Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Gloria Henry, ‘Dennis the Menace’ Mother, Dies at 98

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      She was a prolific B-movie actress early in her career, but she became best known for her role as Alice Mitchell, the gentle mother of Dennis, on the CBS show.Gloria Henry, a B-movie actress of the 1940s and ’50s who became best known as the sunny, preternaturally patient mom on the television series “Dennis the Menace,” died on Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 98.The death was confirmed by her daughter, Erin Ellwood.Ms. Henry was 36 and a veteran of more than two dozen films in 1959 when she was cast as Alice Mitchell, the gentle, tolerant but constantly horrified mother in “Dennis the Menace,” a sitcom based on Hank Ketcham’s popular comic strip. Dennis (played by Jay North) was an angelic little boy on the surface, but every time he tried to help or just do something nice, it somehow backfired. The show ran for four seasons on CBS.Gloria Eileen McEniry was born in New Orleans on April 2, 1923, and attended Worcester Art Museum School in Massachusetts. She moved to Los Angeles in her teens and began working in radio, where she began using the last name Henry.She made her movie debut in the 1947 drama “Sport of Kings,” set in Kentucky horse country. Ms. Henry started at the top in the B-movie genre, starring in the film as a young veterinarian.Over the next three years she appeared in at least 17 films, more often than not in the starring role. A number of her films were westerns, like “Adventures in Silverado” (1948), “Law of the Barbary Coast” (1949) and “Lightning Guns” (1950). In two films — “The Strawberry Roan” (1948) and “Riders in the Sky” (1949) — she starred opposite Gene Autry, getting third billing, after Autry and his horse.She also appeared in several sports comedies, including “Triple Threat” (1948), with Richard Crane, and “Kill the Umpire” (1950), with William Bendix. Her best-known film was probably “Rancho Notorious” (1952), which was directed by Fritz Lang and starred Marlene Dietrich.Once Ms. Henry had made her television debut, in a 1952 episode of “Fireside Theater,” she devoted her career almost exclusively to series TV. Over four decades, on and off, she appeared in shows from “My Little Margie,” “Perry Mason” and “The Life of Riley” to “Dallas,” “Newhart” and “Doogie Howser, M.D.”Her final television appearance was on a 2012 episode of the sitcom “Parks and Recreation.” Ms. Henry’s first marriage, in 1943 to Robert D. Lamb, ended in divorce in 1948. She married Craig Ellwood, the California Modernist architect, in 1949. They divorced in 1977. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by two sons, Jeffrey and Adam, and a granddaughter.Ms. Henry, who kept in touch with Mr. North over the years, often commented on her “Dennis the Menace” character’s amazing restraint with her son. “I wasn’t allowed to yell at Jay North,” she told The Los Angeles Times at a 1989 gathering of actresses who had played famous mothers on television. “It was difficult. Being a normal, in-reality mother, I yelled at my children a lot.” More

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      in Theater

      Arthur Kopit, Whose ‘Oh Dad’ Shook Up the Theater, Dies at 83

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      A three-time Tony nominee, he first became known for avant-garde works, many of them christened with rambling titles, that sparked spirited reactions.Arthur Kopit, the avant-garde playwright who thrust Off Broadway into a new era with the absurdist satirical farce “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad” and earned Tony Award nominations for two wildly different plays, “Indians” and “Wings,” and the musical “Nine,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.His death was announced by a spokesman, Rick Miramontez, who did not specify the cause.In 1962, when “Oh Dad, Poor Dad” opened at the 300-seat Phoenix Theater on East 74th Street, American popular culture was shifting. Julie Andrews was between the idealistic “Camelot” and the wholesome “Mary Poppins”; Lenny Bruce, the hot comic of the moment, was known for what came to be called “sick humor.” Broadway was dominated by “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “A Man for All Seasons.”Along came a 24-year-old playwright with a script about an older woman who liked traveling with her virginal adult son and her husband’s preserved corpse. The New York Times critic, Howard Taubman, had reservations — he called it “funny” and “stageworthy” but “nonsensical” — but it won the Drama Desk Award (then the Vernon Rice Award) and even transferred to Broadway for a few months in 1963.There was often vehement disagreement about Mr. Kopit’s work. Before “Indians” (1969) — a dreamlike production that positioned Buffalo Bill Cody as the first guilty white American liberal and prominently featured his 19th-century Wild West show — arrived on Broadway, there was a production in London, where critical reaction was decidedly mixed. The script included the rape of one Native American and the casual murder (for sport) of another.Clive Barnes, writing in The Times, called the Broadway production, starring Stacy Keach, “a gentle triumph” and praised Mr. Kopit for “trying to do something virtually no one has done before: the multilinear epic.” But Walter Kerr, his Times colleague, compared it to “bad burlesque.”John Lahr, writing in The Village Voice, summarized “Indians” as “never less than scintillating” and called it the “most probing and the most totally theatrical Broadway play of this decade.” “Indians” received three Tony nominations, including for best play.Mr. Kopit professed a very specific social conscience. “I’m not concerned in the play with the terrible plight of the Indians now — they were finished from the moment the first white man arrived,” he told a London newspaper in 1968. “What I want to show is a series of confrontations between two alien systems.” Many saw parallels to the Vietnam War, then at its peak.When Mr. Kopit returned to Broadway a decade later, his subject could not have been more different. “Wings,” which opened at the Public Theater in 1978 and moved to Broadway the next year, followed the journey of a 70-year-old woman (played by Constance Cummings) having a stroke and reacting to it with fear, determination and kaleidoscopic verbal confusion. As The Washington Post reported, when the main character is asked to repeat the sentence “We live across the street from the school,” she replies, “Malacats on the forturay are the kesterfacts of the romancers.”Mr. Kopit in 1999. “When I wrote a play,” he once said, “I found that I lost myself as Arthur Kopit and I just wrote down what the characters said.”Jack Mitchell/Getty ImagesRichard Eder of The Times called “Wings,” which had been inspired by the post-stroke rehabilitation experiences of Mr. Kopit’s stepfather, “a brilliant work” — “complex at first glance,” he wrote, “yet utterly lucid, written with great sensitivity and with the excitement of a voyage of discovery.”The play was nominated for three Tonys. Ms. Cummings won the Tony and Drama Desk awards for best actress and an Obie for her performance.Mr. Kopit discovered his gift for writing plays almost by accident. In a 2007 interview with The Harvard Gazette, the official news outlet of his alma mater, he looked back at his initial reaction when he switched from short stories to scripts. “I was having a lot of trouble with the narrative point of view,” he recalled. “When I wrote a play, I found that I lost myself as Arthur Kopit and I just wrote down what the characters said. I wasn’t anywhere in the play, and I liked that.”Arthur Lee Koenig was born on May 10, 1937, in Manhattan, the son of Henry Koenig, an advertising salesman, and Maxine (Dubin) Koenig. His parents divorced when he was 2, and his mother’s occupation was listed in the 1940 census as millinery model. He took on his stepfather’s name after his mother married George Kopit, a jewelry sales executive.Arthur grew up and attended high school in Lawrence, an affluent Long Island community. He was already writing by the time he left Harvard in 1959 with an engineering degree. As he began a graduate fellowship in Europe, he heard about a Harvard playwriting contest. He wrote, entered and won the $250 prize with “Oh Dad,” which he said he never believed had any commercial potential.Mr. Kopit was at first fond of wordy, rambling titles. “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad” even had a subtitle: “A Pseudo-Classical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition.” He followed that success with a collection of one-acts, including “The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis,” set at a suburban country club. “On the Runway of Life, You Never Know What’s Coming Off Next” was another early work.His last Tony nomination was for the book of the musical “Nine” (1982), based on Federico Fellini’s film “8½.” That same year, he adapted the book of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” for a Broadway revival. More

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      Malcolm Cecil, Synthesizer Pioneer, Is Dead at 84

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      His massive machine, known as TONTO, helped transform the music in Stevie Wonder’s mind into classic albums like “Innervisions.”Malcolm Cecil, a British-born bassist with the soul of an engineer who revolutionized electronic music by helping to create a huge analog synthesizer that gave Stevie Wonder’s albums a new sound, died on Sunday at a hospital in Valhalla, N.Y. He was 84.His son, Milton, said the cause had not yet been determined.Mr. Cecil, a loquacious man with a head full of curls, had played the upright bass in jazz bands in England and was the night maintenance engineer at Mediasound Studios in Manhattan in 1968 when he met Robert Margouleff, a film and record producer who owned and operated a Moog synthesizer there.“He said, ‘Robert, if you show me how to play the synthesizer, I will teach you how to become a first-class recording engineer,’” Mr. Margouleff said in a phone interview. “We had a deal.”They began designing and building what would become The Original New Timbral Orchestra, or TONTO. Starting with the Moog and adding other synthesizers and a collection of modules, some of them designed by Mr. Cecil, they created a massive semicircular piece of equipment that took up a small room and weighed a ton. It could be programmed to create a vast array of original sounds and to modify and process the sounds of conventional musical instruments.As they continued to develop it, Mr. Cecil and Mr. Margouleff recorded an album, “Zero Time” (1971), under the name TONTO’s Expanding Head Band.Reviewing “Zero Time” in Rolling Stone, Timothy Crouse wrote: “Like taking acid and discovering that your mind has the power to stop your heart, the realization that this instrument can do all sorts of things to you, now that it has you, is unsettling.”The album attracted the attention of Mr. Wonder, who had just turned 21 when he showed up at Mediasound on Memorial Day weekend in 1971. Mr. Cecil lived in an apartment above the studio so that he would be available to fix anything that might go wrong, day or night.“I get a ring on the bell,” Mr. Cecil told Red Bull Music Academy in 2014. “I look out; there’s my friend Ronnie and a guy who turns out to be Stevie Wonder in a green pistachio jumpsuit and what looks like my album under his arm. Ronnie says, ‘Hey, Malcolm, got somebody here who wants to see TONTO.’”What started as a demonstration of TONTO for Mr. Wonder turned out to be a weekend-long recording experiment. Seventeen songs were recorded, and a collaboration was born.Over the next three years, TONTO became a significant sonic element of Mr. Wonder’s music on the albums “Music of My Mind” and “Talking Book,” both released in 1972, and their follow-ups, “Innervisions” (1973) and “Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974).In an interview in 2019 with the music website Okayplayer, Mr. Cecil described part of the creative process behind the recording of “Evil,” the last track on “Music of My Mind.”“If you listen to ‘Evil,’ it has a fantastic opening, which is all TONTO, and the sound of it was classical,” he said. “There was an oboe sound. There was a horn sound and a foreboding bass.” He added, “When Stevie wanted something, he would explain what he heard in his head, and we would attempt to create it as closely as possible.”The experience of working with Mr. Wonder was, Mr. Margouleff said, “very much in the moment; nothing was preplanned. It was all intuitive and wonderful.”From left, Mr. Cecil, Stevie Wonder and Mr. Margouleff in the studio. The three collaborated on the albums “Music of My Mind,” “Talking Book,” “Innervisions” and “Fulfillingness’ First Finale.”via Robert MargouleffMr. Cecil and Mr. Margouleff at the 1974 Grammy Awards. They won for their engineering of “Innervisions.”via Robert MargouleffMr. Cecil and Mr. Margouleff won the Grammy Award for their engineering of “Innervisions,” which included the hit songs “Living in the City” and “Higher Ground.” Mr. Wonder won Grammys that year for album of the year and for best rhythm and blues song, for “Superstition,” which blended Mr. Wonder’s playing on drums and clavinet with a funky bass sound provided by TONTO.Mr. Cecil and Mr. Margouleff’s partnership with Mr. Wonder ended after four albums.“We never got the business part of our relationship with Stevie together,” Mr. Margouleff said. “Business issues made our relationship untenable.”A year later — following technical difficulties during Billy Preston’s live TONTO performance on the NBC music show “Midnight Special” — Mr. Margouleff and Mr. Cecil broke up.Malcolm Ian Cecil was born on Jan 9, 1937, in London. His mother, Edna (Aarons) Cecil, was an accordionist who played in bands, including one, composed entirely of women, that entertained troops during World War II. His father, David, was a concert promoter who also worked as a professional clown under the name Windy Blow. They divorced when Malcolm was very young.Malcolm started playing piano when he was 3 and took up drums a little later. He began to play the upright bass as a teenager and was soon playing in jazz clubs. He studied physics for a year at London Polytechnic before entering the Royal Air Force in 1958. His three years as a radar operator prepared him for future studio work.After his discharge, he was the house bassist at the saxophonist Ronnie Scott’s nightclub in London, where he played with visiting American musicians like Stan Getz and J.J. Johnson; a member of Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, a band whose evolving cast at various times included Charlie Watts and Jack Bruce; and the principal bassist of the BBC Radio Orchestra. He also had a business building public address systems and other equipment for musicians.Suffering from collapsed lungs, Mr. Cecil decided he needed a warmer climate and moved to South Africa, where he continued playing bass. But he disliked living amid apartheid.He sailed to San Francisco in 1967 and then headed to Los Angeles, where he spent a year as the chief engineer at Pat Boone’s recording studio. He later moved to New York City, where he worked at the Record Plant for six weeks before being hired as the maintenance engineer at Mediasound.He admired the Moog synthesizer IIIc at Mediasound but did not meet Mr. Margouleff until his fifth night there. They quickly began recording experimental psychedelic music together, and six months later the jazz flutist Herbie Mann signed them to his Embryo label.The first track they recorded for what would be their album “Zero Time” was “Aurora,” which was originally 23 minutes long. “I said, ‘Malcolm, I’m not even sure it’s music,’” Mr. Margouleff recalled. They cut its length by two-thirds.Mr. Cecil and Mr. Margouleff turned TONTO into the most advanced synthesizer in music. It was used, largely in its 1970s heyday, on recordings by Richie Havens, the Doobie Brothers, James Taylor, Quincy Jones, Joan Baez, Little Feat and others.Mr. Cecil in 2018 at the National Music Center, in Calgary, Alberta, where TONTO currently resides, and where its impact was celebrated at a five-day event.Sebastian BuzzalinoIn the 1980s and ’90s, Mr. Cecil produced several of Gil Scott-Heron’s albums and produced or engineered albums by the Isley Brothers, Ginger Baker, Dave Mason and other artists. He also played bass on Mr. Scott-Heron’s 1994 album, “Spirits.” Mr. Margouleff went on to produce the rock band Devo.TONTO’s Expanding Head Band released one more album, “It’s About Time,” in 1974. “Tonto Rides Again,” a digitally remastered compilation of the two earlier albums, was released in 1996.“Margouleff and Cecil were about 30 years ahead of their time when they started this project,” Jim Brenholts wrote in a review of “Tonto Rides Again” on AllMusic.In addition to his son, Milton, Mr. Cecil is survived by his wife, Poli (Franks) Cecil.TONTO had several homes in New York City, including Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios; it also spent time in Los Angeles and in a converted barn owned by Mr. Cecil in the Hudson River town of Saugerties, N.Y.In 2013, TONTO was acquired by the National Music Center in Calgary, Alberta, where it was restored and its impact celebrated in a five-day event in 2018. A Tribe Called Red, a Canadian electronic-music duo that admires TONTO and considers it an influence, performed there, and Mr. Cecil gave a demonstration.A member of the band, Ehren Thomas, compared TONTO to the combination spaceship and time machine on a long-running British TV series.“It’s like the Tardis in ‘Doctor Who,’” he told the CBC, “because you can’t program it to do something specifically. You can set up the parameters and ask TONTO to do what you want, but what comes out is beyond your control.” More

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      Constance Demby, New Age Composer, Is Dead at 81

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      Ms. Demby wrote ethereal, otherworldly music and played much of it on instruments of her own making, including one she called the Space Bass.Constance Demby, whose ethereal music, some of it played on instruments she designed, was much admired by New Age adherents, spiritual seekers and fans of electronica, died on March 19 in Pasadena, Calif. She was 81.Her son and only immediate survivor, Joshua Demby, said the cause was complications of a heart attack.Ms. Demby’s 1986 album, “Novus Magnificat: Through the Stargate,” was a breakthrough for both her and the New Age genre, selling more than 200,000 copies, a substantial figure for that type of music. Pulse magazine named it one of the top three New Age albums of the decade and called it “a landmark, full-length electronic symphony reminiscent of Baroque sacred music with crystalline effects that take you out of the realm of everyday experience.”Ms. Demby’s album “Novus Magnificat: Through the Stargate,” released in 1986, sold more than 200,000 copies, a substantial figure for New Age music.Constance DembyMore recently, tracks like “Alleluiah” and “Haven of Peace” from “Sanctum Sanctuorum,” a 2001 release, have been drawing attention from a new generation of fans, said Jon Birgé, owner of Hearts of Space Records, Ms. Demby’s label for the past 20 years.Ms. Demby viewed sound, when harnessed properly, as having transformative and even healing power.“Music is a realm of consciousness the listener enters by traveling on a beam of sound,” she told Malibu Surfside News in 2010. “It opens the heart.”Eleni Rose-Collard, her former assistant, saw the effects of Ms. Demby’s music on audiences, including those who came to her studio for small-scale house concerts.“Her home concerts were magical, immersive, healing, profound,” Ms. Rose-Collard said by email. Ms. Rose-Collard herself experienced those effects.“One of my deepest memories was being there with her while she was composing ‘Novus Magnificat,’” she said. “I was across the room, I fell to my knees, crawled to her, put my head in her lap and sobbed.”Ms. Demby’s studio was full of synthesizers, computer monitors and various instruments, including one she named the Space Bass, which she created in the 1960s when she was an artist in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood making sculptures.“I brought this 10-foot-long sheet of mirror-finished steel to the studio and hung it up to start torching it,” she recalled in the 2010 interview — and she was transfixed by the sounds that emanated from the metal when it wobbled. She added some brass and steel rods and other refinements, and the Space Bass was born.There was also the Whale Sail, another sheet-metal creation, as well as a hammered dulcimer that she and the noted instrument maker Sam Rizzetta designed especially to reach notes lower than a traditional hammered dulcimer can produce.“It ended up being almost five feet long,” Ms. Demby wrote on her website, “because that low C string demanded a certain length in order to achieve the note. The resonance is such that the sound of one string being struck hangs in the air for nearly 15 seconds.”The writer Dave Eggers, a nephew, recalled how his aunt’s albums and artworks had brightened his youth in Chicago.“Whenever Connie would create a new album, she’d send it to us,” he said by email, “and the contrast between our many-shades-of-brown house and her records and posters, all with ethereal themes and rainbow colors, was dramatic.”Later he would visit the studio where she made her music.“In her place in Sierra Madre, in a light-filled front room, the Space Bass made sounds of thunder and crashing oceans,” Mr. Eggers wrote. “Most of her compositions were otherworldly — as if she were composing the soundtrack to the next world.”Ms. Demby in 2015 at the Space Bass, an instrument she created in the 1960s when she was an artist in SoHo making sculptures.Michael McCoolConstance Mary Eggers was born on May 9, 1939, in Oakland, Calif. Her father, John, was an advertising executive, and her mother, Mary Elizabeth (Kingwell) Eggers, was a homemaker.She grew up in Greenwich, Conn. When she was 8, her mother acquired a grand piano, which sparked Connie’s interest in music.“I watched her two hands interacting,” she said. “Within days I was taking piano lessons.”Ms. Demby married David Demby in 1961 (the marriage would end in divorce), and she spent much of that decade in New York, where she fell in with musicians like Robert Rutman, who would become well known as a multimedia artist. In 1966 Ms. Demby relocated to Maine, and soon Mr. Rutman did, too. Around 1970 she joined him in the Central Maine Power Music Company, a performance group that made much of its music with homemade instruments.“It has given concerts in various auditoriums,” a local newspaper wrote of the group, “sometimes playing to large, enthusiastic audiences, and sometimes playing to a baffled and resistant handful.”Ms. Demby in the 2000s on the terrace of her home in Spain, where she lived for a time before settling in California. Constance DembyMs. Demby lived in Spain for a time before settling in California. She took her music all over the world. Mr. Eggers recalled her telling stories of performing at Stonehenge in England and at the foot of the pyramids at Giza in Egypt. She often performed at planetariums and other astronomy facilities, including the Mount Wilson Observatory in California.Her music was used or sampled in a number of films. Her other albums include “Set Free” (1989), “Aeterna” (1994) and “Spirit Trance” (2004).“What Demby likes to do,” Ms. Demby told The Los Angeles Times in 2000, “is to play energy, and play the audience as one of her instruments.”Mr. Eggers said he had spoken frequently to his aunt, most recently a few weeks ago, when her health was failing.“Her memory was not good, and she couldn’t remember many friends or any recent events,” he said. “But she knew her music. She knew everywhere she’d played, and the name of every composition.”“Out of nowhere she began talking about heaven,” he added. “‘I think I’ll be welcomed there,’ she said. ‘I think they’d like the music I made, and they’ll open the gates for me.’” More

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      Pat Collins, Tony Award-Winning Lighting Designer, Dies at 88

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      She sought to move audiences with her lighting in shows like “The Threepenny Opera,” “I’m Not Rappaport” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”Pat Collins, a Tony Award-winning lighting designer and a Broadway mainstay whose work was seen for nearly 50 years in plays, musicals and operas, died on March 21 at her home in Branford, Conn. She was 88.The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Dr. Virginia Stuermer, her partner of 64 years and her only survivor.Ms. Collins, who won her Tony for Herb Gardner’s “I’m Not Rappaport” in 1986, was the lighting designer for more than 30 other Broadway productions, among them “The Threepenny Opera,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Doubt,” which earned her a Tony nomination.“Her lighting was like her personality: She was nervy and intelligent but with a sensitive side,” John Lee Beatty, a Tony-winning scenic designer and frequent collaborator, said in a phone interview. “She really blossomed in tech rehearsals; she loved to create on the spot.” He added: “She could do conventional lighting, but she also wanted to try everything.”Ms. Collins brought an autumnal palette to “I’m Not Rappaport,” about two irascible and inseparable octogenarians who meet on a Central Park bench, and the darkness of looming death to a 1989 production in Baltimore of “Miss Evers’ Boys,” David Feldshuh’s play about the federal government’s withholding of treatment for syphilis to poor Black men. In a 2002 revival of Lanford Wilson’s “Burn This” at the Union Square Theater, she transformed figures onstage into what Ben Brantley of The New York Times called “ambiguous silhouettes.”She also worked at regional theaters throughout the United States and with opera companies in New York, San Francisco, Santa Fe, London, Paris and Munich — always using light to establish moods, create the illusion of time passing and indicate where the audience’s attention should be on the stage.“Lighting has everything to do with how you feel and how things affect you,” Ms. Collins told The Post-Star in Glens Falls, N.Y., in 1975. “Almost everyone has had the aesthetic experience of being moved by seeing light filtered through trees in the forest. Multiply that by one thousand and you’d have some idea of the constant subliminal effect lighting has on us.”The musical “Ain’t Misbehavin’” on Broadway. It was one of more than 30 Broadway productions for which Ms. Collins designed the lighting.Alamy Stock PhotoMichael Chybowski, a lighting designer who worked with Ms. Collins on two productions at the Alaska Repertory Theater in the 1980s, said of her: “She understood the point of the show and made sure that you saw it. Whether it was portentous events in ‘An Enemy of the People’ or the sheer fun of ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’,’ her light reflected and communicated that.”Mr. Chybowski recalled the lighting design that Ms. Collins devised for “An Enemy of the People,” Ibsen’s political drama about a scientist who tries to save his town from water pollution but becomes a scapegoat.“She went into the studio, worked at my drafting table for four hours, drew up the plan and went off to the airport,” he said. “I said, ‘It can’t be that easy,’ but we put on the show, and it was the most beautiful show we did in my five years at the theater.”Patricia Jane Collins was born on April 3, 1932, in Brooklyn to Jerry and Alta (Hyatt) Collins. Her mother worked in a law firm; her father left the family when Pat was very young.Ms. Collins attended Pembroke College in Brown University, where she studied Spanish and joined a campus drama group. After graduating, she spent a year at Yale Drama School — where she met Dr. Stuermer — but felt it was a waste of time. She went to work instead as a stage manager at the Joffrey Ballet, and then as an assistant to Jean Rosenthal, a top Broadway lighting designer, at the American Shakespeare Festival Theater in Stratford, Conn.Ms. Collins won a Tony for her work on Herb Gardner’s “I’m Not Rappaport” in 1986. She also designed the lighting for a 2002 Broadway revival with Ben Vereen, left, and Judd Hirsch.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMs. Collins worked as a stage manager, among other jobs, in the 1960s but did not hit her stride until Joseph Papp, the founder and director of the New York Shakespeare Festival, hired her to design the lighting for productions of “The Threepenny Opera” at Lincoln Center in 1976, which earned her a Tony nomination, and at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park in 1977.“She had fixed somebody else’s show, and he offered her ‘Threepenny,’” said Mimi Jordan Sherin, a lighting designer and longtime associate of Ms. Collins’s. “That put her on the map, and she never stopped working after that.”For all that she worked on Broadway, she spent much of her time away from it, designing lighting at regional theaters, including Ford’s Theater in Washington, Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, Berkeley Repertory Theater in California, the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles and the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn.For the Hartford Stage Company’s production of Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline,” Malcolm Johnson of The Hartford Courant wrote admiringly of “the ever-changing light patterns” that Ms. Collins had created with “mirror images and stars and moons and comets.”Ms. Collins, who began listening to opera on radio at age 9, designed lighting for productions at the Metropolitan Opera, the Royal Opera House in London and the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. She also conceived the lighting for Lar Lubovitch’s production of “Othello: A Dance in Three Acts” at the American Ballet Theater in 1997.Ms. Collins conceived the lighting for Lar Lubovitch’s production of “Othello” with the American Ballet Theater in 1997.Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesHer other Broadway credits include “The Heidi Chronicles,” “The Sisters Rosenzweig,” “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” “Good People,” “Orphans” and “Execution of Justice,” for which she won a Drama Desk Award in 1986.Mr. Beatty recalled being in London one year when Ms. Collins had a double bill of work there — Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” and a performance nearby at the English National Opera.At “Into the Woods,” he said, “the curtain goes down, the music starts” and the lighting was “bright and simple, like the world’s biggest flashbulb had come on. Whoa, in your face!”“There was a certain joyfulness to that,” he added. “Then, she was down the street, doing an esoteric opera, challenging that director to think out of the box. It was perfect Pat.” More

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      Freddie Redd, Jazz Pianist and Composer, Is Dead at 92

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      He was best known for writing the music for “The Connection,” an Off Broadway play that depicted the lives of heroin-addicted musicians in New York.The pianist Freddie Redd in a scene from the 1961 movie “The Connection.” He composed the music for the play it was based on, which was also used in the film, in addition to appearing in both.Alamy Stock PhotoFreddie Redd, a pianist and composer who released a pair of well-received albums for Blue Note Records in the early 1960s, then spent more than half a century bouncing through different cities as an ambassador of jazz’s golden age, died on March 17 at a care facility in Manhattan. He was 92.His grandson Leslie Clarke said he had died in his sleep, but did not give a cause.Mr. Redd is best known for writing the music for “The Connection” (1959), an Off Broadway play by Jack Gelber that depicted the lives of heroin-addicted musicians in New York, and that two years later became a renowned film directed by Shirley Clarke. Mr. Redd appeared in both.Largely self-taught, Mr. Redd was particularly known for his compositions and for his skill as an accompanist. Even when he was the one soloing, his left hand’s roving chords were often as rich as his right hand’s improvised lines.“The Music From ‘The Connection,’” released in 1960, was Mr. Redd’s first album for Blue Note; it was followed in 1961 by the similarly acclaimed “Shades of Redd,” which featured an all-star band: the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean (who was also in “The Connection”), the tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks, the bassist Paul Chambers and the drummer Louis Hayes.He recorded another album’s worth of material in 1961, but those tapes were shelved after Mr. Redd had a falling-out with one of Blue Note’s founders, Alfred Lion. It was finally released as “Redd’s Blues” in 1988. His studio career slowed down, and by the mid-1960s he had moved to Europe, where for audiences his presence became symbolic of a vanishing halcyon age in small-group jazz.A native New Yorker, Mr. Redd did the inverse of the pilgrimage made by most major jazz musicians: He started his career at the center of the jazz universe, then moved out. And moved, and moved again.From the mid-’60s on, he would spend stretches in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Guadalajara, Baltimore and Carrboro, N.C. In his 80s he returned to New York, where he recorded two albums for the SteepleChase label and spent his final years.Mr. Redd told The New York Times that his peripatetic career had provided him creative satisfaction,  if not always fair pay.“I like to move around,” he said in a 1991 interview. “It’s always refreshing because you don’t know the nuances, the tricks of the new place. Unfortunately, the price I’ve paid for being a maverick is living a lifestyle that hasn’t been particularly supportive. But I don’t have regrets. There’s a lot out there to find out about, and sometimes you can’t do it in a week or a month.”Mr. Redd in performance at Smalls Jazz Club in Manhattan in 2011.Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images/Getty ImagesFreddie Redd Jr. was born in Harlem on May 29, 1928, to Freddie and Helen (Snipes) Redd. His father was a porter who played the piano at home, and his mother was a homemaker. His father died when Freddie was 2, but he left behind the instrument on which Freddie would teach himself to play.In addition to his grandson Mr. Clarke, Mr. Redd is survived by a stepdaughter, Susan Redd; two other grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren. His wife, Valarie (Lyons) Redd, died before him, as did his children, Stephanie Redd and Freddie Redd III.Mr. Redd was drafted into the Army in 1946. He later remembered first hearing bebop while stationed in South Korea, on a record played by a fellow service member. He was hooked.After returning to New York in 1949, he started playing with leaders on the scene like Art Blakey, Gene Ammons, Sonny Rollins and Art Farmer; he recorded his first album, “Freddie Redd Trio,” for Prestige in 1955 and spent time in California performing with Charles Mingus.“During that period, we realized that we were a brotherhood; we were all after the same thing,” Mr. Redd told The Times, remembering his colleagues on the modern jazz scene in the 1950s. “We were drawn to the inspirational aspect of the music. It was a wonderful time.”After being arrested for marijuana possession, he lost his cabaret card, a document issued by law enforcement that was required of anyone performing in nightclubs. Unable to work in clubs, he moved into a loft in Greenwich Village and became part of a scene that included visual artists, poets and other musicians.There Mr. Redd met the actor Garry Goodrow, who had just been cast in “The Connection,” a new play at the Living Theater that put the lives of heroin-addicted musicians on intimate display. That led to an introduction to Mr. Gelber, who hired him to compose the music and perform as a member of the cast.“The Music From ‘The Connection’” was the first of three albums Mr. Redd recorded for Blue Note in the 1960s, although the third was not released until 1988.Blue NoteThough the film version of “The Connection” is now recognized as a classic of indie cinema, its raw and unflinching portrayal came into the cross hairs of censors in the United States, where it was hardly ever screened.A few years later, in one of his few pop studio dates, Mr. Redd was the organist on James Taylor’s debut single, “Carolina in My Mind.”In the liner notes to a Mosaic Records boxed set, “The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Freddie Redd” (1989), Jackie McLean reflected on Mr. Redd’s chimerical career. “You never know what town you’ll see” the pianist in, he wrote. “He’s always been itinerant. Freddie just appears from time to time, like some wonderful spirit.” More

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      Jack Bradley, Louis Armstrong Photographer and Devotee, Dies at 87

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      His trove of pictures formed the foundation of a vast personal collection that is now part of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens.Jack Bradley at his home on Cape Cod in 2008. For 12 years he was Louis Armstrong’s fan, friend and photographer, as well as a collector of Armstrong memorabilia.Earl Wilson/The New York Times Jack Bradley, an ecstatic fan of Louis Armstrong’s who became his personal photographer, creating an indelible and intimate record of the jazz giant’s last dozen years, died on March 21 in Brewster, Mass., on Cape Cod. He was 87.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Nancy (Eckel) Bradley, said.Mr. Bradley first attended a concert by Armstrong and his band on Cape Cod in the mid-1950s. “I never heard anything like that,” he said in an interview in 2012 for a documentary about Armstrong, “Mr. Jazz,” directed by Michele Cinque. “My life was never the same.”Using a Brownie, Mr. Bradley snapped his first photo of Armstrong at another performance — the first of thousands he would take, first as a devotee and then as part of his inner circle. He took pictures of Armstrong at his home in Corona, Queens; in quiet moments backstage; at rehearsals and concerts; during recording sessions; and in dressing rooms.Mr. Bradley photographed Armstrong in his backyard in Queens in about 1960. In all, he took an estimated 6,000 photos of Armstrong.Louis Armstrong House Museum, Jack Bradley CollectionArmstrong and Mr. Bradley in Framingham, Mass., in 1967. “What we had in common,” Mr. Bradley said, “was this unending love for the music.”Louis Armstrong House Museum, via Associated Press“With that face and his beautiful smile,” Mr. Bradley was quoted as saying in a family-approved obituary, “how could anyone take a bad shot?”Mr. Bradley did more than take photographs. He became a voracious collector of anything related to Armstrong’s life and career: 16-millimeter films, reel-to-reel tapes of recordings and conversations, 78 r.p.m. discs and LPs, magazines, manuscripts, sheet music, telegrams, fan letters, figurines — even Armstrong’s slippers and suits, and a hotel laundry receipt that included “90 hankies,” which he famously used to wipe away perspiration during performances.“One day Jack went into Louis’s study and Louis was ripping up picture and letters into little tiny pieces,” Ms. Bradley said by phone. “Jack said, ‘No, you can’t do that!’ and Louis said, ‘You have to simplify.’ To Jack it was history and shouldn’t be thrown out.”Mr. Bradley’s refusal to simplify brought him renown as an Armstrong maven and led to a deal in 2005 in which the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation awarded Queens College a $480,000 grant to acquire his collection for the Louis Armstrong House Museum, where Armstrong and his wife, Lucille had lived.Mr. Bradley’s vast collection of Armstrong material, including fan mail, was acquired by the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens.Earl Wilson/The New York Times“Our cornerstone is Louis’s stuff,” said Ricky Riccardi, the museum’s director of research collections, referring to the vast trove of material that Armstrong left behind when he died in 1971. “That will always stand on its own. But Jack’s is the perfect complement. Louis was obsessed with documenting his life, and Jack was obsessed with documenting Louis’s life.”The museum’s collections, now housed at Queens College, will be moved to an education center nearing completion across the street from the museum, which has been closed during the Covid-19 pandemic.Mr. Bradley was not a salaried employee of Armstrong but was compensated for each photograph he took by Armstrong’s manager, Joe Glaser. To earn extra money, Mr. Bradley took some commercial photography jobs as well.“I don’t think he ever made more than $10,000 in any year,” his friend Mike Persico said.Dan Morgenstern, the jazz critic and historian, wrote in a Facebook tribute to Mr. Bradley that he had called him “One Shot” because “he would snap just once, in part to save film but also because he trusted his eye and timing.”Mr. Bradley captured Armstrong and the band leader Guy Lombardo during a rehearsal for a performance at Jones Beach on Long Island in the mid-1960s.Jack Bradley Collection, Louis Armstrong House Museum Mr. Bradley once photographed Armstrong naked from behind, in a dressing room. According to Mr. Morgenstern, Armstrong, when he heard the click of Mr. Bradley’s camera, said, “I want one of those!” An enlarged print of the photo hung in Armstrong’s den.John Bradley III was born on Jan 3, 1934, on Cape Cod, in Cotuit. His mother, Kathryn (Beatty) Bradley, had many jobs, including hairdresser. His father left the family when Jack was 10.A love of the sea inspired Mr. Bradley to attend the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, from which he graduated in 1958. He then left for Manhattan, where he immersed himself in jazz clubs and met Jeann Failows, who worked for Mr. Glaser helping to answer Armstrong’s mail. She and Mr. Bradley began dating, and Armstrong, seeing him with her, became convinced that Mr. Bradley was someone he could trust.“What we had in common,” Mr. Bradley told JazzTimes in 2011, using one of Armstrong’s nicknames, “was this unending love for the music. Pops never sought fame for fame’s sake. He just wanted to play his horn. Louis had a message — a message about excellence.“I’ve never met a man who had more genius for music,” he continued. “He could hear something once, and it was locked in his brain forever.”Mr. Bradley was often by my Armstrong’s side from 1959 to 1971, sometimes driving him to engagements and spending hours at Armstrong’s house. In all, the self-taught Mr. Bradley took an estimated 6,000 photos of Armstrong.Armstrong and the clarinetist Joe Muranyi rehearsing in 1967. Mr. Bradley took numerous photos of other jazz musicians as well. Jack Bradley, via Louis Armstrong House MuseumOne sequence of photos, taken in December 1959, shows Armstrong warming up before a concert at Carnegie Hall and jamming with his band before taking the stage, then performing, greeting friends afterward and signing autographs for fans outside the stage door.Mr. Bradley’s focus was not entirely on Armstrong. He photographed many other jazz artists and is said to have taken one of the last pictures of Billie Holiday in performance — at the Phoenix Theater in Greenwich Village in May 1959. (She died that July.)In the 1960s, he was a merchant marine and managed a jazz club, Bourbon Street, in Manhattan for a year. In the 1970s he was a partner in the New York Jazz Museum, in Midtown Manhattan. He also spent time as the road manager for the pianist Erroll Garner and the trumpeter Bobby Hackett.Mr. Bradley returned to live in Cape Cod after the jazz museum closed in 1977. He became a charter boat captain, lectured locally on jazz and hosted a local radio program on which he interviewed jazz musicians. His wife taught high school Spanish.Mr. Bradley, seated, in 2008 with Michael Cogswell, the executive director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum and Archives. “Louis was obsessed with documenting his life,” the museum’s Ricky Riccardi said, “and Jack was obsessed with documenting Louis’s life.”Earl Wilson/The New York TimesMr. Bradley crammed his massive jazz memorabilia collection — of which the Armstrongiana was only a part — into his modest house on Cape Cod in Harwich.“He had it in closets, the attic, shoe boxes, sea chests, the basement, the attic, everything but in oil drums,” said Mr. Persico, who has helped organize the archive.Mr. Bradley died in a nursing facility in Brewster. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sisters, Emmy Shanley and Bonnie Jordan, and his brother, Bob.Ms. Bradley said she did not mind that her marriage had been, in effect, shared with Armstrong.“That was OK,” she said. “The third guy was a lot of fun.” More

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      Paul Laubin, 88, Dies; Master of Making Oboes the Old-Fashioned Way

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      He learned the craft from his father and continued to make his instruments by hand. Laubin oboes are cherished for their dark and rich tone.Paul Laubin, a revered oboe maker who was one of the few remaining woodwind artisans to build their instruments by hand — he made so few a year that customers might have to wait a decade to play one — died on March 1 at his workshop in Peekskill, N.Y. He was 88. His wife, Meredith Laubin, confirmed the death. She said that Mr. Laubin, who lived in Mahopac, N.Y., had collapsed at his workshop at some point during the day and the police found his body there that night.In the world of oboes, his partisans believe, there are Mr. Laubin’s oboes and then there is everything else.Mr. Laubin was in his early 20s when he began making oboes with his father, Alfred, who founded A. Laubin Inc. and built his first oboe in 1931. He took over the business when his father died in 1976. His son, Alex, began working alongside him in 2003.Oboists in major orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the St. Louis Symphony, have played Mr. Laubin’s instruments, cherishing their dark and rich tone.“There is something that strikes a chord deep in your body when you play a Laubin,” said Sherry Sylar, the associate principal oboist of the New York Philharmonic. “It’s a resonance that doesn’t happen with any other oboe. It rings inside your body. You get addicted to making that kind of a sound and nothing else will do.”In a dusty workshop near the Hudson River, lined with machines built as long ago as 1881, Mr. Laubin crafted his oboes and English horns with an almost religious sense of precision. He wore an apron and puffed a cob pipe as he drilled and lathed the grenadilla and rosewood used to make his instruments. (The pipe doubled as a testing device: Mr. Laubin would blow smoke through the instrument’s joints to detect air leaks.)His father taught him instrument-making techniques that date back centuries. As the decades passed and instrument makers began embracing computerized design and factory automation, the younger Mr. Laubin steadfastly resisted change. As far as he was concerned, if it took 10 years to build a good oboe — well, so be it.“What’s the rush?” Mr. Laubin said in an interview with The New York Times in 1991. “I don’t want anything going out of here with my name that I haven’t made and checked and played myself.”Mr. Laubin would store the blocks of his rare hardwoods outdoors for years so they could acclimate to extremes of weather and become more resilient instruments, resistant to the cracks that are the bane of woodwind players. After he drilled a hole that would become the instrument’s bore, the chunk of wood sometimes needed another year to dry out.Mr. Laubin, who was a professional oboist as a young man, constantly played each oboe he worked on in search of imperfections. “Every key is a struggle,” he told News 12 Westchester in 2012.When a Laubin oboe was finally completed, its unveiling became a cause for celebration. One customer arrived at the Peekskill workshop with a bottle of champagne, and as he played his first few notes, Mr. Laubin raised a toast.Mr. Laubin learned oboe-making from his father, who made his first instrument in 1931.via Laubin familyPaul Edward Laubin was born on Dec. 14, 1932, in Hartford, Conn. His father, an oboist and music teacher, started making oboes because he was dissatisfied with the quality of the instruments that were available; he built the first Laubin oboe as an experiment, melting down his wife’s silverware to make its keys. Paul’s mother, Lillian (Ely de Breton) Laubin, was a homemaker.As a boy, Paul was enchanted by the instruments he saw his father making, but Alfred initially did not want his son to pursue music. Paul kept pestering him; when he was 13 his father reluctantly gave him an oboe, a reed and a fingering chart, and Paul taught himself how to play.Mr. Laubin studied auto mechanics and music at Louisiana State University in the 1950s. Before long, his yearning to perform got the better of him, and he landed a spot in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Soon after that, he finally joined the family business and began to build oboes with his father in the garage of their home in Scarsdale, N.Y.In 1958, they moved their workshop to a clarinet factory in Long Island City in Queens, and for a time the business was churning out (relatively speaking) 100 instruments per year.Mr. Laubin married Meredith Van Lynip, a flutist, in 1966. He moved the company to its current location in Peekskill in 1988. As time passed, Mr. Laubin’s team got smaller, and so did his production.By the 1990s, A. Laubin Inc. was producing about 22 instruments a year. By around 2005, the average was down to 15. Over time, the scarcity of Laubin oboes only added to their legend. The company has rarely advertised, relying on word of mouth. A grenadilla oboe costs $13,200, and a rosewood instrument costs $14,000.In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Laubin is survived by a daughter, Michelle; a sister, Vanette Arone; a brother, Carl; and two grandchildren.Mr. Laubin was well aware that selling so few instruments a year, no matter how exquisite, did not necessarily make financial sense. “I chose to follow my father even though I knew I’d never get rich on it,” he told The Times in 1989. “I would have to think twice about starting it today.”The company’s fate is now undetermined. Alex Laubin served as office manager and helped with some aspects of production but did not learn the full process. He often urged his father to modernize their operation — to little avail.“No one sits down anymore and files out keys,” Meredith Laubin said. “No one turns out one oboe joint at a time. This is all automated now, like how robots make cars. But Paul wasn’t endorsing any of these things. To him, there was no cheating the family recipe.”But Mr. Laubin knew the old ways would come to an end. In recent years, he was finding it harder to ignore the stark realities of being an Old World artisan in the modern era.“Paul got to have one part of his dream, which was to be able to work with his son,” Ms. Laubin said. “But the other part of his dream, knowing that his work would continue on in the way he did things, he knew that wasn’t going to happen.”Nevertheless, he hewed to tradition. On his work table the day he died lay the beginnings of Laubin oboe No. 2,600. More