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      Kirstie Alley, Emmy-Winning ‘Cheers’ Actress, Dies at 71

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      She also starred in the NBC sitcom “Veronica’s Closet,” which aired from 1997 to 2000.Kirstie Alley, the actress whose breakout role as the career-minded Rebecca Howe in the sitcom “Cheers” catapulted her career and earned her an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe, died on Monday. She was 71.The cause was cancer, according to a statement from her family on Twitter.Ms. Alley quickly won over millions of viewers while playing Rebecca in “Cheers,” the timeless NBC show that ran for 11 seasons in the 1980s and ’90s. She had stepped in to replace Shelley Long in the ensemble cast in 1987, at the height of the series’ popularity, and remained through the final season.Critics noted how Ms. Alley had brought a refreshing new dynamic to the character, with scripts giving her a more fun arc that helped create a “denser joke machine,” as one writer noted. At times, Rebecca, who managed the bar in the show, appeared to be a hapless and gold-digging mess. In other moments, Ms. Alley portrayed Rebecca with a faux-bravado, and with an attitude of indifference to others romantic advances.Her character gradually evolved from being a corporate-pleasing manager to a full-fledged, genial member of the gang who was perky yet perpetually disappointed.In an interview with “Entertainment Tonight” in 2019, Ms. Alley looked back on her “Cheers” years as a somewhat chaotic time, with all kinds of misbehavior being the norm on a set that included co-stars like Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson.“We never paid attention, we were always in trouble,” she said. “We never showed up on time.”Kirstie Alley with Ted Danson, left, and Woody Harrelson in “Cheers.”Photo by Kim Gottlieb Walker/NBCU via Getty ImagesIn addition to her 1991 Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a comedy series for “Cheers,” Ms. Alley also won the 1994 Emmy for lead actress in a mini-series for the title role in “David’s Mother,” a drama about a mother who raises her autistic son alone.Ms. Alley, who acted regularly for about four decades, also starred in the NBC sitcom “Veronica’s Closet,” which ran from 1997 to 2000. Her character was the successful head of a lingerie company.Marta Kauffman, a creator and an executive producer of “Veronica’s Closet,” said of Ms. Alley in 1997: “She is crazy most of the time, and I mean that in the best sense of the word.”Ms. Alley was born on Jan. 12, 1951, in Wichita, Kan., where she was raised in a Roman Catholic family. She was particularly close with her grandfather, a lumber-company owner.She attended Kansas State University but dropped out to become an interior decorator. Around that time, she developed an addiction to cocaine.She eventually moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in Narconon, a rehabilitation program affiliated with the Church of Scientology.When asked by Barbara Walters in 1992 why she had joined a religion with a problematic past, Ms. Alley said that she had “not come across anything” negative.“It answered a lot of questions for me,” Ms. Alley said in 1997 of the church. “I was a pretty able person. I wasn’t looking for something like that. But I wanted to get rid of the barriers keeping me from what I wanted, to be an actress. It’s just part of my life.”While living in Los Angeles, Ms. Alley began to take an interest in acting. In 1982, she made her film debut in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” playing a half-Vulcan, half-Romulan lieutenant with pointy ears.In 1989, she starred alongside John Travolta in the film “Look Who’s Talking,” a comedy in which a baby’s thoughts are narrated by Bruce Willis. Vincent Canby, who reviewed the movie in The Times, wrote that “cute” was the “operative word” for a movie that starred “some good actors doing material that is not super.”In 2005, Ms. Alley shifted her attention to a mock-reality show about her weight. She said at the time that the show, “Fat Actress,” drew from her experience as a woman in Hollywood who did not meet the industry’s stereotypically slim beauty standards. Another show, “Kirstie Alley’s Big Life,” also focused on Ms. Alley’s weight-loss journey.Ms. Alley was married to Bob Alley, and the two eventually divorced. A later marriage to Parker Stevenson also ended in divorce.She is survived by her two children, True and Lillie Parker. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Alley told The New York Times in 1997 that she had sought out TV series throughout her career in order to have a normal schedule and be closer to her family.“It’s the best life style,” Ms. Alley said. More

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      Bob McGrath, Longtime ‘Sesame Street’ Star, Dies at 90

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      He was an original cast member who, for nearly half a century, played a sweater-clad and easygoing music teacher who dispensed advice.Bob McGrath, who played the sweater-clad neighborhood music teacher and general advice-giver on “Sesame Street” for almost half a century, died at his home in New Jersey on Sunday morning. He was 90.Mr. McGrath’s daughter Cathlin McGrath confirmed his death by email on Sunday. She said Mr. McGrath died from complications after a stroke. She said that the night before Mr. McGrath passed, his family had decorated his room for Christmas, and sung and danced around him. “We just knew that he wanted to go the way he lived.”Mr. McGrath wasn’t particularly interested when an old Phi Gamma Delta fraternity brother stopped him one night to tell him about his new project, a children’s show on public television. But then he had never heard of Jim Henson, the puppeteer, and he had never seen a Muppet. After his first meeting and a look at some of the animation, he knew this show would be different.“Sesame Street” had its premiere in November 1969, with Mr. McGrath and other cast members gathered around an urban brownstone stoop, in front of the building’s dark green doors, beside its omnipresent collection of metal garbage cans. His character, conveniently and coincidentally named Bob, was reliably smiling, easygoing and polite, whether he was singing about “People in Your Neighborhood” (the butcher, the baker, the lifeguard), discussing everyday concerns with young humans and Muppets, or taking a day trip to Grouchytown with Oscar the Grouch.Viewers were outraged when Mr. McGrath and two other longtime cast members — Emilio Delgado, who played Luis, and Roscoe Orman, who played Gordon — were fired in 2016. When HBO took over the broadcasting rights to “Sesame Street,” their contracts were not renewed.But Mr. McGrath took the news graciously, expressing gratitude for 47 years of “working with phenomenal people” and for a whole career beyond “Sesame Street” of doing family concerts with major symphony orchestras.“I’m really very happy to stay home with my wife and children a little bit more,” he said at Florida Supercon, an annual comic book and pop culture convention, later in 2016. “I’d be so greedy if I wanted five minutes more.”Robert Emmett McGrath was born on June 13, 1932, in Ottawa, Ill., about 80 miles southwest of Chicago. He was the youngest of five children of Edmund Thomas McGrath, a farmer, and Flora Agnes (Halligan) McGrath.Robert’s mother, who sang and played the piano, recognized his talent by the time he was 5. He was soon entering and winning competitions in Chicago and appearing on radio. He did musical plays and studied privately but, as a practical matter, intended to study engineering.But he was invited to attend a music camp outside Chicago the summer after his high school graduation. Teachers there encouraged him to change his plans, and he “did an about-face,” he remembered in a 2004 video interview for the Television Academy Foundation.He majored in voice at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1954. He spent the next two years in the Army, mostly in Stuttgart, Germany, where he worked with the Seventh Army Symphony. Then he went to New York, where he received a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music.He took a job with St. David’s, a private boys’ school in Manhattan. Freelance singing assignments, obtained through a vocal contractor, paid the bills until 1961, when “Sing Along With Mitch” came along. He was one of 25 male singers who appeared every week on that show, on NBC, performing traditional favorites like “Home on the Range,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”As St. Patrick’s Day approached, the program’s host and producer, Mitch Miller, asked Mr. McGrath if he knew the song “Mother Machree.” He was so impressed with Mr. McGrath’s rendition and his light lyric tenor — he had been singing the sentimental Irish American number since he was a little boy — that he doubled his salary and made him the show’s featured male soloist.After “Sing Along With Mitch” ended in 1964, the cast played Las Vegas and did a 30-stop tour in Japan. That led to an unusual chapter in Mr. McGrath’s career: teenage idol.Schoolgirls chanted his name at concerts and organized fan clubs. Their demand brought him back to Japan nine times over the next three years, and he recorded nine albums there, singing in both English and Japanese. His repertoire included Japanese folk ballads on which he was accompanied by a shakuhachi, or bamboo flute. Back home, he amused American television viewers by singing “Danny Boy” in Japanese.When “Sesame Street” began, it led to a very different collection of albums for Mr. McGrath, with names like “Sing Along With Bob” and “Songs and Games for Toddlers.”He also learned American Sign Language, which he used regularly on camera with Linda Bove, a cast member who was born deaf.Asked about important memories of his years on the series, Mr. McGrath often named the 1983 episode devoted to children’s, adults’ and Muppets’ reactions to the death of Will Lee, who had played Mr. Hooper on the show for 13 years. Another favorite was the holiday special “Christmas Eve on Sesame Street” (1978), particularly the Bert and Ernie segment inspired by the O. Henry story “The Gift of the Magi.”In 1958, Mr. McGrath married Ann Logan Sperry, a preschool teacher whom he met on his first day in New York City. They had five children. He is survived by Ms. McGrath, who is 89, and their five children, Liam McGrath, Robert McGrath, Alison McGrath Osder, Lily McGrath and Cathlin McGrath, as well as eight grandchildren. He is also survived by an elder sister, Eileen Strobel.“It’s a very different kind of fame,” Mr. McGrath reflected in the Television Academy interview about his association with “Sesame Street.”He recalled a little boy in a store who came up to him and took his hand. At first he thought he had been mistaken for the child’s father. When he realized that the boy seemed to think they knew each other, Mr. McGrath asked, “Do you know my name?” “Bob.” “Do you know where I live?” “Sesame Street.” “Do you know any of my other friends on Sesame Street?”“Yep,” the boy answered and promptly gave an example: “Oh, the number 7.”Livia Albeck-Ripka More

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      Julia Reichert, Documentarian of the Working Class, Dies at 76

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      She took home, to Ohio, a 2019 Oscar for “American Factory,” and in a long career teaching and making films, she paid special attention to working women.Julia Reichert, a filmmaker and educator who made a pioneering feminist documentary, “Growing Up Female,” as an undergraduate student and almost a half-century later won an Academy Award for “American Factory,” a documentary feature about the Chinese takeover of a shuttered automobile plant in Dayton, Ohio, died on Thursday at her home in nearby Yellow Springs, Ohio. She was 76.Steven Bognar, her husband and filmmaking partner, confirmed the death. The cause, diagnosed in 2018, was urothelial cancer, which affects the urethra, bladder and other organs. She learned she had non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2006.Ms. Reichert, a longtime professor of motion pictures at Wright State University in Dayton, was in the forefront of a new generation of social documentarians who came out of the New Left and feminist movements of the early 1970s with a belief in film as an organizing tool with a social mission. Her films were close to oral history: Eschewing voice-over narration, they were predicated on interviews in which her mainly working-class subjects spoke for themselves.“Growing Up Female” (1971), which she made with her future husband, James Klein, a classmate at Antioch College in Ohio, was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry in 2011.Her documentaries “Union Maids” (1976), made with Mr. Klein and Miles Mogelescu, and “Seeing Red” (1983), also made with Mr. Klein, were both nominated for Academy Awards.Both movies mix archival footage with interviews. “Union Maids” profiles three women active in the Chicago labor movement during the Great Depression. “Seeing Red” portrays rank-and-file members of the Communist Party during the 1930s and ’40s.Ms. Reichert was again nominated, in 2010, for the short documentary “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant,” which she directed with Mr. Bognar, her second husband.“The Last Truck” documented the closing of a an automobile assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, some of it clandestinely filmed by workers inside the plant. The movie served as a prologue to “American Factory,” which Netflix released in conjunction with Barack and Michelle Obama’s fledgling company Higher Ground Productions, and which won the 2019 documentary-feature Oscar.Reviewing the film in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called it “complex, stirring, timely and beautifully shaped, spanning continents as it surveys the past, present and possible future of American labor.”The movie is suffused in ambivalence. Having purchased the same plant documented in “The Last Truck,” a Chinese billionaire converts it into an automobile-glass factory and restores lost jobs while confounding American workers with a new set of attitudes.In 2020, Ms. Reichert and Mr. Bognar were invited by the comedian Dave Chappelle to document one of the outdoor stand-up shows he hosted during the Covid pandemic from a cornfield near his home in Yellow Springs. The two-hour feature “Dave Chappelle: Live in Real Life” had its premiere at Radio City Music Hall as part of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.Although Ms. Reichert addressed a variety of social issues in the documentaries she directed and produced, her enduring interests were labor history and the lives of working women. Her last film, “9to5: The Story of a Movement,” directed with Mr. Bognar, brought those two concerns together, focusing on the organizing of female office workers beginning in the 1970s.Ms. Reichert with Mr. Bognar and Chad Cannon, who composed the score for “American Factory,” at a screening of the film in Los Angeles in 2019.Araya Diaz/Getty ImagesJulia Bell Reichert was born on June 16, 1946, in Bordentown, N.J., a city on the Delaware River about eight miles southeast of Trenton. She was the second of four children of Louis and Dorothy (Bell) Reichert. Her father was a butcher in a neighborhood supermarket, her mother a homemaker who became a nurse.One of the few students from her high school to go to college, Ms. Reichert was attracted to Antioch because of its cooperative work-study program. Her parents were conservative Republicans, but once she was at Antioch Ms. Reichert’s political orientation shifted left. She canvased for the Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, during the 1964 election and hosted a feminist program, “The Single Girl,” on the campus radio station. She later credited her radio experience with honing her documentary skills.“I came out of radio,” she said in an interview with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scientists before winning the 2019 Oscar. “So without having to spend any money, I learned a lot about interviewing and editing and mixing music and how to talk — how to tell a story in a time frame.”Ms. Reichert also took a film course at Antioch with the avant-garde filmmaker David Brooks and organized a documentary workshop with Mr. Klein. After making “Growing Up Female,” which was originally intended for consciousness-raising groups, she and Mr. Klein founded a distribution cooperative, New Day Films, which focused on bringing new documentary films to schools, unions and community groups.The couple also collaborated on the documentary “Methadone: An American Way of Dealing,” in addition to “Union Maids” and “Seeing Reds.”Vincent Canby of The Times, who discovered “Union Maids” in early 1977 on a double bill in a limited run at a downtown Manhattan theater, called it “one of the more moving, more cheering theatrical experiences available in New York this weekend.”He was similarly supportive of “Seeing Red,” which was first shown at the 1983 New York Film Festival, and which is arguably the most sympathetic portrayal of American Communists ever put onscreen. Mr. Canby considered it “a fine, tough companion piece to ‘Union Maids.’” Rather than dogma, he wrote, the subject was “American idealism.”Ms. Reichert started a filmmaking program at Wright State University with Mr. Klein. She also directed a quasi-autobiographical feature film, “Emma and Elvis” (1992), written with Mr. Bognar, about a married documentary filmmaker who becomes involved with a young video artist. Although the film received only limited distribution, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum praised it in The Chicago Reader for “making a filmmaker’s creative/midlife crisis meaningful, engaging and interesting.”Mr. Reichert and Mr. Bognar during the filming of “American Factory.”NetflixMs. Reichert’s most personal film — the first she directed with Mr. Bognar — was “A Lion in the House,” a documentary about children with cancer completed in 2006 after having been in production for close to a decade. It was inspired in part by her adolescent daughter’s struggle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Her daughter recovered, but after the film was completed Ms. Reichert was herself diagnosed with cancer.“A Lion in the House” won multiple awards, including a Primetime Emmy, the 2006 Sundance Film Festival grand jury documentary award and the 2008 Independent Spirit Award for best documentary.Ms. Reichert’s marriage to Mr. Klein ended in divorce in 1986. She married Mr. Bognar, who survives her, in 1987. She is also survived by her daughter, Lela Klein; three brothers, Louis, Craig and Joseph Reichert; and two grandchildren.Ms. Reichert was very much a regional filmmaker. After graduating from Antioch, she remained in the Dayton area and became a source of inspiration for other Midwestern documentarians, including Michael Moore and Steve James. She also produced a number of films.In an appreciation written for a 2019 retrospective of her work at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, the journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich recalled that Ms. Reichert had “defied every stereotype I’d had of independent filmmakers.”“She wasn’t rich, and she wasn’t arrogant or egotistical,” wrote Ms. Ehrenreich, the author, of “Nickel and Dimed” (2001), about the working poor in America. (She died in September.) “The daughter of a butcher and a house cleaner turned registered nurse, she dressed and spoke plainly, usually beaming with enthusiasm, and never abandoned her Midwestern roots.”She might have added that virtually all of Ms. Reichert’s films were explicitly collective enterprises.A scene from “American Factory,” depicting workers at an auto-glass factory in Ohio.Netflix, via Everett CollectionIn an email, Mr. Klein wrote that he and Ms. Reichert “came of age with a sense that it was only through community that the type of work we wanted to see being made could happen.”“And Julia really lived her beliefs,” he added.Despite her politics, Ms. Reichert was by her account less interested in ideology than she was in people. In an interview with Cineaste magazine, she called the subjects of “Seeing Red” “some of the most wonderful people you’ll ever want to meet.”“They made a very positive life choice, despite everything they went through,” she said.“American Factory,” which deals with the mutual culture shock experienced by Chinese and American workers and their reconciliation, was Ms. Reichert’s most ethnically and racially diverse film. The movie, she told an interviewer, “tries to be very fair by listening to everyone’s point of view — that of the chairman” — Cao Dewang, the billionaire Chinese entrepreneur who purchased and reopened the factory — “union people, anti-union people, and workers.”Indeed, Mr. Cao, a product of Communist China who teaches American workers the hard realities of global capitalism, is in many respects the film’s protagonist.Although a fully committed artist, Ms. Reichert wore her politics so lightly that almost no one seemed to notice when she concluded her Oscar acceptance speech for “American Factory” by cheerfully citing the best-known phrase from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s “Communist Manifesto.”“We believe that things will get better,” she said, “when the workers of the world unite.”Lyna Bentahar contributed reporting. More

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      Brad William Henke, N.F.L. Player Who Turned to Acting, Dies at 56

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      A defensive lineman who played for the Denver Broncos, he later appeared in “Orange Is the New Black,” “Dexter” and “Lost.”Brad William Henke, a former N.F.L. player who later turned to acting and became known for his role as a prison guard on “Orange Is the New Black,” died on Tuesday. He was 56.His death was confirmed by his manager, Matt DelPiano, who said Mr. Henke died in his sleep but did not specify the location. He also did not cite a cause, but in May 2021 Mr. Henke posted on Instagram that he had a 90 percent blockage in an artery, and the next month he said he had received two stents in his heart.Mr. Henke played many roles in film and television across a 25-year career, but he was probably best known for his appearance on more than two dozen episodes of the Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black” from 2016 to 2018. His character, Desi Piscatella, a gay corrections officer at the penitentiary where the show was set, was an integral part of the drama in its fourth and fifth seasons, and in 2017 he shared in the cast’s Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a comedy series.Although “Orange” could be considered Mr. Henke’s breakout role, it was far from his first. His acting career began in 1996 with the film “Mr. Wrong,” which starred Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Pullman and Joan Cusack. Among the dozens of television shows on which he was seen were “ER,” “Judging Amy,” “Dexter,” “October Road” and “Lost.” His movies included the original “Space Jam.”Mr. Henke was born on April 10, 1966, in Columbus, Neb., and raised in Littleton, Colo. He played football for the University of Arizona in the late 1980s. A 6-foot-3, 275-pound defensive lineman, he was drafted by the New York Giants in 1989 as but was cut, he told The Tucson Citizen in 1998, He went on to play for the Denver Broncos and was on the team when it lost the 1990 Super Bowl to the San Francisco 49ers.His football career ended in the early 1990s after several injuries, and he held a number of jobs, including assistant football coach at a community college in California. An unexpected encounter with Rod Martin, formerly of the Oakland Raiders, set him on a new path.“Rod mentioned there was a need for actors to play football players for commercials, so I tried out for it and got one for Pizza Hut,” Mr. Henke told The Citizen. “While I was there, a guy invited me to attend an acting class. I went and it hit me that this is what I wanted to do.”The depth and types of roles Mr. Henke landed progressed with each credit. In a 2021 interview with CGMagazine, Mr. Henke said that at the start of his career he was learning the business and was taking jobs to earn money, but that things changed. “Lately, I’ve just tried to do it for the love of it,” he said. “Just cause I love creating the characters — figuring out how they talk, how they stand, all the physical things and all the emotional things.”Mr. Henke told the website Tell-Tale TV in 2020 that his role as Tom Cullen on the mini-series “The Stand,” the most recent adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same title, which starred Whoopi Goldberg and Alexander Skarsgard, was challenging yet rewarding.“It was the best experience I’ve had in acting so far in my whole career,” he said. “I haven’t had very many opportunities in my career where I have been offered this job three months before it starts. So many times, it’s just right before it starts. So I had so much more time to work on it and prepare and just think about it, dream about it.”Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Jesus Jiménez More

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      Frederick Swann, Master of the Pipe Organ, Is Dead at 91

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      He drew the best from complex instruments at Riverside Church in Manhattan, at countless recitals and on the “Hour of Power” TV show.Frederick Swann, who in churches on the East Coast and the West played some of the world’s grandest organs, performing classical and religious works on the complex instruments with sensitivity and technical skill, died on Nov. 13 at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 91.The cause was cancer, said Karen McFarlane Holtkamp, who was Mr. Swann’s secretary in the 1960s and ’70s and then his concert manager.Mr. Swann was well known in New York as organist and music director at Riverside Church in Manhattan, where he began playing in the 1950s.In 1982 he reached a much wider audience when he moved to the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., home base of the Rev. Robert H. Schuller, the television evangelist. There he appeared each week on “Hour of Power,” one of the most widely watched religious programs in the country, with a viewership in the millions.Before retiring in 2001, he also served for three years as organist at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, which has one of the largest pipe organs in the world. He also played thousands of recitals all over the United States and beyond.That was no easy feat. Large pipe organs require much more than just keyboard dexterity, and each one is different. The acoustics in each church or hall also vary.“Fred was a genius at controlling and maximizing the potential of very large pipe organs,” the organist John Walker, who succeeded Mr. Swann as music director at Riverside, said in a phone interview. “Every organ is absolutely unique. They are custom-made works of art, and Fred was so uniquely skilled at uncovering the timbres in each instrument that he was regularly invited to give inaugural recitals” — that is, the first public performance on a new or rebuilt organ.Mr. Swann at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., home base of the television evangelist Robert H. Schuller, where he moved in 1982.Al Schaben/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesHe filled that role in 2004 for the formidable organ at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, a 6,134-pipe instrument designed by Frank Gehry. His program that night included pieces by Bach, Mendelssohn and Josef Rheinberger.“In all three,” Mark Swed wrote in a review in The Los Angeles Times, “the stirring deep pedal tones produced a sonic weight that seemed to anchor the entire building, while the upper diapason notes were clear and warm. The delicate echo effects in the slow movement of Mendelssohn’s sonata spoke magically, as if coming from the garden outdoors.”Ms. Holtkamp noted that, at Riverside and other stops, Mr. Swann was choral director as well as organist; it was not uncommon to see him playing and conducting at the same time. His energy, she said, was boundless. She recalled one Sunday on which he played and directed the morning service at Riverside, played and conducted a portion of the Messiah at the church in the late afternoon, then headed to Lincoln Center to accompany the “Messiah Sing-In.”“How Fred did so much so well in one day still amazes me,” she said by email. “I was totally worn out and I was only the page-turner!”Mr. Walker said that Mr. Swann held four centuries’ worth of music in his head and generally played from memory. He played recitals of all kinds, sometimes as the featured attraction and sometimes accompanying a vocalist, and released numerous albums. Mr. Walker said his playing for religious services was particularly poignant.“In playing a hymn,” he said, “he would be able to express the meaning of an individual word in such a poignant way that I would just immediately tear up.”Frederick Lewis Swann was born on July 30, 1931, in Lewisburg, W.Va. His father, Theodore, was a Methodist minister, and his mother, Mary (Davis) Swann, was a homemaker.Mr. Swann said he pounded on the family piano so much as a toddler that his parents locked it.“Of course,” he told The Diapason, a publication about organs, in 2014, “any 3-year-old can figure out how to get into a piano if he really wants to, and I did.”When he was 5 his parents arranged for him to take piano lessons from the organist at a nearby church. One day he arrived for his lesson and the teacher wasn’t waiting at the piano; he found her at the organ console, practicing.“I was hypnotized watching things popping in and out,” he said. “Lights were flashing, her hands and feet were flying, and I thought, ‘Oh my, that looks like fun.’”His legs weren’t yet long enough to reach the pedals, but eventually she began teaching him the organ — which was lucky, because when he was 10 the organist at his father’s church died, and there was no one else to step in but young Fred.“It must have been simply awful,” he admitted, “but that’s how I got started at age 10, and I’ve just kept on.”He earned a bachelor’s degree in music at Northwestern University in Illinois in 1952 and two years later received a master’s degree in sacred music at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He first played the Riverside organ while still a student. He also played at other Manhattan churches — sometimes, he said, he would provide music at four different churches on the same Sunday.After two years in the Army, he began playing full time at Riverside in 1958. Eventually he became music director. A tribute on the Riverside website noted his role in helping to shape the sound of the church’s organ, a famed instrument.Mr. Swann in 2006 at Riverside Church for a 75th anniversary celebration. He began playing there in the 1950s and served as organist and music director.Nan Melville for The New York Times“Although the organ was originally commissioned under the direction of Virgil Fox, Fred Swann was also on staff at the time of the installation of the organ in the mid-1950s,” it said. “In the succeeding years as director of music he oversaw a complete redesign of the organ console and supervised the organ’s expansion and tonal development. As such, he and those he worked with are responsible for the renowned instrument we hear today.”Mr. Swann acknowledged that his departure from Riverside for the West Coast and the Schuller church in 1982 was viewed with disdain by some of his colleagues.“They thought I had lost my mind because I had this beautiful Gothic cathedral, with a magnificent organ and a professional choir and really a lot of recognition as a church that set the standards in music,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1998.The Schuller services, in contrast, were known for their showiness and their hodgepodge of musical styles — a service might include a choral number and a country song. Mr. Swann elevated the musical content considerably, but he also broadened his own views.“I feel like we’ve all benefited,” he told The Orange County Register of California in 1987. The challenge of adjusting to a new type of service appealed to him, he said. It also helped that the Crystal Cathedral had an impressive organ.“It goes from barely audible to oh-my-gosh thunderous,” he told The Register in 2013.(The Crystal Cathedral was sold after Mr. Schuller’s ministry went bankrupt and reopened as a Roman Catholic church, Christ Cathedral, in 2019.)Mr. Swann was married briefly to Mina Belle Packer in the 1950s. He is survived by his partner of 64 years, George Dickey.Mr. Swann was active in the American Guild of Organists, serving as its president for six years beginning in 2002, and was a mentor to many younger players, including Mr. Walker.“Most of what I know about how to play a church service I learned from standing next to Fred,” Mr. Walker said.He was also known for his sense of humor, which was often on display in his chats with recital audiences. One time, Mr. Walker said, while giving the inaugural performance on an organ in Dallas, he was vexed by a “cipher” — a pipe that, because of a malfunction, refused to stop playing.“New organs are just like new babies,” he explained to the audience. “They behave just fine until you take them out in public.” More

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      Christine McVie, Hitmaker for Fleetwood Mac, Is Dead at 79

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      As a singer, songwriter and keyboardist, she was a prolific force behind one of the most popular rock bands of the last 50 years.Christine McVie, the singer, songwriter and keyboardist who became the biggest hitmaker for Fleetwood Mac, one of music’s most popular bands, died on Wednesday. She was 79.Her family announced her death on Facebook. The statement said she died at a hospital but did not specify its location or give the cause of death. In June, Ms. McVie told Rolling Stone that she was in “quite bad health” and that she had endured debilitating problems with her back.Ms. McVie’s commercial potency, which hit a high point in the 1970s and ’80s, was on full display on Fleetwood Mac’s “Greatest Hits” anthology, released in 1988, which sold more than eight million copies: She either wrote or co-wrote half of its 16 tracks. Her tally doubled that of the next most prolific member of the band’s trio of singer-songwriters, Stevie Nicks. (The third, Lindsey Buckingham, scored three major Billboard chart-makers on that collection.)The most popular songs Ms. McVie wrote favored bouncing beats and lively melodies, numbers like “Say You Love Me” (which grazed Billboard’s Top 10), “You Make Loving Fun” (which just broke it), “Hold Me” (No. 4) and “Don’t Stop” (her top smash, which crested at No. 3). But she could also connect with elegant ballads, like “Over My Head” (No. 20) and “Little Lies” (which cracked the publication’s Top Five in 1987).All those songs had cleanly defined, easily sung melodies, with hints of soul and blues at the core. Her compositions had a simplicity that mirrored their construction. “I don’t struggle over my songs,” Ms. McVie (pronounced mc-VEE) told Rolling Stone in 1977. “I write them quickly.”Fleetwood Mac in concert in 1980, from left: John McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Ms. McVie and Stevie Nicks. (Mick Fleetwood is partly visible at the far left.)Pete Still/Redferns, via Getty ImagesIn just half an hour, she wrote one of the band’s most beloved songs, “Songbird,” a sensitive ballad that for years served as the band’s closing encore in concert. In 2019, the band’s leader, Mick Fleetwood, told New Musical Express that “Songbird” is the piece he wanted played at his funeral, “to send me off fluttering.”Ms. McVie’s lyrics often captured the more intoxicating aspects of romance. “I’m definitely not a pessimist,” she told Bob Brunning, the author of the 2004 book “The Fleetwood Mac Story: Rumours and Lies.” “I’m basically a love song writer.”At the same time, her words accounted for the yearning and disappointments that can lurk below an exciting surface. “I’m good at pathos,” she told Mojo magazine in 2017. “I write about romantic despair a lot, but with a positive spin.”‘That Chemistry’Ms. McVie’s vocals communicated just as nuanced a range of feeling. Her soulful contralto could sound by turns maternally wise and sexually alive. Her tawny tone had the heady effect of a bourbon with a rich bouquet and a smooth finish. It found a graceful place in harmony with the voices of Ms. Nicks and Mr. Buckingham, together forming a signature Fleetwood Mac sound.“It was that chemistry,” she told Mojo. “The two of them just chirped into the perfect three-way harmony. I just remember thinking, ‘This is it!’”Ms. McVie in performance in 1979.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesA sturdy instrumentalist, Ms. McVie played a range of keyboards, often leaning toward the soulful sound of a Hammond B3 organ and the formality of a Yamaha grand piano.With Fleetwood Mac, she earned five gold, one platinum and seven multiplatinum albums. The band’s biggest success, “Rumours,” released in 1977, was one of the mightiest movers in pop history: It was certified double diamond, representing sales of over 20 million copies.In 1998, Ms. McVie was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame along with various lineups of Fleetwood Mac, reflecting the frequent (and dramatic) personnel shifts the band experienced throughout its labyrinthine history. Ms. McVie served in incarnations that dated to 1971, but she also had uncredited roles playing keyboards and singing backup as far back as the band’s second album, released in 1968. Before joining Fleetwood Mac, she scored a No. 14 British hit with the blues band Chicken Shack on a cover of Etta James’s “I’d Rather Go Blind” for which she sang lead.Christine Anne Perfect was born on July 12, 1943, in the Lake District of England to Cyril Perfect, a classical violinist and college music professor and Beatrice (Reece) Perfect, a psychic.Her father encouraged her to start taking classical piano lessons when she was 11. Her focus changed radically four years later when she came across some sheet music for Fats Domino songs. At that moment, she told Rolling Stone in 1984, “It was goodbye Chopin.”“I started playing the boogie bass,” she told Mojo. “I got hooked on the blues. Even today, the songs I write use that left hand. It’s rooted in the blues.”Ms. McVie in 1969, the year she joined Fleetwood Mac.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMs. McVie studied sculpture at Birmingham Art College and for a while considered becoming an art teacher. At the same time, she briefly played in a duo with Spencer Davis, who, along with a teenage Steve Winwood, would later find fame in the Spencer Davis Group. She helped form a band named Shades of Blue with several future members of Chicken Shack.After graduating from college in 1966, Ms. McVie moved to London and became a window dresser for a department store. One year later, she was asked to join the already formed Chicken Shack as keyboardist and sometime singer. She wrote two songs for the band’s debut album, “40 Blue Fingers, Freshly Packed and Ready to Serve.”She was twice voted best female vocalist in a Melody Maker readers’ poll, but she left the band in 1969 after marrying John McVie, the bassist in Fleetwood Mac, which had been formed in 1967 and had already recorded three albums. That same year, she recorded a solo album, “The Legendary Christine Perfect Album,” which she later described to Rolling Stone as “so wimpy.”“I just hate to listen to it,” she said.Ms. McVie in the recording studio in an undated photo.Fin Costello/Redferns, via Getty ImagesJoining the BandHer disappointment in that record, combined with her reluctance to perform, caused Ms. McVie to put music aside for a time. But, in 1970, when Fleetwood Mac’s main draw, the guitarist Peter Green, suddenly quit the band after a ruinous acid trip, Mick Fleetwood invited her to fill out their ranks.Initially, she found the invitation to join her favorite band “a nerve-racking experience,” she told Rolling Stone. But she rose to the occasion by writing two of the catchiest songs on her first official release with the band, “Future Games” (1971). That release found the band leaning away from British blues and toward progressive Southern Californian folk-rock, aided by the addition of an American player, the singer, songwriter and guitarist Bob Welch.The band fine-tuned that sound on its 1972 set “Bare Trees,” which sold better and featured one of Ms. McVie’s most soulful songs, “Spare Me a Little of Your Love.” The band’s 1973 release, “Penguin,” went gold. The next collection, “Heroes Are Hard to Find,” was the band’s first to crack the U.S. Top 40. But it was only after the departure of Mr. Welch and the hiring of the romantically involved team of Ms. Nicks and Mr. Buckingham, for the 1975 album simply called “Fleetwood Mac,” that the band began to show its full commercial brio.Ms. McVie‘s song “Over My Head” began the groundswell by entering Billboard’s Top 20; her “Say You Love Me,” reached No. 11. After a slow buildup, the “Fleetwood Mac” album eventually hit Billboard’s summit.Just over a year and a half later, the group released “Rumours,” which generated outsize interest not only for its four Top 10 hits (two of them written by Ms. McVie) but also for several highly dramatic behind-the-scenes events within the band’s ranks, which they aired out in the lyrics and openly discussed in the press.During the creation of the album, the two couples in the band — Ms. Nicks and Mr. Buckingham and the married McVies — broke up. Ms. McVie’s song “You Make Loving Fun” celebrated an affair she was then having with the band’s lighting director. (At first, she told Mr. McVie that the song was about her dog.) The optimistic-sounding “Don’t Stop” was intended to point her ex-husband toward a new life without her.“We wrote those songs despite ourselves,” Ms. McVie told Mojo. “It was a therapeutic move. The only way we could get this stuff out was to say it, and it came out in a way that was difficult. Imagine trying to sing those songs onstage with the people you’re singing them about.”It helped dull the pain, she told Mojo, that “we were all very high,” adding, “I don’t think there was a sober day.” And the album’s megasuccess gave the members a different high. “The buzz of realizing you’ve written one of the best albums ever written; it was such a phenomenal time,” Ms. McVie told Attitude magazine in 2019.Ms. McVie, center, and the other members of Fleetwood Mac in 1978 after winning honors at the American Music Awards in Santa Monica, Calif. From left: Mr. Fleetwood, Ms. Nicks, Mr. McVie and Mr. Buckingham. Nick Ut/Associated PressBut the group yearned to stretch creatively. The result was the less commercial sound of the double-album follow-up, “Tusk,” released in 1979. Though not a success on anything near the scale of “Rumours,” it sold more than two million copies and produced three hits, including Ms. McVie’s “Think About Me.”Into the ’80sThe group moved smoothly into the new decade with the 1982 release “Mirage,” which hit No. 1 aided by Ms. McVie’s “Hold Me,” a Top Five hit that was inspired by her tumultuous relationship with the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson. Two years later, Ms. McVie issued a solo album that made the Top 30, while its strongest single, “Got a Hold on Me,” broke the Top 10.In 1987, the reconvened Fleetwood Mac issued “Tango in the Night,” which featured two hits written by Ms. McVie, “Everywhere” and “Little Lies.” (“Little Lies” was written with the Portuguese musician and songwriter Eddie Quintela, whom she had wed the year before. They would divorce in 2003.) Mr. Buckingham left the group shortly afterward, shaking the dynamic that had made their recordings stellar. The 1990 album “Behind the Mask” barely went gold, producing just one Top 40 single (“Save Me,” written by Ms. McVie), while “Time,” issued five years later, was the band’s first unsuccessful album in two decades.Ms. McVie didn’t tour with the band to support “Time.” But the early 1990s brought broad new attention to her hit “Don’t Stop” when it became the theme song for Bill Clinton’s successful presidential campaign. In 1993, Mr. Clinton persuaded the five musicians who played on that hit to reunite to perform it at an Inaugural ball.They came together again in 1997 for a tour, which produced the live album “The Dance,” one of the top-selling concert recordings of all time. Yet by the next year a growing fear of flying, and a desire to return to England from the band’s adopted home of Los Angeles, inspired Ms. McVie to retire to the English countryside.Five years later, she agreed to add some keyboard parts and backing vocals to a largely ignored Fleetwood Mac album, “Say You Will,” and in 2006 she produced a little-heard solo album, “In the Meantime,” which she recorded and wrote with her guitarist nephew Dan Perfect.Finally, in 2014, driven by boredom and a growing sense of isolation, she reunited with the prime Mac lineup for the massive “On With The Show” tour. In its wake, Ms. McVie began to write lots of new material, as did Mr. Buckingham, resulting in an album under both their names in 2017, as well as a joint tour. The full band also played shows that year; even though Mr. Buckingham was fired in 2018, Ms. McVie continued to tour with the group in a lineup that included Neil Finn of Crowded House and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. In 2021, Ms. McVie sold publishing rights to her entire 115-song catalog for an undisclosed sum.Information on her survivors was not immediately available.Ms. McVie in 1980. Two years later she had a Top Five hit with “Hold Me,” inspired by her tumultuous relationship with the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson. Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesThroughout her career, Ms. McVie took pride in never being categorized by her gender. “I kind of became one of the guys,” she told the British newspaper The Independent in 2019. “I was always treated with great respect.”While she always acknowledged the special chemistry of Fleetwood Mac’s most successful lineup, she believed her role transcended it.“Band members leave and other people take their place,” she told Rolling Stone, “but there was always that space where the piano should be.” More

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      Wilko Johnson, Scorching Guitarist and Punk Pioneer, Dies at 75

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      Known later as an actor on “Game of Thrones,” he helped lay the foundation for a 1970s rock revolution on England’s pub circuit.Wilko Johnson, the searing yet stoical guitarist for the British band Dr. Feelgood, whose ferociously minimalist fretwork served as an early influence for punk-rock luminaries in the 1970s, died on Nov. 21 at his home in Westcliff-on-Sea, England. He was 75.His death was announced on his social media channels.In 2013, Mr. Johnson was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given 10 months to live. A cancer specialist in Cambridge, England, soon discovered a rare form of tumor — Mr. Johnson called it, at six and a half pounds, “the size of a baby” — and removed it in an 11-hour operation.He lived for nearly another decade and took an unexpected detour into acting, playing Ser Ilyn Payne, a mute executioner, in the first two seasons of “Game of Thrones,” as well as recording and touring with Roger Daltrey of the Who.His legacy, however, is rooted in his tenure with Dr. Feelgood, a rowdy pub-rock band of the 1970s whose high-adrenaline take on rhythm and blues helped lay the groundwork for the punk-rock revolution to follow.In performance, he cut a wild-eyed figure. Often clad in a black suit, Mr. Johnson, who was prone to amphetamine use in his early days, appeared equal parts robotic and manic onstage, glaring murderously at the audience while pacing the stage frantically.His staccato guitar phrasing formed a sound all his own. Mr. Johnson, who was born left-handed and learned to play right-handed, avoided basic rock staples like barre chords and even picks, relying instead on quick, aggressive finger strums — he called them “stabs” — on his black Fender Telecaster. His playing was explosive, as percussive as it was melodic.Mr. Johnson in what was billed as a farewell concert in North London in 2013, after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told that he had only 10 months to live. Joel Ryan/Invision, via Associated Press“Wilko Johnson was a precursor of punk,” the British singer and songwriter Billy Bragg said on Twitter after Mr. Johnson’s death. “His guitar playing was angry and angular, but his presence — twitchy, confrontational, out of control — was something we’d never beheld before in U.K. pop.”Mr. Bragg added that John Lydon (otherwise known as Johnny Rotten) of the Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer of the Clash and Paul Weller of the Jam “learned a lot from his edgy demeanor.”The volcanic approach of Mr. Johnson and his bandmates — the singer Lee Brilleaux, the bassist John Sparks and the drummer John Martin — helped make Dr. Feelgood a must-see band on England’s pub-rock circuit in the early 1970s.The band’s second album, “Malpractice” (1975), reached No. 17 on the British album chart. The live album “Stupidity” rocketed to No. 1 the next year, providing “the antidote to all those prog-rock double concept albums,” the British music writer Clinton Heylin wrote in an email, “and not a guitar solo in sight.”While his guitar sound was forward-looking, Mr. Johnson drew from the soulful sounds of the past, working out demons from a difficult childhood on Canvey Island, a once-thriving resort town at the mouth of the Thames that became a hub of the petrochemical industry.“My first inspiration was the blues, but I realized I couldn’t write about freight trains and chain gangs,” he said in a 2013 interview with the London-based music magazine Uncut. “There weren’t any in Canvey. So I tried to keep it all in Essex, to get the landscape, the oil refineries, into songs.”Mr. Johnson in 1981. He often discussed his struggles with depression, which he said were “certainly rooted in my childhood.”David Corio/Michael Ochs Archive, via Getty ImagesWilko Johnson was born John Peter Wilkinson on Canvey Island on July 12, 1947. His father, a gas fitter, was violent and abusive, Mr. Johnson recalled in a 2013 interview with the British music magazine Mojo.“I hated him,” he said. “He wasn’t just uneducated, he was stupid with it. The older I get the more I look like him. Every time I shave, I see that bastard looking back at me. So I thought by eradicating his name I could start my own dynasty.”Mr. Johnson often discussed his struggles with depression, which he said in one interview was “certainly rooted in my childhood.”“But I don’t think you should blame that,” he added. “You grow into an adult and you are what you are, whatever the influences.”By the time his father died, when Mr. Johnson was 16, music had already become an escape for him: He played guitar in local bands while attending Westcliff High School for Boys, where, he said, his mother “used to scrub floors at the gas company to pay for our grammar school uniforms.”He went on to study English at Newcastle University, where he taught himself Old Icelandic so he could read the Icelandic sagas. It was one of many antiquarian literary interests in which he would indulge over the years. Mr. Heylin said he once found Mr. Johnson backstage during a soundcheck reading “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a 14th-century romance written in Middle English. “So much for the image of a bruiser who took up the guitar,” he wrote.After a trip to India following his university graduation, Mr. Johnson changed his name and joined with the other three musicians to form Dr. Feelgood in 1971. By the middle of the decade, the band was rolling in Britain but had failed to make a mark with record buyers in the United States.Yet the band was not unknown across the Atlantic. In a phone interview, the guitarist Chris Stein of Blondie recalled a party in 1975 at his band’s de facto headquarters, a loft on the Bowery near CBGB, the seminal New York punk club, before any of the major bands from that scene had made an album.Mr. Johnson, at left, performing in 1976 with the other members of Dr. Feelgood: the singer Lee Brilleaux, the drummer John Martin and the bassist John B. Sparks.Richard Creamer/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“We were having a huge party, and everyone in the scene was there — the Heartbreakers, the Ramones, probably some of the Talking Heads,” he said. “It went on all night.”Halfway through, Clem Burke, Blondie’s drummer, showed up after returning from a trip to London. He was enthusiastically waving a copy of Dr. Feelgood’s new album, “Malpractice.”“We put that on and played it repeatedly,” Mr. Stein said. “Everyone was transfixed. It was so simple and raw. I remember people saying, ‘This is what the Ramones are going to sound like when they make a record.’”Dr. Feelgood would not last long enough to ride the new wave it helped inspire. Rifts between Mr. Johnson and the other members came to a boiling point in 1977.“I think they lost it, they threw me out,” Mr. Johnson told Mojo. “The final argument that split the band came just after they had all my new songs in the can.” He added, “I was in a terrible state for months.”Mr. Johnson formed a new band, the Solid Senders, which released an album in 1978. He served a stint in Ian Dury’s band, the Blockheads, appearing on the group’s 1980 album, “Laughter.” He released “Ice on the Motorway,” the first of several albums under his own name, the next year, and he performed for decades with the Wilko Johnson Band.In 2009, the director Julien Temple released a documentary about Dr. Feelgood, “Oil City Confidential,” which “promotes Wilko Johnson as a 100-1 shot for the title of Greatest Living Englishman,” Peter Bradshaw wrote in a review in The Guardian.Mr. Johnson and Roger Daltrey of the Who, performing in 2014. The two released an album that year.Associated PressMr. Johnson’s survivors include his sons, Matthew and Simon, and a grandson. His wife, Irene Knight, died in 2004.While his pub-rock legacy became something of an obsession for rock connoisseurs and historians, Mr. Johnson experienced an unlikely career renaissance after his 2013 cancer scare. The album he made the next year with Mr. Daltrey, “Going Back Home,” which included songs from his Dr. Feelgood days as well as later compositions, reached No. 3 in Britain.“He’s one of those British guitarists that only the Brits make,” Mr. Daltrey said in a 2014 British television interview. “Wilko is a one-off, he really is.”By that point Mr. Johnson had found an unlikely home on premium cable, earning a role on “Game of Thrones” despite having no acting experience.“I got offered this part and it was a brilliant part, because the character that I play has had his tongue cut out, so I’ve got no lines to learn, right?” Mr. Johnson he said in a 2011 interview with the entertainment website Geeks of Doom. “I say, ‘What do you want me to do?’ ‘Just go around giving everyone dirty looks.’ I go, ‘I’m very good at that!’” More

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      in Theater

      Michael Feingold, Forceful Drama Critic, Dies at 77

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      For decades he wrote about theater in The Village Voice, but he also was a dramaturge and a Tony-nominated translator.Michael Feingold, whose learned writing about the theater was a fixture of The Village Voice for decades, and who was also a dramaturge, a translator and a Tony Award-nominated lyricist and adapter, died on Nov. 21 in Manhattan. He was 77.Daniel Pardo, one of his executors, confirmed the death, in a hospital. He said Mr. Feingold had had a longstanding heart condition.Mr. Feingold had an encyclopedic knowledge of plays and musicals, which he drew upon as he sized up productions, beginning in the early 1970s and continuing until recently. He did not pull punches, even if his target was a venerable veteran.He once dismissed Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose music is often said to be derivative, with this line: “Webber’s music isn’t so painful to hear, if you don’t mind its being so soiled from previous use.”In 2003 he assessed Neil Simon’s last produced play, “Rose’s Dilemma,” saying that it “doesn’t mean anything to anybody and doesn’t reveal any understanding, on its author’s part, of how plays are written.” Mr. Simon at that point had won multiple Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Theatrical trends did not impress Mr. Feingold either, especially Broadway’s late-20th-century fixation on big-budget musicals that, as he once put it, were about “large, mechanized objects” rather than characters. His 1991 takedown of Cameron Mackintosh’s production of “Miss Saigon,” which ran on Broadway for 10 years and was famed for its onstage helicopter, was part of theatrical lore.“Every civilization gets the theater it deserves, and we get ‘Miss Saigon,’ which means we can now say definitively that our civilization is over,” Mr. Feingold wrote. “After this, I see no way out but an aggressive clearance program: All the Broadway theaters must be demolished, without regard for their size, history or landmark status.”He went on to list other things that needed to be done away with, including the staff of The New York Times (where the critic Frank Rich had praised the show). Also, he said, “Cameron Mackintosh and his production staff should be slowly beaten to death with blunt instruments; this year’s Pulitzer Prize judges in drama could be used for the job.” Those judges had, weeks earlier, given the drama Pulitzer to Mr. Simon for “Lost in Yonkers.”But Mr. Feingold was not a critic who would just sit and snipe. He was active in creating for the theater himself, even while writing criticism for The Voice.He translated numerous European works for the American stage, especially those of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. His adaptation of the Brecht-Weill collaboration “Happy End” even made Broadway in 1977, with Meryl Streep and Christopher Lloyd in the cast. He shared Tony nominations for the book and for the score. He earned another Broadway credit in 1989 for his translation of another Brecht-Weill work, “Threepenny Opera.” His translation earned some favorable comments, but critics trashed the show, which featured the rock star Sting.Mr. Feingold spent time as literary manager for the Yale Repertory Theater, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., roles in which he would read scripts and often help shape ones that were accepted for production. The theater historian Jeffrey Sweet, in his book “The O’Neill: The Transformation of Modern American Theater” (2014), recounted the role played by Mr. Feingold in propelling the career of August Wilson.In 1982, when Mr. Wilson was still largely unknown, he brought his play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” to the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., where Mr. Feingold was doing dramaturgy. The first reading of the piece, directed by William Partlan, lasted more than four hours. Mr. Partlan and Mr. Feingold talked Mr. Wilson through the necessary trimming.“Cutting was a torment to him,” Mr. Feingold said in an interview for the book. “Cutting was always a terrible struggle for August because every word was blood.”Another reading was held, and this time the play was 90 minutes shorter. Mr. Rich, the Times critic, was in the audience and was impressed. His enthusiastic write-up in The Times jump-started Mr. Wilson’s career.“While there’s nothing novel about rich language in the theater,” Mr. Rich wrote, “it is quite unusual in 1982 to find a playwright who is willing to stake his claim to the stage not with stories or moral platitudes, but with the beauty and meaning of torrents of words.”Mr. Feingold wrote for The Voice from 1971 to 2013, when he became a victim of downsizing (though he would return later in a limited capacity). Robert Simonson, reporting on that dismissal in Playbill, said that Mr. Feingold’s writing was known for “erudition and understanding of theater history, both ancient and modern, and how current plays fit in with that continuum.”Mr. Feingold, right, in 2015 at the Obie Awards with, from left, the costume designer William Ivey Long, the performer Lea DeLaria and Heather Hitchens, the president of the American Theater Wing. Mr. Feingold was often a judge for the Obies, and he received one of his own in 2020.Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for American Theater WingMr. Feingold was born on May 5, 1945, in Chicago. His mother, Elsie (Silver) Feingold, taught piano, and his father, Bernard, managed a tannery.Michael grew up in Chicago and Highland Park, Ill., where the family moved when he was in high school. The Highland Park high school he attended had a drama club where, as he put it in an interview with the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project in 2018, “I did some inept acting and some slightly less inept directing.”He became further interested in theater at Columbia University, where he earned a degree in English and comparative literature in 1966. He had taken a senior seminar from Robert Brustein, who was then known primarily for his theater criticism, and in the fall of 1965 asked if Mr. Brustein would write him a recommendation to support his application to the Yale School of Drama. After Christmas break, he asked if Mr. Brustein had remembered to do so.“He smiled mysteriously and said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’” Mr. Feingold said in the oral history. “And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Read The Times tomorrow.’”The next day the newspaper reported that Mr. Brustein had just been named dean of Yale Drama.“So he wrote the recommendation and then he accepted it,” Mr. Feingold said, “feeling that he should take his own advice.”Mr. Feingold had wanted to study playwriting at Yale, and he did, but Mr. Brustein steered him toward criticism as well. He began writing for The Voice, and in 1983 he was named its chief drama critic.Mr. Feingold, who lived in Manhattan and who leaves no immediate survivors, was often a judge for the Obie Awards, which recognize Off Broadway work. In 2020 he received one of his own, a special citation recognizing “his extraordinary service to the theater.”He was, above all, a champion of theater that is bold and challenging. In 1993 he was the editor of “Grove New American Theater,” a play collection that included work by Karen Finley, Mac Wellman and other cutting-edge writers.In the introduction to that book, he lamented the cyclical nature of American theater: a period of innovation, then stagnation, repeated endlessly, stunting growth.“If the theater doesn’t grow up, the American public doesn’t grow up either,” he wrote. “Instead, it gets hotted up, every 20 years or so, over the same issues — sex, politics and religion — the three matters that art, according to some strangely permanent lunatic fringe of American opinion, must never be allowed to deal with, at least not in any open manner.” More