Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Tony Rice, Bluegrass Innovator With a Guitar Pick, Dies at 69

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTony Rice, Bluegrass Innovator With a Guitar Pick, Dies at 69The nimble king of flatpicking had enormous influence on a host of prominent musicians. And he could sing, too, until he could no longer.Tony Rice in about 2000. “I don’t know if a person can make anything more beautiful” than his guitar playing, the singer-songwriter Jason Isbell said.Credit…Stephen A. Ide/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesDec. 28, 2020Updated 6:26 p.m. ETTony Rice, an immensely influential singer and guitarist in bluegrass and in the new acoustic music circles that grew up around it, died on Saturday at his home in Reidsville, N.C. He was 69.The International Bluegrass Music Association confirmed his death. No cause was specified.“Tony Rice was the king of the flatpicked flattop guitar,” the singer-songwriter Jason Isbell said on Twitter. “His influence cannot possibly be overstated.”Mr. Isbell was referring to what is commonly known as flatpicking, a technique that involves striking a guitar’s strings with a pick or plectrum instead of with the fingers. Inspired by the forceful fretwork of the pioneering bluegrass bandleader Jimmy Martin, Mr. Rice’s flatpicking was singularly nimble and expressive.“I don’t know if a person can make anything more beautiful,” Mr. Isbell went on to say in his tweet, describing Mr. Rice’s fluid, percussive playing, in which feeling, whether expressed harmonically or melodically, took precedence over flash.Mr. Rice left his mark on a host of prominent musicians, including his fellow newgrass innovators Mark O’Connor and Béla Fleck, acoustic music inheritors like Chris Thile and Alison Krauss, and his flat-picking disciples Bryan Sutton and Josh Williams.“There’s no way it can ever go back to what it was before him,” Ms. Krauss said of bluegrass in an interview with The New York Times Magazine for a profile of Mr. Rice in 2014. She was barely a teenager when Mr. Rice first invited her onstage to play with him.Starting in the 1970s with his work with the group J.D. Crowe and the New South, Mr. Rice built bridges that spanned traditional bluegrass, ’60s folk songs, jazz improvisation, classical music and singer-songwriter pop.He was a catalyst for the newgrass movement, in which bands broke with bluegrass tradition by drawing on pop and rock sources for inspiration, employing a more improvisational approach to performing and incorporating previously untapped instrumentation like electric guitar and drums.The bluegrass association named him instrumental performer of the year six times, and in 1983 he received a Grammy Award for best country instrumental performance for “Fireball,” a track recorded with J.D. Crowe and the New South.Not only a virtuoso guitarist, Mr. Rice was also a gifted singer and master of phrasing. His rich, supple baritone was as equally at home singing lead in three-part bluegrass harmony arrangements as it was adapting the troubadour ballads of Gordon Lightfoot under the newgrass banner.But his performing career was abruptly cut short beginning in 1994, when he learned he had muscle tension dysphonia, a severe vocal disorder that robbed him of the ability to sing in public and compromised his speaking voice. He would not sing onstage or address an audience again until 2013, when the bluegrass association inducted him into the International Bluegrass Hall of Fame.Not long after that diagnosis, Mr. Rice learned that he also had lateral epicondylitis, commonly known as tennis elbow, which made it too painful for him to play the guitar in public anymore as well.A 1975 album by the band J.D. Crowe and the New South, with Mr. Rice on guitar, modernized bluegrass in ways that shaped the music into the 21st century. From left, J.D. Crowe, Ricky Scaggs, Bob Slone and Mr. Rice. David Anthony Rice was born on June 8, 1951, in Danville, Va., one of four boys of Herbert Hoover Rice and Dorothy (Poindexter) Rice, who was known as Louise. His father was a welder and an amateur musician, his mother a millworker and a homemaker. It was her idea to call her son Tony, after her favorite actor, Tony Curtis. Everyone in the Rice household played or sang bluegrass music.After the family moved to the Los Angeles area in the mid-1950s, Mr. Rice’s father formed a bluegrass band called the Golden State Boys. The group, which recorded several singles, included two of his mother’s brothers as well as a young Del McCoury at one point, before he became a bluegrass master in his own right. The band inspired Mr. Rice and his brothers to form a bluegrass outfit of their own, the Haphazards.The Haphazards sometimes shared local bills with the Kentucky Colonels, a band whose dazzling guitarist, Clarence White — a future member of the rock band the Byrds — had a profound influence on Mr. Rice’s early development as a musician.(Mr. White was killed by a drunken driver while loading equipment after a show in 1973. Afterward, Mr. Rice tracked down Mr. White’s 1935 Martin D-28 herringbone guitar, which he purchased from its new owner in 1975 for $550. Restoring the guitar, he started performing with it, affectionately calling it the “Antique.”)The Rice family moved from California to Florida in 1965 and then to various cities in the Southeast, where Mr. Rice’s father pursued one welding opportunity after another.He also drank, creating a tumultuous home life that forced Mr. Rice to move out when he was 17. Tony Rice struggled with alcohol himself but, by his account, had been sober since 2001.Dropping out of high school, Mr. Rice bounced among relatives’ homes before moving to Louisville in 1970 to join the Bluegrass Alliance. The band’s members, including the mandolinist Sam Bush, went on to form much of the founding nucleus of the progressive bluegrass band New Grass Revival.Mr. Rice joined J.D. Crowe and the New South in 1971. Three years later, Mr. Skaggs signed on as well, replacing Mr. Rice’s brother Larry in the group. The dobro player Jerry Douglas also become a member of the New South at this time. In 1975, the band released an album titled simply “J.D. Crowe and the New South” (but commonly known by its first track, “Old Home Place”), which modernized bluegrass in ways that shaped the music into the 21st century.Mr. Rice, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Skaggs left the group in August 1975. Mr. Rice then moved to San Francisco and helped found the David Grisman Quartet, a trailblazing ensemble featuring bluegrass instrumentation that fused classical and jazz sensibilities to create what Mr. Grisman called “dawg music.”“The music laid out in front of me was like nothing I’d ever seen,” Mr. Rice told The Times Magazine in 2014. “At first I thought I couldn’t learn it. The only thing that saved me was that I always loved the sound of acoustic, small-group, modern jazz.”After four years with Mr. Grisman, Mr. Rice established his own group, the Tony Rice Unit, which was acclaimed for its experimental, jazz-steeped approach to bluegrass as heard on albums like “Manzanita” (1979) and “Mar West” (1980).Mr. Rice also recorded more mainstream and traditional material for numerous other projects, including a six-volume series of albums that paid tribute to the formative bluegrass of the 1950s.“Skaggs & Rice” (1980), another history-conscious album, featured Mr. Skaggs and Mr. Rice singing seamless, soulful harmonies in homage to the brother duos prevalent in the pre-bluegrass era.Mr. Rice performing in 2009 with his band the Tony Rice Unit at the Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee. Credit…Jason Merritt/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesMost of Mr. Rice’s releases after 1994, the year he got his vocal disorder diagnosis, were instrumental projects or collaborations, like “The Pizza Tapes,” a studio album with Mr. Grisman and Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead fame; Mr. Rice contributed acoustic guitar.His survivors include his wife of 30 years, Pamela Hodges Rice, and his brothers Ron and Wyatt. His brother Larry died in 2006.Mr. Rice cut a dashing figure onstage, complete with finely tailored suits and a dignified bearing, as if to gainsay the lack of respect bluegrass has sometimes received outside the South, owing to its hardscrabble rural beginnings.Mr. Rice was as conscious of these cultural dynamics as he was of the limitless possibilities he saw in bluegrass music.“Maybe the reason I dress like I do goes back to the day where, if you went out on the street, unless you had some sort of ditch-digging job to do, you made an effort to not look like a slob,” he told his biographers, Tim Stafford and Caroline Wright, for “Still Inside: The Tony Rice Story” (2010).“Back in the heyday of Miles Davis’s most famous bands, you wouldn’t have seen Miles without a tailored suit on,” he went on. “My musical heroes wear suits.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Jon Huber, Who Rose to Fame With World Wrestling Entertainment, Dies at 41

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJon Huber, Who Rose to Fame With World Wrestling Entertainment, Dies at 41Mr. Huber, who was known in the ring as Brodie Lee and Luke Harper, died from a “lung issue” unrelated to Covid-19, his wife said.Jon Huber, who was also known as Luke Harper, was known for his soft-spoken intensity in the ring.Credit…Roy Rochlin/Getty ImagesDec. 27, 2020Jon Huber, a pro wrestler known in the ring as Luke Harper and Brodie Lee, died on Saturday. He was 41.His death followed a battle with a “lung issue” unrelated to Covid-19, his wife, Amanda Huber, said on Instagram.Aside from his wife, he is survived by his two children.Mr. Huber rose to fame with World Wrestling Entertainment, where he was known for his soft-spoken intensity in the ring.During his time with WWE, he found success in the independent circuit before joining the NXT brand.He battled other wrestling stars, including The Shield, Kane, Daniel Bryan, John Cena and the Usos, using a combination of “aggressive offense and demented mind games,” WWE said.Mr. Huber “moved with a rare quickness for a 6-foot-5 monster,” his biography on WWE said. “His jaw-rattling clotheslines and frenzied dives to the outside knocked down anyone who dared to step across the ring from him.”In 2014, he won the intercontinental championship and later the SmackDown Tag Team and NXT Tag Team championships.“Whether powerbombing rivals off ladders or standing toe-to-toe with John Cena, Harper left an undeniable mark — and on some superstars, a literal one in the form of a scar — on WWE and NXT,” WWE said.Mr. Huber joined All Elite Wrestling, a WWE competitor, this year as “The Exalted One.”Over the summer, he won the All Elite Wrestling TNT Championship.“In an industry filled with good people, Jon Huber was exceptionally respected and beloved in every way — a fierce and captivating talent, a thoughtful mentor and simply a very kind soul that starkly contradicted his persona as Mr. Brodie Lee,” AEW said in a statement.His final televised battle was a bloody fight against Cody Rhodes, an AEW superstar, in October.Mr. Rhodes wrote in a social media tribute that it was an honor to share his final match with Mr. Huber, who he said was “a family man and first-class human being.”Referring to Mr. Huber as “Big Rig,” Mr. Rhodes said Mr. Huber was a “gifted athlete and storyteller and his gift beyond that was to challenge you, and he set the bar very high.”Mr. Huber’s death reverberated among other wrestling stars.“Totally devastated over the loss of Jon,” Hulk Hogan wrote on Twitter. “Such a great talent and awesome human being! RIP my brother.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      John Fletcher, a.k.a. Ecstasy of the Group Whodini, Dies at 56

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJohn Fletcher, a.k.a. Ecstasy of the Group Whodini, Dies at 56He was, the executive who signed Whodini said, “truly one of the first rap stars” and a sex symbol “when they were very scarce in the early days of rap.”Jalil Hutchins, left, and John Fletcher, a.k.a. Ecstasy, of the foundational hip-hop group Whodini in 1984. “I can’t sing,” Mr. Fletcher once said. “But I heard somebody rap one day and I said to myself, ‘I can do that.’”Credit…Paul Natkin/Getty ImagesDec. 26, 2020, 5:56 p.m. ETJohn Fletcher, who as Ecstasy of the foundational hip-hop group Whodini was the engine for some of the genre’s first pop successes, wearing a flamboyant Zorroesque hat all the while, died on Wednesday. He was 56.Jonnelle Fletcher, his daughter, confirmed the death in a statement but did not specify the cause or say where he died. In the mid-1980s, Whodini — made up initially of Mr. Fletcher and Jalil Hutchins, who were later joined by the D.J. Grandmaster Dee (born Drew Carter) — released a string of essential hits, including “Friends,” “Freaks Come Out at Night” and “One Love.” Whodini presented as street-savvy sophisticates with a pop ear, and Mr. Fletcher was the group’s outsize character and most vivid rapper.“I can’t sing,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1987. “But I heard somebody rap one day and I said to myself, ‘I can do that.’ I rap in pitch. I try to be unique. I have my own style.”John Fletcher was born on June 7, 1964, and grew up in the Wyckoff Gardens projects in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. He first worked with Mr. Hutchins, who was from nearby Gowanus, when Mr. Hutchins was trying to record a theme song for the newly influential radio D.J. Mr. Magic.Mr. Fletcher in performance in 2017. His flat-brimmed leather hats became his signature look.Credit…Leon Bennett/Getty ImagesThat collaboration received significant local attention, and Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Hutchins were soon signed by Jive Records, which named them Whodini. They quickly recorded “Magic’s Wand,” produced by Thomas Dolby, and “The Haunted House of Rock,” a Halloween song.“Ecstasy was truly one of the first rap stars,” Barry Weiss, the executive who signed them, wrote on Instagram. “Not just a brilliant voice and wordsmith but a ladies’ man and sex symbol when they were very scarce in the early days of rap. Whodini helped usher in a female audience to what had been a traditional male art form.”Most of the group’s earliest material was recorded in London when Mr. Fletcher was fresh out of high school. Its 1983 self-titled debut album was produced by Conny Plank, who had also produced the bands Kraftwerk and Neu! Whodini also toured Europe before finding true success back in the United States.“We didn’t go to university and get a college degree, but that was our education, just seeing the world,” Mr. Fletcher said in a 2018 interview with the YouTube channel HipHop40.For its follow-up album, “Escape” (1984), Whodini began working with the producer Larry Smith, who amplified its sound and gave it a bit of appealing scuff. (Mr. Smith was also responsible for Run-DMC’s breakout albums.) “Escape” contained the songs that would become Whodini’s seminal hits, notably “Friends” and “Five Minutes of Funk” (released as flip sides on the same 12-inch single) and “Freaks Come Out at Night.”“Friends,” a skeptical storytelling song about deceit, was a smash in its own right and had a robust afterlife as sample material, most notably on Nas and Lauryn Hill’s “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That).”“Five Minutes of Funk” — which would become even more widely known as the theme music for the long-running hip-hop video show “Video Music Box” — deployed a clever countdown motif woven through the lyrics. “In creating that song,” Mr. Fletcher told HipHop40, “we pictured it blaring from the windows in the projects as we walked through it on a summer’s day.”As hip-hop was beginning to gain global notice, Whodini was consistently near the center of the action. The group was managed by the rising impresario Russell Simmons and appeared on the inaugural Fresh Fest tour, hip-hop’s first arena package.But as Run-DMC was taking hip-hop to edgier territory, Whodini remained committed to smoothness. “We were the rap group that kind of bridged the gap between the bands and the rappers,” Mr. Fletcher told HipHop40, adding that he and Mr. Hutchins were mindful that hip-hop was still struggling to gain acceptance among radio programmers, and wrote songs accordingly: “We wanted to curse, but we couldn’t curse.”Mr. Fletcher was also a key innovator in introducing melody to rapping. “Ecstasy was the lead vocalist on most Whodini songs because anything that we could play he could rap right to it in key,” Mr. Hutchins said in an interview with the hip-hop website The Foundation.“Escape” went platinum, and Whodini’s next two albums, “Back in Black” (1986) and “Open Sesame” (1987), both went gold. On “One Love” (from “Back in Black”), which had streaks of the sound that was to soon coalesce as new jack swing, Mr. Fletcher was reflective, almost somber:The words ‘love’ and ‘like’ both have four lettersBut they’re two different things altogether‘Cause I’ve liked many ladies in my dayBut just like the wind they’ve all blown awayHavelock Nelson and Michael A. Gonzales, in their book “Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture” (1991), described Whodini as “a beautifully kept building in the middle of Brooklyn’s ghetto heaven, personable characters floating gently through a turbulent sea of hard-core attitude and crush-groove madness.”In no small part that was because of the group’s style. Whodini dressed with flair: leather jackets, sometimes with no shirt; flowing pants or short shorts; loafers. And most crucially, Mr. Fletcher’s flat-brimmed leather hats, which became his signature look, inspired by a wool gaucho he saw in a shop on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn that he had remade in leather. Before long, he had several.“He had them in red; had them in white; two in black, one with an African headpiece on it,” Mr. Hutchins said in a 2013 interview with the Alabama website AL.com. “He had different ones, but the original one was his favorite.”Whodini was also one of the first hip-hop groups to use dancers in their stage shows. A young Jermaine Dupri got one of his earliest breaks as a dancer for the group. He later repaid the favor, signing Whodini to his label, So So Def, on which it released its final album, “Six,” in 1996. Whodini continued to perform frequently into the 2000s.Information on Mr. Fletcher’s survivors in addition to his daughter was not immediately available.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Fanny Waterman, Doyenne of the Leeds Piano Competition, Dies at 100

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFanny Waterman, Doyenne of the Leeds Piano Competition, Dies at 100A British pianist and teacher, she helped establish one of the world’s most important piano showcases and then presided over it for decades.Fanny Waterman in 2010. Convinced that Leeds, her native city, was worthy of an international piano competition, she pushed hard to establish one and served as its guiding force for more than half a century.Credit…Andy ManningDec. 26, 2020, 3:31 p.m. ETFanny Waterman, the British pianist and teacher who co-founded the prestigious Leeds International Piano Competition and oversaw it as chairwoman and artistic director for more than five decades, died on Dec. 20 at a care home in Ilkley, Yorkshire. She was 100.Her death was announced by the Leeds competition.The idea of presenting an international music competition in 1960s Leeds, a gritty industrial city in northern England, seemed risky. But Ms. Waterman, a Leeds native who learned perseverance from her poor Russian immigrant father, believed in the vitality of her hometown and was certain she could draw support for the venture.“I dreamt it up one night, and I was so excited that I woke up my husband,” she said in a 2010 interview with The Jewish Chronicle. “He was born in London,” Ms. Waterman added, “and he said: ‘It won’t work in Leeds. It has to be in a capital city.’”But Ms. Waterman talked up the idea and raised funds from patrons, banks, businesses, the Leeds City Council and the University of Leeds. Her husband, Geoffrey de Keyser, a doctor, became a founder of the competition, along with her good friend Marion Harewood, a pianist who was then the Countess of Harewood (and was later married to the Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe). The two friends also wrote “Me and My Piano,” a series of piano lesson books that remain top sellers in Britain.From the start, Ms. Waterman conceived of the Leeds competition, which is held every three years, as a means to foster musical values she had cultivated as a performer and teacher, placing musicianship, artistry and sensitivity over technical bravura.Music is a “wonderful discipline,” she said in the 2010 interview. “You can’t play a note without thinking, how loud, how soft, how soon, how late. It makes you think carefully and it gives you judgment.”Over the years the competition joined the ranks of the world’s elite contests, including the Van Cliburn, Tchaikovsky and Chopin. Such competitions are major springboards for careers in music, often an obligatory stop on a young performer’s progress; they have also come in for criticism for quashing creativity and individuality.As with all competitions, the administrators of the Leeds contest point not just to the list of their outstanding winners — among them Michel Dalberto, Jon Kimura Parker, Ian Hobson and Alessio Bax — as proof of success in identifying young talent, but also to finalists who became major artists. That group of luminaries includes Mitsuko Uchida, Andras Schiff, Lars Vogt and Louis Lortie.The first Leeds competition took place in 1963, with the composer and conductor Arthur Bliss as chairman of an eminent jury. It was an immediate success, with 94 entrants from 23 countries, though with one potentially embarrassing result: The winner was one of Ms. Waterman’s students, Michael Roll, raising the perception of favoritism. Ms. Waterman later said that he had deserved to win, and that the judges had strongly supported him.Ms. Waterman backstage with the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, left foreground, and the pianist Murray Perahia, right foreground, in 1972, the year Mr. Perahia won the Leeds competition.Credit…Leeds International Piano CompetitionFor the third competition, in 1969, Ms. Waterman asserted herself after the Romanian pianist Radu Lupu placed fourth in the second round, which meant he would not advance to the finals. Deeply impressed by Mr. Lupu’s playing, Ms. Waterman insisted that the number of finalists be increased from three to five and vowed not to organize another competition unless he made the cut. She got her way, and Mr. Lupu wound up winning and went on to a distinguished career.The competition garnered wide attention in 1972 when the American pianist Murray Perahia, then 25, won first prize.In the last round, with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the other two finalists, Craig Sheppard and Eugene Indjic, also Americans, played Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, a work that many young pianists have used to prove their virtuosic mettle.Mr. Perahia, already an audience favorite from performances of works by Schumann, Mozart, Mendelssohn and others, instead chose to play Chopin’s intimate, elegantly brilliant Piano Concerto No. 1 in the finals. He prevailed despite suffering terrible anxiety under the pressure, earning a cash prize of $1,850 and numerous recital and concerto engagements.Ms. Waterman was born on March 22, 1920, in Leeds, the second child of Mary (Behrman) Waterman and Meyer Waterman (the family name was originally Wasserman). Her mother was an English-born daughter of Russian immigrant Jews. Her father, born in Ukraine, was a skilled jeweler.Though the family struggled financially, her parents came up with enough money to provide young Fanny with piano lessons once her talent became clear. She practiced on an old upright piano and studied with a local teacher, while her brother, Harry, took violin lessons.At 18, she became a scholarship student at the Royal College of Music in London, studying with Cyril Smith. She performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in 1941 with the Leeds Symphony Orchestra, the same year she met Dr. de Keyser, then a young medical student, whom she would marry in 1944. With the birth of her first child, Robert, in 1950, Ms. Waterman decided to devote herself to teaching.Robert de Keyser survives her, as do another son, Paul, a violin teacher, and six granddaughters. Her husband died in 2001.Once the Leeds Competition got going, Dr. de Keyser became intimately involved, both in recommending lists of repertory and in writing up rules. “He was a doctor, but his knowledge of music was second to nobody,” Ms. Waterman said in 2010.In 1966 Ms. Waterman and her husband bought Woodgarth, a magnificent eight-bedroom Victorian house in Oakwood, a suburb of Leeds. She kept two fine pianos in its spacious drawing room, where she taught, made plans for the competition and presided over lively musical soirees that included guests like the composer Benjamin Britten and the tenor Peter Pears, as well as Prime Minister Edward Heath. Ms. Waterman sold the house this year.She was appointed dame commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005. In 2015, at 95, she retired from the Leeds Competition. Yet in an interview with the BBC five years later, she revealed that she had stepped aside unwillingly.“I think they were misguided,” she said of the unnamed people who wanted her out, “because I had many, many years more to give of my own passion, my own knowledge and everything.”Still, she expressed pride over her accomplishments. “I do hope and pray,” she said, “that in another 100 years our competition will have the reputation it’s got now.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Theater

      Roger Berlind, 90, Dies; Broadway Impresario Who Amassed 25 Tonys

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRoger Berlind, 90, Dies; Broadway Impresario Who Amassed 25 TonysHe played a role in producing more than 100 plays and musicals. And while he kept an eye on the bottom line, he could be seduced by sheer artistry.Roger Berlind in 1998 near the Cort Theater, where his production of “The Blue Room,” was playing. He was introduced to the theater world by friends and soon immersed himself in the process of putting on a show.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDec. 24, 2020Roger Berlind, who produced or co-produced more than 100 plays and musicals on Broadway, including such critical and box-office hits as “The Book of Mormon,” “Dear Evan Hansen,” “City of Angels” and revivals of “Guys and Dolls” and “Kiss Me, Kate,” died on Dec. 18 at his home in Manhattan. He was 90. His family said the cause was cardiopulmonary arrest.During a four-decade career in the theater, Mr. Berlind backed some of the most original work on Broadway and amassed an astonishing 25 Tony Awards, one of the largest hauls on record. (Hal Prince, another prodigious Tony-winning producer, collected 21.)Mr. Berlind helped bring buoyant musicals to the stage, like the smash 1992 revival of “Guys and Dolls” with Nathan Lane, as well as sophisticated literate dramas, like the original 1984 production of “The Real Thing,” Tom Stoppard’s dazzling exploration of the nature of love and honesty. “The Real Thing” swept the Tonys, winning for best play and best director (Mike Nichols) and garnering top acting awards for Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close and Christine Baranski.His route to Broadway was indirect. Able to play the piano by ear, he fancied himself a songwriter, but his dream of making a living that way fell flat and he went to work on Wall Street.He was a partner at a brokerage firm when tragedy struck: His wife and three of his four children were killed in an airliner crash at Kennedy International Airport. Within days, he resigned from his firm.“The whole idea of building a business and making money didn’t make sense anymore,” he told The New York Times in 1998. “There was no more economic motivation.”After a period in the wilderness, he found his way to Broadway, which helped him rebuild his life and establish a whole new career.“The significant thing about Roger is that he made an incredible turnaround,” Brook Berlind, his second wife, said in a phone interview.“His life was utterly bifurcated by the accident,” she said. “There was Act I and Act II. I don’t think many other people could have gone on to such success after such catastrophe.”Success on Broadway came slowly. Mr. Berlind’s first production, in 1976, was the disastrous “Rex,” a Richard Rodgers musical (with lyrics by Sheldon Harnick) about Henry VIII, which the Times theater critic Clive Barnes said “has almost everything not going for it.”James Davis and Ali Stroker in the pre-Broadway run of the 2019 revival of “Oklahoma!” Mr. Berlind was one of several producers on the show, for which Ms. Stroker won a Tony.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs it happened, the music of Mr. Rodgers bookended Mr. Berlind’s career. His last show, of which he was one of several producers, was the darkly reimagined Tony-winning 2019 revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” (That show made Broadway history when the actress Ali Stroker became the first person who uses a wheelchair to win a Tony.)After “Rex,” Mr. Berlind co-produced six other shows before he had his first hit with the original 1980 production of “Amadeus,” in which a mediocre composer burns with jealousy over the genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The play, written by Peter Shaffer, directed by Peter Hall and starring Ian McKellen and Tim Curry, took home several Tonys, including best play.Two more successes quickly followed: “Sophisticated Ladies,” a 1981 revue with music by Duke Ellington; and “Nine,” a 1982 musical based on the Fellini film “8½” about a tortured film director facing professional and romantic crises.Along the way were plenty of flops. Producing on Broadway is always risky, with no surefire formula for a hit. It became even more challenging in the late 20th century, as theater people migrated to Hollywood, labor and advertising costs soared and high ticket prices discouraged audiences. Getting shows off the ground required more and more producers to pool their resources, and even then they were unlikely to recoup their investments.One of Mr. Berlind’s achievements was staying in the game. Despite the challenges, he took chances on shows because he believed in them, and because he could afford to lose as often as he won.“I know it’s not worth it economically,” he told The Times in 1998. “But I love theater.”His successes included “Proof,” “Doubt,” “The History Boys,” the 2012 revival of “Death of a Salesman” with Philip Seymour Hoffman and the 2017 revival of “Hello, Dolly!” with Bette Midler.Even as he experienced flops, Mr. Berlind had many successes, like the 2017 revival of “Hello, Dolly!,” starring Bette Midler. He had “enormous fortitude and persistence,” said Scott Rudin, one of his co-producers on this and many other shows.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesScott Rudin, who produced about 30 shows with Mr. Berlind, said that Mr. Berlind was propelled by “enormous fortitude and persistence.”“He was not dissuaded by the obstacles that dissuaded other people,” Mr. Rudin said in an email. “He had enormous positivity, which is much, much more rare than you might think.”That became evident after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when Broadway went dark for 48 hours, a sign of the economic uncertainty that hung over the city.At the time, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani urged theaters to reopen quickly, and they did. But a half-dozen shows closed, and one on the verge of doing so was “Kiss Me, Kate,” in which Mr. Berlind had been deeply involved and of which he was enormously fond. He was enthralled with Cole Porter’s music, and everything in the show had clicked. The winner of five Tonys, including best revival of a musical, “Kate” had been running for nearly two years and was not scheduled to close until Dec. 30, 2001.Brian Stokes Mitchell and Marin Mazzie in the 1999 revival of “Kiss Me, Kate.” The show had been scheduled to close early in 2001, but Mr. Berlind took to the stage on what was supposed to be its final night and declared, “The show will go on.”Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut because of a sharp drop in ticket sales, the production was going to close early. A closing date of Sept. 23 was announced.Just before the curtain rose on what was supposed to have been the final performance, Mr. Berlind, a modest man who evinced little of the showmanship typical in the theater, took to the stage. He held the closing notice in his hand and ripped it up.“The show will go on,” he declared, to an already emotional audience.The cast and crew had agreed to give up 25 percent of their pay and to donate another 25 percent to buy tickets to the show for rescue workers. The move allowed “Kate” to keep running until its scheduled Dec. 30 closing.“That was my Merrick moment,” Mr. Berlind later told The Guardian of London, referring to David Merrick, one of Broadway’s famously outsize showmen.The Guardian went on to praise Mr. Berlind’s exuberant London production of “Kate,” which opened that October, as “a symbol of the indomitability and grace under pressure of a community, indeed a city, that has been reeling since 11 September.”Roger Stuart Berlind was born on June 27, 1930, in Brooklyn to Peter Berlind, a hospital administrator, and Mae (Miller) Berlind, an amateur painter who gave painting lessons while raising her four sons.The family moved to Woodmere, on Long Island, when Roger was 3. He attended Woodmere Academy and went on to Princeton, where he majored in English.His campus life revolved around the theater. He joined the Triangle Club, which performs student-written comedies, and Theatre Intime, a student-run theatrical organization. Years later, in 1998, he donated $3.5 million to build the 350-seat Roger S. Berlind Theater as part of an expansion of Princeton’s McCarter Theater.After graduating in 1952, he joined the Army and served in the Counterintelligence Corps in Germany. At one point he was on a troop ship with Buck Henry, the comic actor and writer who died this year, and the two regularly created shows for the soldiers.When Mr. Berlind returned to New York in 1954, he was determined to become a songwriter.“He loved the big-band music of the ’40s, he could play almost any song from the American songbook and he had a great memory for lyrics,” his son William said in a phone interview. His own tunes ran to the simple and nostalgic, as reflected by their titles, “Lemon Drop Girlfriend” and “Isn’t It a Rainbow Day?” among them. But Tin Pan Alley was uninterested, and, needing a job, Mr. Berlind was pointed by friends to Wall Street.“I had never had an economics course in college,” he told Playbill in 2005, “and I had 26 or 28 interviews before anyone would hire me.”Mr. Berlind, center, in 1968, during his Wall Street days, with his partners Arthur L. Carter, left, and Sanford I. Weill.Credit…Edward Hausner/The New York TimesHe worked for four years at an investment house, then in 1960 co-founded a brokerage firm, Carter, Berlind, Potoma & Weill, which went through various iterations until it was acquired by American Express in 1981. His partners along the way included Sanford I. Weill, who became chairman and chief executive of Citigroup, and Arthur Levitt Jr., the future chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.It was a heady time for Mr. Berlind. But on June 24, 1975, his world stopped.He had gone to the airport that day to meet his wife, Helen Polk (Clark) Berlind, and three of their children — Helen, 12; Peter, 9; and Clark, 6 — who were returning to New York from New Orleans after visiting Helen Berlind’s mother in Mississippi.While on approach to Kennedy in a severe storm, the Boeing 727, Eastern Air Lines Flight 66, was swept down by a wind shear and crashed, killing 113 of the 124 people on board, including Mr. Berlind’s family.Their son William, 2, was at home in Manhattan with his nurse at the time. As he grew up, he had unresolved issues around what had happened.“Roger was so damaged by the accident that he didn’t spend as much time with William on this subject as he could have,” Ms. Berlind, who married Mr. Berlind in 1979, said.Finally, a psychiatrist told Mr. Berlind that he needed to answer William’s questions, even if he asked the same thing over and over. Eventually, this proved therapeutic for both father and son.“He was present and strong for me,” said William Berlind, a former reporter at The New York Observer and writer for The New York Times Magazine, who followed his father to Broadway and collaborated with him on several shows.“He was marked by the tragedy,” he added, “but it didn’t consume him, and he persevered.”Mr. Berlind in 1993. He had originally wanted to be a songwriter, but his dream of making a living that way fell flat.Credit…Fred Conrad/The New York TimesIn addition to his wife and son, Mr. Berlind is survived by two granddaughters and a brother, Alan.In time, friends connected Mr. Berlind with people in the theater, and he was soon immersing himself in the entire process of putting on a show. He had a reputation for generally being more mindful than many producers about not interfering with the creative process.But Mr. Berlind always insisted that the work he backed have merit. While he kept a cold eye on the bottom line, he could be seduced by sheer artistry.“He had been a tough and successful businessman, but in his theater life he was besotted by talent, and that’s what he invested in,” Rocco Landesman, who produced “Guys and Dolls,” “Kiss Me, Kate” and “Proof” with him, said in an email.“He loved his flops almost as much as his hits,” Mr. Landesman added. “And whenever one of his shows closed, Roger was ‘available’ again.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Leslie West, ‘Mississippi Queen’ Rocker, Is Dead at 75

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLeslie West, ‘Mississippi Queen’ Rocker, Is Dead at 75He rose to fame with Mountain, which Rolling Stone called a “louder version of Cream” — a band Mr. West idolized. One of the group’s first gigs was Woodstock.Leslie West with his band West, Bruce and Laing at the Rainbow in London in 1973. “I wanted to have the greatest, biggest tone,” he said of his guitar playing, “and I wanted vibrato like somebody who plays violin in a hundred-piece orchestra.”Credit…Fin Costello/RedfernsDec. 23, 2020Leslie West, whose meaty guitar riffs and snarling lead lines powered the hit band Mountain through “Mississippi Queen” and other rock anthems of the 1970s, died on Wednesday in Palm Coast, Fla. He was 75.The cause was cardiac arrest, said a spokesman, Steve Karas.Mr. West had battled various health problems over the years. In the early 2000s he had bladder cancer. In 2001 he had his lower right leg amputated because of complications of diabetes.Mr. West, who struggled with his weight for most of his life, used his ample size to his advantage onstage. In an era ruled by rail-thin rock stars, his physique stood out. His guitar tone matched it in girth: It was uncommonly thick, with a vibrato that could shake with earthquake force.“I didn’t play fast — I only used the first and the third finger on the fingering hand,” Mr. West told the website Best Classic Bands in 2011. “So I worked on my tone all the time. I wanted to have the greatest, biggest tone, and I wanted vibrato like somebody who plays violin in a hundred-piece orchestra.”His singing style mirrored his guitar playing, marked by barking declarations that at their most stentorian could pin a listener to the wall. The weight of Mr. West’s sound has been cited as an early example of heavy metal, though Mountain offered a striking contrast to its more forceful songs with other numbers that displayed the prettier vocals and more elegant melodies of the band’s bassist, co-lead singer and producer, Felix Pappalardi.When Mountain first appeared, Rolling Stone called the band “a louder version of Cream,” a comparison underscored by Mr. Pappalardi’s role as the producer of many of that British band’s best-known recordings.One song he produced for the first solo album by Cream’s bassist and singer, Jack Bruce, “Theme for an Imaginary Western,” became far better known in the version cut by Mountain for its debut album, “Climbing!,” released in 1970. “I idolized Cream,” Mr. West told Guitar World magazine in 1987, “and here was a chance to play with one of the best musicians in rock ‘n roll and one of the best writers, too,” referring to Mr. Pappalardi.Mr. West with the drummer Corky Laing, with whom he worked in the bands Mountain and West, Bruce, and Laing, at a festival in Vienna, Va., in 2007.Credit…Stephen J. Boitano/LightRocket, via Getty ImagesDeepening the bond between the two bands, Mr. Bruce joined Mr. West and Mountain’s drummer, Corky Laing, to form the power trio West, Bruce and Laing after Mr. Pappalardi left Mountain in 1972. That amalgam reached No. 26 on the Billboard chart with their debut album, “Why Dontcha.” But Mountain sold better, earning two gold albums, “Climbing!” and its follow-up, “Nantucket Sleighride,” which each broke Billboard’s Top 20 in the early ’70s.Leslie West was born Leslie Weinstein on Oct. 22, 1945, in New York City to Bill and Rita Weinstein. His mother was a hair model, his father the vice president of a rug shampoo company. He grew up in the suburbs.When Leslie was 8, his mother bought him his first instrument, a ukulele, but he became entranced with the guitar after seeing Elvis Presley play one on television. He bought his first guitar with the money given to him for his bar mitzvah.After his parents divorced, he changed his name to West, and upon graduating high school he decided to go directly into the music business. “I went to N.Y.U. — New York Unemployment,” he jokingly told The News-Times of Danbury, Conn., in 2005.His professional career began in a band he formed in the mid-1960s with his brother Larry, who played bass. The band, the Vagrants, was a blue-eyed soul group inspired by a hit act from Long Island, the Rascals. The two bands played the same local clubs, as did Billy Joel’s early group, the Hassles.Improbably, Vanguard Records, better known for folk, jazz and classical artists, signed the Vagrants. Their first single, “I Can’t Make a Friend,” a garage rocker, became a minor hit in 1966. Mr. Pappalardi, who produced some of the Vagrants’ songs, helped them obtain a new contract with Atco Records, a subsidiary of Atlantic, for which they cut a cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” that earned East Coast airplay in 1967.But Mr. West yearned to record something heavier, so he left to make a solo album in 1969 whose title, “Mountain,” was a reference to his imposing size. Produced by Mr. Pappalardi, it featured many songs co-written by the two, including “Long Red,” which, in a live version backed by the drummer N.D. Smart, featured a drum break that inspired one of the most popular samples in hip-hop history, heard on more than 700 recordings, including ones by Public Enemy, Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar.By the time “Mountain” appeared, Mr. West had persuaded Mr. Pappalardi to form a band with him named for the album. “I said, ‘There’s never been a fat and a skinny guy onstage,’” Mr. West told Guitar World. “‘We can’t miss.’”Mr. West with his first band, the Vagrants, at the Village Theater in Manhattan in 1967. The drummer is Roger Mansour.Credit…Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesOne of Mountain’s first gigs was at the Woodstock festival, a booking the band received because it shared an agent with Jimi Hendrix. The band’s debut album was released the next spring, with Steve Knight, who came aboard for the Woodstock performance, on keyboards, and Mr. Laing on drums.The addition of Mr. Knight’s surging organ added warmth to the band’s sound and differentiated Mountain from Cream’s power-trio format. The album’s lead track, “Mississippi Queen,” had what became one of the most famous cowbell intros in rock, though it was originally used by Mr. Pappalardi simply as a way to count the band into the song. The song reached No. 21 on the Billboard singles chart and became an FM radio staple.The final studio album by the original Mountain, “Flowers of Evil,” was released in late 1971. One side had material, recorded in the studio, fashioned around an anti-drug theme; the other side had music recorded live at the Fillmore East.The next year the group split, a result of various band members’ drug abuse and Mr. Pappalardi’s decision to quit touring. While he continued to work as a producer, Mr. West, Mr. Bruce and Mr. Laing recorded two studio albums and a live set before Mr. Bruce bowed out in 1973. That same year, Mr. West and Mr. Pappalardi reformed Mountain with a new drummer and keyboardist for a double live album, “Twin Peaks,” and a studio album, “Avalanche,” both issued in 1974. But months later, the group imploded.In 1983, Mr. Pappalardi was fatally shot by his wife, Gail Collins, who had co-written songs for Mountain and designed their famous album covers.Mr. West continued to record and perform, billed either under his own name or as leader of Mountain, sometimes with Mr. Laing. He collaborated on albums with star guitarists like Joe Bonamassa and Peter Frampton and recorded with top metal singers like Ian Gillan of Deep Purple and Ozzy Osbourne.His last album with Mountain, “Masters of War,” released in 2007, featured covers of Bob Dylan songs. In 2009, he toured with a band billed as West, Bruce Jr. and Laing, with Mr. Bruce’s son, Malcolm, on bass. (Jack Bruce died in 2014.) He appeared with Mountain at an all-star concert for the 40th anniversary of Woodstock in 2009. His most recent solo release, “Soundcheck,” reached No. 2 on Billboard’s blues chart in 2015.Mr. West in performance at the Jammy Awards at the Theater at Madison Square Garden in 2008. He continued to record and perform, billed either under his own name or as leader of Mountain, well into the 21st century.Credit…Jason DeCrow/Associated PressMr. West is survived by his brother and his wife, Jenni Maurer, whom he married onstage after his Woodstock performance in 2009.Throughout his career, Mr. West remained committed to his uniquely punchy guitar style.“I’m not a great guitarist, technically,” he told Guitar World in 1987. “But you know why people remember me? If you take a hundred players and put them in a room, 98 or 99 of ’em are gonna sound the same.“The one who plays different,” he said, “that’s the one you’re going to remember.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny, Whose Music Melded Genres, Dies at 75

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny, Whose Music Melded Genres, Dies at 75A creator of modern music as a teenager, he later juggled a breezy pop sensibility with conceptual rigor. He was an important collaborator with the composer Robert Ashley.The pianist and composer “Blue” Gene Tyranny in performance at La MaMa in Manhattan in 2004.Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesDec. 23, 2020, 5:58 p.m. ETRobert Sheff, a composer and pianist who worked under the name “Blue” Gene Tyranny as a solo performer and a collaborator with artists including Iggy Pop, the composer Robert Ashley and the jazz composer and arranger Carla Bley, died on Dec. 12 in hospice care in Long Island City, Queens. He was 75.The cause was complications of diabetes, Tommy McCutchon, the founder of the record label Unseen Worlds, which released several albums by Mr. Tyranny, said in an email.His memorable pseudonym, coined during his brief stint with Iggy and the Stooges, was derived partly from Jean, his adoptive mother’s middle name. It also referred to what he called “the tyranny of the genes” — a predisposition to being “strongly overcome by emotion,” he said in “Just for the Record: Conversations With and About ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny,” a documentary film directed by David Bernabo released in September.Music, Mr. Tyranny explained in the film, was a source of solace, but also a means “of deeply informing myself that there’s another world. Music is my way of being in the world.”A master at the keyboard and an eclectic composer who deftly balanced conceptual rigor with breezy pop sounds, Mr. Tyranny was active in modern music as early as his teenage years.From curating contemporary-music concerts in high school, he went on to participate in the groundbreaking and influential Once Festival of New Music in Ann Arbor, Mich., during the 1960s. He taught classes and worked as a recording-studio technician at Mills College, an experimental-music hotbed in Oakland, Calif., from 1971 to 1982. Arriving in New York City in 1983, Mr. Tyranny worked with Mr. Ashley, Laurie Anderson and Peter Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra, while also composing his own works.Mr. Tyranny, who had been living in Long Island City since 2002, is survived by a brother, Richard Sheff, and three half siblings, William Gantic Jr., Vickie Murray and Justa Calvin.He was born Joseph Gantic to William and Eleanor Gantic on Jan. 1, 1945, in San Antonio. When Mr. Gantic, an Army paratrooper, was reported missing in action in Southeast Asia during World War II, Mr. Tyranny related in “Just for the Record,” his wife gave up their infant child for adoption.He was adopted 11 months later by Meyer and Dorothy Jean Sheff, who ran a clothing shop in downtown San Antonio, and renamed Robert Nathan Sheff. He began piano studies early in his childhood and took his first composition lessons at 11. By high school, he was performing avant-garde works by composers like Charles Ives and John Cage in an experimental-music series he jointly curated with the composer Philip Krumm at the McNay Art Institute in San Antonio.Invited by the Juilliard School to audition as a performance major, he demurred, insisting even then on being viewed as a composer. Instead he went to Ann Arbor, where he lived and worked from 1962 to 1971 and participated in the Once Festival. Mr. Tyranny’s works from this period, like “Ballad” (1960) and “Diotima” (1963), were abstract and fidgety, chiefly concerned with timbral contrast.Mr. Tyranny preparing for a concert at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., in 2006.Credit…Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIn 1965, Mr. Tyranny helped found the Prime Movers Blues Band, whose drummer, James Osterberg Jr., would achieve fame as the proto-punk singer-songwriter Iggy Pop. Another founder, Michael Erlewine, later created AllMusic, which became a popular reference website to which Mr. Tyranny contributed, occasionally writing about his own work.In the late 1960s, Mr. Osterberg transformed himself into Iggy Pop and formed the Stooges. After releasing the album “Raw Power” in 1973, he invited his former bandmate to join him on tour. Mr. Tyranny accepted, performing with red LED lights woven into his hair.He also played in the bands of jazz composers like Bill Dixon and Ms. Bley, and in 1976 explored the intersections of contemporary classical music and rock with Mr. Gordon in a groundbreaking concert series in Berkeley, Calif., documented on a 2019 Unseen Worlds release, “Trust in Rock.”An association with Mr. Ashley, whom Mr. Tyranny had met in Ann Arbor and then followed to Mills College, flourished into a close, enduring collaboration. Mr. Tyranny’s best-known work likely was the role he created in “Perfect Lives (Private Parts)” (1976-83), Mr. Ashley’s landmark opera, conceived and eventually presented as a television series: Buddy, the World’s Greatest Piano Player. Their relationship was deeply collaborative. Presented by Mr. Ashley with a blueprint indicating keys and metric structures, Mr. Tyranny filled in harmonies and supplied playfully ornate piano writing.“Blue and Bob had this symbiotic relationship from back in Ann Arbor,” Mr. Gordon, who also participated in the creation of “Perfect Lives,” said in a phone interview. “The character Buddy is like the avatar for the music of ‘Blue’ Gene.”“What we commonly recognize as music in ‘Perfect Lives’ was ‘Blue’ Gene’s,” Mr. Gordon explained, “but the overall composition was Bob’s.” Mr. Tyranny would contribute in different ways to later Ashley operas, including “Dust” (1998) and “Celestial Excursions” (2003).In his own music, much of which he recorded for the Lovely Music label, Mr. Tyranny moved from early efforts with graphic notation and magnetic tape to compositions that drew from popular styles. Some selections on his debut solo album, “Out of the Blue” (1978), like “Leading a Double Life,” were essentially pop songs. “A Letter From Home,” which closed that album, mixed found sounds and dreamy keyboards with an epistolary text, spoken and sung, ranging from the mundane to the philosophical.He worked extensively with electronics and labored throughout the 1990s on “The Driver’s Son,” which he termed an “audio storyboard.” A realization of that piece, a questing monodrama set to lush timbres and bubbly rhythms, will be included in “Degrees of Freedom Found,” a six-CD boxed set of unreleased Tyranny recordings due on Unseen Worlds in the spring. Mr. Tyranny, who lost his eyesight in 2009 and gave up performing after 2016, helped to compile the set, hoping to give his disparate canon a coherent shape.Mr. Tyranny’s compositions divided critical response. “To this taste, Mr. Tyranny’s work too often skirts the trivial,” John Rockwell wrote in a 1987 New York Times review. But Ben Ratliff, in a 2012 Times review of the last new recording issued during Mr. Tyranny’s life, “Detours,” offered a different view: “Mr. Sheff represents a lot of different American energies.”He added, “He does not stint on beautiful things — major arpeggios, soul-chord progressions, lines that flow and breathe — and his keyboard touch is rounded and gorgeous, a feeling you remember.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Rebecca Luker, a Broadway Star for Three Decades, Dies at 59

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRebecca Luker, a Broadway Star for Three Decades, Dies at 59Her Broadway career, fueled by her crystal-clear operatic soprano, brought her Tony Award nominations for “Show Boat,” “The Music Man” and “Mary Poppins.”Rebecca Luker as Maria, surrounded by the von Trapp children, in the 1998 Broadway revival of “The Sound of Music.” She also starred in hit revivals of “Show Boat” and “The Music Man.”Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDec. 23, 2020Rebecca Luker, the actress and singer who in a lauded three-decade career on the New York stage embodied the essence of the Broadway musical ingénue in hit revivals of “Show Boat,” “The Sound of Music” and “The Music Man,” died on Wednesday in a hospital in Manhattan. She was 59. The death was confirmed by Sarah Fargo, her agent. Ms. Luker announced in February that she had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as A.L.S. or Lou Gehrig’s disease.Ms. Luker’s Broadway career, fueled by her crystal-clear operatic soprano, brought her three Tony Award nominations. The first was for “Show Boat” (1994), in which she played Magnolia, the captain’s dewy-fresh teenage daughter, whose life is ruined by marriage to a riverboat gambler. The second was for “The Music Man” (2000), in which she was Marian, the prim River City librarian who enchants a traveling flimflam man who thinks — mistakenly — that he’s just passing through town.In between, Ms. Luker delighted critics by playing against type in a 1997 Encores! production of “The Boys From Syracuse.” As Adriana, the neglected wife who gets her groove back (with her husband’s long-lost twin brother), she wore slinky 1930s gowns and exuded what Ben Brantley, in his review for The New York Times, called “a disarmingly confectionary sexiness.”Ms. Luker, center, with Debbie Gravitte, left, and Sarah Uriarte Berry in the 1997 Encores! production of “The Boys From Syracuse.” Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPlaying Adriana was fun, Ms. Luker admitted. “For the first time in my life, I got to do a bit,” she told The Times in 1998. “Learning to turn to the audience, learning to hold for laughs — I ate it up with a spoon.”But by the end of that year, she was deep into ingénue territory again, playing Maria, the undisciplined novice nun turned live-in governess of seven, in “The Sound of Music.”When she earned her third Tony nomination, this one for best featured actress in a musical, it was for playing Winifred Banks, a married Englishwoman with two children and a gifted nanny, in “Mary Poppins” (2006).For all her success in musicals, Ms. Luker did not identify as a show-tunes type. “I am so not a musical theater person,” she told Playbill in 2003. “I love rock music and jazz. I love the ’70s stuff I grew up with.”Rebecca Joan Luker was born on April 17, 1961, in Birmingham, Ala., and grew up in Helena, a small town nearby. She was one of four children of Norse Doak Luker Jr., a construction worker, and Martha (Baggett) Luker, the local high school’s treasurer. Rebecca sang in her church choir (First Baptist of Alabaster) and was a member of the Thompson High marching band.In high school, she entered a beauty pageant. Singing “Much More,” the ballad of girlish dreams and determination from “The Fantasticks,” she won a college scholarship as first runner-up to Alabama’s Junior Miss.That took her to the University of Montevallo, just 14 miles from her parents’ home, where she was a music major and received her diploma in 1984. Graduation was a year later than planned because she took a break to work with Michigan Opera Theater, where she met her future New York agent. Just five years after college, she was on the Broadway stage, assuming the lead female role in “The Phantom of the Opera”— Christine, the chorus girl who is the object of the phantom’s affections.“Phantom” was her Broadway debut; she began as the understudy to the original star, Sarah Brightman; became an alternate; and took over as Christine in 1989. She remained with the show until 1991.Ms. Luker moved on immediately to another Broadway show: She played a ghost, the little orphan girl’s dead Aunt Lily, in “The Secret Garden.” In his review in The Times, Frank Rich singled out “I Heard Someone Crying,” Ms. Luker’s haunting trio with Mandy Patinkin and Daisy Egan, for special praise.Ms. Luker in performance at the Allen Room of Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2005. In addition to her theater work, she had a thriving cabaret career.Credit…Rahav Segev for The New York TimesIn several of her later Broadway roles, Ms. Luker replaced the original actress in a long-running hit. She took over as Claudia, the director-protagonist’s movie-star muse, in “Nine” (2003); Marie, the temperamental fairy godmother, in “Cinderella” (2013); and Helen, the frustrated wife and mother who misses being an actress — just as Mrs. Banks had in “Mary Poppins” — in “Fun Home” (2016).She grew older gracefully in a number of her later Off Broadway roles. Twenty years after starring in a 1996 revival of “Brigadoon” as Fiona, a Scottish lass so rare she really does come along only once a century, she played a droll Buffalo matron in A.R. Gurney’s comic drama “Indian Blood” (2006). In 2011, she was an Italian duchess grieving her son’s death in Maury Yeston’s musical “Death Takes a Holiday.”Ms. Luker also had a thriving cabaret career, appearing at intimate venues like Café Carlyle and Feinstein’s/54 Below, but she professed a special love for “the live experience in front of an orchestra.”The stage was always her first home, but she did finally make her screen acting debut in her late 30s when she appeared in “Cupid and Cate” (2000), a Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie in which she played the heroine’s perfect and perfectly sensible sister. Between 2010 and 2020, she had guest roles on series including “Boardwalk Empire” and “N.C.I.S. New Orleans” and appeared in three feature films, including “Not Fade Away” (2012), a drama about a teenage rock band.Her final stage role was as a small-town minister’s narrow-minded wife in a 2019 Kennedy Center production of “Footloose.” She performed at a concert in honor of the lyricist Sheldon Harnick in March 2020.Ms. Luker at home in 2015 with her husband, the actor Danny Burstein.Credit…Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesHer last performance was in June, via Zoom, in a prerecorded benefit performance, “At Home With Rebecca Luker.”“When I sing,” she told The Times shortly before that show, “I think it heals me. It helps me feel like I’m still a part of something.”Ms. Luker married Gregory Jbara, an actor, in 1993; they divorced in 1996. In 2000 she married the actor Danny Burstein, whom she met when they starred together in “Time and Again” in San Diego.Mr. Burstein survives her, as do two stepsons, Zachary and Alexander Burstein; a brother, Roger; a sister, Suzanne Luker; her mother, Martha Hales; and her stepfather, Lamar Hales. Another brother, Stephen, died last year.Looking back on her career in a 2016 Theater People podcast, Ms. Luker expressed gratitude for the roles she’d had but admitted that she probably should have broken out of the leading-lady mold — studied acting longer and more seriously, appeared in more plays, done more comedy.“I wish I had branched out a little more,” she said cheerily. “Maybe played a bitch or something.”Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More