times contributed reporting. More

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      Richard Rush, Who Directed ‘The Stunt Man,’ Dies as 91

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      He was nominated for an Oscar for the movie, about filmmaking stunts, perception and reality. His earlier films were aimed at the teenage market.Richard Rush, who made rebellious-youth films in the 1960s that featured emerging stars like Jack Nicholson but who had his biggest success in 1980 with “The Stunt Man,” a quirky, expectation-defying thriller that gained cult status, died on April 8 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 91.His wife, Claude Rush, said the cause was an accumulation of health issues that included heart and kidney failure. He had a heart transplant 18 years ago.Mr. Rush didn’t make a lot of movies; the last of his dozen feature films, the erotic thriller “Color of Night,” was released in 1994. But he made his mark with the actors he cast and with a certain fearlessness in his filmmaking choices.In “The Stunt Man,” Steve Railsback plays a fugitive who accidentally finds himself on a film set and ends up as a stunt man while striking up a romance with one of the stars (played by Barbara Hershey). Mr. Rush was nominated for an Oscar for directing and for the script, which he and Lawrence B. Marcus adapted from a Paul Brodeur novel. Peter O’Toole received an Oscar nomination for his bravura performance as the director who may or may not be trying to kill his new stunt man.The movie is full of wild stunts and misdirection, keeping the audience guessing about what is real and what is movie-within-the-movie magic.“We couldn’t wait to get to the set every day because we knew something exciting and creative was going to happen,” Mr. Railsback said in a phone interview.Mr. Rush, in a 2017 interview with the blog We Are Cult, described what he was going for in the movie.“I had the audacity to think that I could make a picture that would explore illusion and reality,” he said, “and I wanted to use the film as a mirror for the paranoid mind-set that we all live through at one point or another.”If “The Stunt Man” and some of his other films were hard to classify, switching quickly from comedy to drama to romance, that was because reality was like that, he said.“Living life is like falling down through a pinball machine, with balls bouncing off of each other, causing action and reaction in an unexpected way,” he told We Are Cult. “And that’s how I view storytelling: having that great balance of all the various elements. Something is allowed to be funny and serious sometimes within the same moment or scene.”Richard Walter Rush was born on April 15, 1929, in New York. His widow said that his parents were Ray and Nina Rush, Russian immigrants, and that his father had owned bookstores in New York and Los Angeles, where the family settled when Richard was a boy.During the Korean War Mr. Rush was part of a filmmaking unit in the Air Force, stationed in San Bernardino, Calif. After his military service he enrolled in a new film school at the University of California, Los Angeles.His early films were generally low-budget affairs made quickly and aimed at the teenage market.One of Mr. Nicholson’s earliest roles was in Mr. Rush’s first film, “Too Soon to Love” (1960), a drama about a teenage couple dealing with a pregnancy, a somewhat scandalous subject for the time. Mr. Nicholson was back in Mr. Rush’s biker picture, “Hell’s Angels on Wheels,” in 1967, two years before the better-known “Easy Rider” worked a biker theme with a cast that featured Mr. Nicholson, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper (who directed that film).In 1974 Mr. Rush directed the action comedy “Freebie and the Bean,” with James Caan and Alan Arkin starring in an early example of the modern-day buddy-cop genre soon to spawn hits like “48 Hrs” and “Lethal Weapon.”On “Hell’s Angels on Wheels” and several other movies, he worked with the cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, who went on to a long and acclaimed career with credits like “Easy Rider” and “Five Easy Pieces” (1970).Among Mr. Rush’s other movies were “Psych-Out” (1968), about a deaf runaway (Susan Strasberg) in the hippie heart of San Francisco, where Mr. Nicholson and Bruce Dern are among the populace; and “Getting Straight” (1970), with Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen, a film that Vincent Canby of The New York Times dismissed as “the worst of the campus-revolution movies.”Mr. Rush on the set for “Color of Night” (1994), an erotic thriller that drew considerable attention.Cinergi Pictures Entertainment“Color of Night,” which starred Jane March and Bruce Willis, drew considerable attention both for its racy sex scenes and the dispute Mr. Rush got into with the studio over the editing. During arbitration with the studio, Cinergi Productions, Mr. Rush had a heart attack.He also had an unpleasant experience with “Air America,” an action comedy for which he wrote a script that became part of a long development tussle. When the movie finally came out in 1990, it was directed by Roger Spottiswoode; Mr. Rush shared a screenwriting credit.He married Claude Cuvereaux in 1995 after many years together. He is also survived by a son, Anthony, and a grandson.Mr. Rush had definite ideas about the scripts he agreed to direct and how to shoot them. Mr. Railsback recalled that on “The Stunt Man,” the cinematographer, Mario Tosi, was taken aback by Mr. Rush’s hands-on style.“Early on Richard would say, ‘Put your camera here, do this and do this,’” he said, “and Mario was getting upset because Richard was telling him where to put the camera and all this other stuff.”But when the day’s footage (known as dailies) came back, Mr. Railsback said, Mr. Rush’s instincts proved to be spot on.“Mario looked at the dailies,” he said, “and he walked over to Richard and said, ‘You just tell me where to put that camera.’” More

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      Black Rob, Rapper Known for His Hit Single ‘Whoa!,’ Dies at 52

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      A star for Bad Boy Records after the Notorious B.I.G.’s death, the rapper had a husky, seen-it-all voice even as a young man.Robert Ross, the rapper known as Black Rob, whose husky, seen-it-all voice powered turn-of-the-millennium hits like “Whoa!” and “Can I Live” for Bad Boy Records, died on Saturday at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. He was 52.The cause was cardiac arrest, said Mark Curry, a friend and one-time Bad Boy artist, who added that Mr. Ross had numerous health issues in recent years, including diabetes, lupus, kidney failure and multiple strokes.Mr. Ross had been undergoing dialysis and was discharged from Piedmont Atlanta Hospital this month, Mr. Curry said. In a video that was posted online and spread across the hip-hop world, Mr. Ross detailed his ailments and recent struggles with homelessness.“He didn’t have a home, but he always had us,” said Mr. Curry, who called Mr. Ross “a true poet.” He added: “He’s known for telling stories and his music described his life. You can feel it.”Last week, Mr. Curry, along with the producer Mike Zombie, began promoting a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for Mr. Ross — “to help him find a home, pay for medical help and stability during these trying times,” the campaign’s description said. The fund-raiser collected about half of its $50,000 goal.Mr. Ross, who was born in Harlem, N.Y., began rapping around the age of 11, influenced by local artists like Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh, whom he credited for helping to develop his storytelling prowess. He also internalized the essence of his musically ascendant neighborhood, citing its “pick-me-up kinda sound.”“It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s got a little flavor, I could dance to this’ — you’re gonna talk about a little bit of money, a little bit of drugs,” Mr. Ross said in a 2013 interview. “We were the flashiest.”Best known for the hard-hitting 2000 single “Whoa!”, which reached No. 43 on the Billboard Hot 100, and a string of electric guest verses on songs by Mase, 112 and Total, Mr. Ross could sound both motivated and weathered even as a young man.Thrust into more of a leading role after the murder of his Bad Boy label mate, the Notorious B.I.G., in March 1997, the rapper became another fast-burning star under the imprimatur of the budding hip-hop mogul Sean Combs, better known as Diddy, by the end of the 1990s.Mr. Ross’s debut album, the fittingly named “Life Story,” was released by Bad Boy in 2000, when he was 31. Already, he had spent more than a decade of his life in and out of juvenile detention, jail and prison, and the music reflected that.“It’s hell,” the rapper said at the time of his past. “Once they get their teeth on you, they keep biting, until they feel like, ‘Let’s throw away the key on this cat.’”“Life Story” featured intricate street tales of stickups, shootouts and the family struggles that could lead to such things, and it reached No. 3 on the Billboard album chart, eventually becoming platinum.Five years later, “The Black Rob Report,” the rapper’s second album, failed to find the same success, in part because Mr. Ross was back in prison, having failed to report to sentencing for a 2004 larceny charge. His career never recovered.“Bad Boy left me for dead,” Mr. Ross said upon his release from prison in 2010. Two subsequent independent releases on different labels foundered.Mr. Ross is survived by his mother, Cynthia; four siblings; nine children; and five grandchildren.Many people on social media offered condolences for Mr. Ross, including Diddy, the entrepreneur Daymond John and the rappers Missy Elliott, L.L. Cool J, GZA and Styles P.On Twitter, L.L. Cool J described Mr. Ross as a storyteller, gentleman and an M.C.Ms. Elliott lamented that the death of Mr. Ross closely followed that of another New York rapper, Earl Simmons, known as DMX, who died this month.“It’s hard finding the words to say when someone passes away,” Ms. Elliott said on Twitter. “I am Praying for both of their families for healing.” More