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      Lucy Simon, Singer and Broadway Composer, Is Dead at 82

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      She and her sister Carly Simon were a folk duo in the 1960s. Years later, she wrote the Tony-nominated music for “The Secret Garden.”Lucy Simon, who with her sister Carly began performing and recording as the Simon Sisters during the folk revival of the 1960s, and who then almost three decades later became a Tony Award-nominated composer for the long-running musical “The Secret Garden,” died on Thursday at her home in Piermont, N.Y., in Rockland County. She was 82.Her family said the cause was metastatic breast cancer.Ms. Simon was the middle of three musical sisters. Her younger sister, Carly, became a best-selling pop star after their folk-duo days, and her older sister, Joanna, was an opera singer with an international career. Joanna Simon, at 85, died in Manhattan a day before Lucy Simon’s death.Lucy and Carly started singing together as teenagers. Their father, Richard, was the “Simon” of Simon & Schuster, the publishing house, so a heady list of guests came through the household, including Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Their mother was Andrea (Heinemann) Simon.“We would go to cocktail parties and bring our guitar and sing,” Lucy Simon told The New York Times in 2015. “And people loved it.”Eventually, she added, they said to each other, “Let’s see if we can pay our way by singing.”Carly was a student at Sarah Lawrence College and Lucy was studying at the Cornell University-New York Hospital School of Nursing in New York in the early 1960s when, during summer break, they took a bus to Provincetown, Mass. (They had wanted to hitchhike, but their mother squashed that plan.) They quickly landed a gig at a bar called Moors, whose musical act had just been drafted. They arrived for their first show in carefully selected matching blouses.“Only later did we learn that the Moors was a gay and lesbian bar,” Carly Simon wrote in her 2015 memoir, “Boys in the Trees.” “What the mostly uncombed, ripped-jeans-and-motorcycle-jacketed audience made of these two sisters is lost to time. Lucy and I had taken our wardrobe at the Moors pretty seriously, and in return the audience probably thought we were twin milkmaids from Switzerland, or escapees from a nearby carnival.”They called themselves the Simon Sisters, even though, as Carly Simon wrote, “Lucy and I agreed that our stage name sounded schlocky and borderline embarrassing, plus neither of us wanted to be labeled — or dismissed — as just another novelty sister act.”In that book, Ms. Simon recalled the sisterly dynamic during that first foray into performing.“Anyone paying close attention would have seen how hard I, Carly, the younger sister, was trying to look and act like Lucy, the older sister,” she wrote. “I was now taller than Lucy, but emotionally speaking, Lucy was still the high-up one, the light, the beauty, the center of it all. Then as now, my sister was my grounding influence, my heroine, my pilot.”Soon they had a contract with a management company and were booked into the Bitter End, the Greenwich Village club that gave numerous future stars their start. An appearance on the musical variety television show “Hootenanny” in the spring of 1963 (along with the Chad Mitchell Trio and the Smothers Brothers) further boosted their profile. They appeared on the show again in early 1964.Some years earlier, Lucy Simon had composed a setting of the Eugene Field children’s poem “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” and the song became a staple of the Simon Sisters’ performances. Released as a single in 1964, titled “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” it reached No. 73 on the Billboard chart. It also anchored one of the two albums they quickly recorded.The two sisters toured for a time, but after her marriage in 1967 to Dr. David Y. Levine, a psychiatrist, Lucy Simon pulled back from performing to focus on their two children. In 1975, she released a solo album, titled simply “Lucy Simon,” followed in 1977 by another, “Stolen Time.” But she found she had lost her zeal for performing.In the early 1980s, she and her husband produced two compilation albums featuring James Taylor, her sister Carly, Linda Ronstadt, Bette Midler and other stars singing children’s songs. The albums, “In Harmony: A Sesame Street Record” and “In Harmony 2,” both won Grammy Awards for best children’s album.In the 1980s, Ms. Simon took a stab at musical theater, working on an effort to make a musical out of the “Little House on the Prairie” stories. That project never bore fruit, but a connection provided by her sister Joanna led her to one that did.Joanna Simon was for a time the arts correspondent for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS, and in 1988 she interviewed the playwright Marsha Norman. She asked Ms. Norman what she was working on, and the playwright mentioned an adaptation of “The Secret Garden,” the Frances Hodgson Burnett children’s novel, and said that she and the producer Heidi Landesman were looking for a composer.Lucy, left, and Carly Simon singing in Shubert Alley along Broadway in 1982. Lucy Simon was later nominated for a Tony Award for best original score, for the hit musical “The Secret Garden.”Nancy Kaye/Associated PressLucy Simon proved to be a good fit for Ms. Norman’s lyrics. The show opened on Broadway in April 1991. Reviews were mixed — Frank Rich, in The Times, said that Ms. Simon’s music was “fetching when limning the deep feelings locked within the story’s family constellations” but not always successful — yet the show was a hit, giving 709 performances over almost two years. Ms. Simon earned a Tony nomination for best original score. (The award went to Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green for “The Will Rogers Follies.”)Ms. Simon reached Broadway again in 2015 as composer of the musical “Doctor Zhivago,” but the show lasted just 23 performances.Lucy Elizabeth Simon was born on May 5, 1940, in Manhattan.“We all came out singing,” she once said of herself and her sisters. “And we kept on singing. At dinner we wouldn’t just say, ‘Please pass the salt, thank you.’ We’d sing it. Sometimes in the style of Gershwin. Sometimes as a lieder.”Carly Simon wrote in her book that the pass-the-salt singing started as a way to help her — Carly — with a vexing stammer. Their mother had suggested that instead of speaking the phrase, Carly try singing it. With Joanna and Lucy joining in to encourage their sister, it worked.Lucy and Carly Simon during an interview with The New York Times in 2015 at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.Ryan Conaty for The New York TimesLucy Simon’s greatest hit as a folk singer, the “Winkin’” song, had a self-help element to it. At 14, she was given a school assignment to memorize a poem, but dyslexia made it difficult. She found that she could memorize the Eugene Field poem by setting it to music. Her version was later recorded by numerous artists.Ms. Simon’s credits also included composing the music for a wild 1993 HBO movie, “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom,” which won Emmy Awards for Holly Hunter and Beau Bridges.Ms. Simon’s brother, Peter, a photographer, died in 2018. In addition to her husband and her sister Carly, she is survived by two children, Julie Simon and James Levine, and four grandchildren.In 1985, Ms. Simon was in the hospital for surgery. She told a reporter that her two sisters had turned up to give her support.“When the stretcher came to take me to the operating room, we sang three-part harmony,” she said. “It lifted me.” More

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      Jody Miller, Singer of ‘Queen of the House’ and More, Dies at 80

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      Best known for a 1965 homemaker’s reply to a hobo’s refrain, the Oklahoma native had a hit the same year with the very different “Home of the Brave.”Jody Miller, a versatile singer with a rich, resonant voice who won a Grammy Award for “Queen of the House,” a homemaker’s reply to a hobo’s refrain, and had her biggest hit with a teenage anthem, “Home of the Brave,” died on Oct. 6 at her home in Blanchard, Okla. She was 80.Her daughter, Robin Brooks, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Signed by Capitol Records as a folk singer, Ms. Miller released her first album in 1963 and cracked the Billboard Hot 100 the next year with the pop song “He Walks Like a Man.”Her career took off in 1965 when Capitol, seizing on the popularity of Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” had her hastily record “Queen of the House,” which set distaff lyrics by Mary Taylor to Mr. Miller’s melody and finger-snapping rhythm.Where Mr. Miller (no relation to Ms. Miller, although they both grew up in Oklahoma) sang of “trailers for sale or rent; rooms to let, 50 cents,” Ms. Miller rhapsodized in a similarly carefree fashion about being “up every day at six; bacon and eggs to fix.”“I’ll get a maid someday,” she sang, “but till then I’m queen of the house.”The song was a crossover hit, reaching No. 5 on Billboard’s country chart and No. 12 on the Hot 100, and earned Ms. Miller the Grammy Award for best female country and western vocal performance in 1966. (Mr. Miller won five Grammys for “King of the Road” that year.)That accolade did not prevent some country radio stations from shunning another single she put out in 1965, “Home of the Brave,” an empathetic ode to a boy who is bullied and barred from school because he doesn’t wear his hair “like he wore it before,” has “funny clothes” and is “not like them and they can’t ignore it.”“Home of the brave, land of the free,” went the chorus of the song, written by the Brill Building stalwarts Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. “Why won’t you let him be what he wants to be?”Despite the opposition of some radio programmers to its anti-establishment theme, “Home of the Brave” became Ms. Miller’s best-selling U.S. single.“I loved that song,” she said in a 2020 interview for an Oklahoma State University oral history project. “Unfortunately, it got a bad rap.”Over time, Ms. Miller landed about 30 singles on the Billboard charts, 27 of them in the country category and several of those in the top five. In the 1970s she worked with the prominent Nashville producer Billy Sherrill, who guided her to another crossover hit with a cover of the Chiffons’ 1963 song “He’s So Fine,” which reached No. 5 on the country chart and No. 53 on the pop chart in 1971.Ms. Miller made her last major-label album in 1979, then mostly stayed in Oklahoma to raise her daughter and to help her husband, Monty Brooks, with his quarter-horse business. She resurfaced later with an album of patriotic material and then, after becoming a born-again Christian, sang gospel music.“I like to sing all kinds of songs, so I didn’t fit into a mold,” she told The Tulsa World in 2018.Ms. Miller at the Grammy Awards in 1966 with her fellow winners Johnny Mandel, left, and Herb Alpert. Her “Queen of the House” was named the year’s best female country vocal performance.Bettmann/Getty ImagesMyrna Joy Miller, the youngest of five sisters, was born on Nov. 29, 1941, in Phoenix, a stop on her family’s move from Oklahoma to Oakland, Calif., where her father, Johnny Bell Miller, a mechanic, had a job lined up. Her mother, Fay (Harper) Miller, was a homemaker.The family often played music and sang together. Johnny Miller was a skilled fiddler, and Myrna’s sister Patricia, whom she idolized, taught her to harmonize.Aware of their daughter’s talent, Myrna’s parents entered her in singing contests, and her father sneaked her into bars, where she would climb atop tables and, she said, “sing my heart out.” She became known as “the little girl with the big voice,” according to Hugh Foley’s book “Oklahoma Music Guide III.”The Millers eventually divorced, and when Myrna was 8 she was put on a bus to Blanchard, a small town just outside Oklahoma City, to live with her paternal grandmother.Two songs Ms. Miller heard growing up made her want to become a professional singer. One was Mario Lanza’s version of “La Donna è Mobile” from “Rigoletto.” The other was a No. 1 hit for Debbie Reynolds in 1957.“The day I knew I would devote my life to singing was the day I first heard Debbie Reynolds sing ‘Tammy,’” Ms. Miller wrote on her website.After graduating from Blanchard High School in 1959, she got a job as a secretary in Oklahoma City and moved into the Y.W.C.A., where she would practice the folk songs she learned at a local library.Her hopes of a recording career got a jump-start one night at a coffeehouse where she was the opening act for the singer Mike Settle. The popular folk trio the Limeliters came in to see Mr. Settle, but also caught Ms. Miller’s performance. Impressed, the group’s Lou Gottlieb urged her to move to California if she was serious about a singing career.She married her high school sweetheart, Mr. Brooks, in January 1962, and together they headed to Los Angeles. After arriving, they contacted the actor Dale Robertson, a fellow Oklahoman and a friend of Mr. Brooks’s family. He helped arrange an audition at Capitol Records, which quickly signed Ms. Miller and suggested that she change her first name.Her first record, “Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe,” was a collection of folk songs on which she was accompanied by session players like Glen Campbell and, she told the Oklahoma publication 405 magazine in 2012, an “unknown teenager” providing some of the backup vocals who later became known as Cher.The record’s timing was unfortunate.“By the time I cut my first LP with Capitol, folk music was on its way out,” she said. Thus began her pivot to pop and country and a career that took her to, among other places, Hawaii on a tour with the Beach Boys; television shows like “American Bandstand,” “Hullabaloo” and “Hee Haw”; and a 15-year run as a top draw in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe.Her album of patriotic songs, recorded in 1987, found its way to Vice President George Bush, who invited her to sing at his campaign rallies when he ran for president the next year. When he was elected, she sang at an inaugural ball.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Miller is survived by two sisters, Carol Cooper and Vivian Cole, and two grandchildren. Her husband died in 2014.Ms. Miller’s final recording, “Wayfaring Stranger,” is to be released next month on what would have been her 81st birthday. A mix of country and gospel songs, it includes a new version of “Queen of the House” and the title song, a 19th-century spiritual that was part of her repertoire when she started out as a folk singer 60 years ago.Alain Delaquérière contributed research. More

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      Ahmed Alshaiba, Yemeni Music Master, Is Dead at 32

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      He taught himself to play the oud, a lutelike stringed instrument, and made a splash on social media with his cover versions of pop songs.Ahmed Alshaiba, who as a teenager in Yemen taught himself the oud, a fretless lutelike Arabic instrument, and who after immigrating to the United States built an online following with his cover versions of pop songs that deftly blended Western and Middle Eastern influences, died on Sept. 28 in a car accident. He was 32.His brother Ali Shibah confirmed the death, in New York State, but provided no other details. Working from a studio in his apartment in Mamaroneck, N.Y., in Westchester County, Mr. Alshaiba recorded videos of himself playing instrumental versions of popular songs, movie themes and Arabic music — sometimes with other musicians, sometimes unaccompanied — and posted them on his YouTube channel. He also played guitar and percussion instruments like the congas and the daf, a large drum.His oud playing added a distinctly Middle Eastern sound to his versions of Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito,” which has had nearly 7.3 million YouTube views; Alan Walker’s “Faded” (6.9 million); Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” (6.8 million); and other songs. His oud seems to deepen the mood of alienation that Simon & Garfunkel brought to “The Sound of Silence” (nearly 1.8 million), and brings a different kind of energy to Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” (1.4 million).In all, his YouTube videos have generated nearly 113 million views.A charismatic performer who interacted enthusiastically with his fans on YouTube and social media platforms, Mr. Alshaiba also produced his own takes on music from “Star Wars” (during which he wore disguises like a Darth Vader helmet and a Yoda mask) and “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.”One of the last videos he posted before his death, on TikTok, was a snippet of his version of the music from HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” the prequel to “Game of Thrones.”“He was one of a kind,” Ravid Kahalani, a founder of Yemen Blues, a band that is influenced by Yemenite, West African, Latin and jazz music, said in a phone interview. Mr. Alshaiba, he added, “had a different intelligence on the oud and a special, soulful touch that was softer than other oud players.”Mr. Alshaiba occasionally played with or opened for Yemen Blues at Joe’s Pub, Brooklyn Bowl and Symphony Space in New York City. He also performed in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait.But, his brother Ali said in an email, he also “did lots of charity shows; that’s why he remained broke.”Mr. Kahalani said that he once asked Mr. Alshaiba why he recorded so many covers.“He said to me something beautiful: ‘I want people to understand that the oud is not only Arabic, it’s everything.’ But the really special thing is how he played traditional Yemeni music, which really opened the gates of God.”Ahmed Alshaiba was born Ahmed Nasser Shibah on May 15, 1990, in Sana, Yemen. His father, Nasser, was a businessman, and his mother, Fanda Zeyad, was a homemaker.Ahmed had no musical ambitions until he was 14, when he watched his brother Hussein take lessons on an oud that their sister Malkah had bought him as a gift in Egypt.“When my other brother lost interest,” Ali Shibah said, “Ahmed picked up the oud and started his self-taught journey.”In an interview with The Times of Israel in 2018, Mr. Alshaiba said: “I would play for hours until my fingers hurt. I would listen to a song and could play it immediately after.” He skipped school to spend time in a music store where, he said, “I would help clean and tune every shipment of oud instruments, and in return the owner would let me stay in the store and practice.”Mr. Alshaiba moved to the United States in 2012 and worked for several years at his brother’s convenience store in Mamaroneck while starting to post cover songs online. In 2017, the Australian singer Sia posted his version of her song “The Greatest” which has more than 1.7 million views on Instagram“I was having doubts about succeeding in the U.S.,” Mr. Alshaiba told The Times of Israel, “but this gesture gave me the validation I needed.” Encouraged, he soon left his job to pursue music full time.A month before Mr. Alshaiba died, he released his first album, “Malahide,” which he produced himself and had been working on for several years. He wrote all the songs.In addition to his sister Malkah Shibah and his brothers Ali and Hussein Shibah, Mr. Alshaiba is survived by his mother; two other sisters, Fauziah and Thahaba Shibah; and two other brothers, Mohammed and Najib Shibah.In an interview and mini-concert at TED Studios in 2017, Mr. Alshaiba discussed his passion for the oud.“When you’re playing this instrument, you’re hugging it,” he said. “So you’re feeling the notes coming out in the body of this lovely instrument.” More

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      Leslie Jordan, ‘Will & Grace’ Actor and Instagram Star, Dies at 67

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      Shows like “Will & Grace” made him a familiar face, then the pandemic brought new fame. He was killed in a car crash in Hollywood.Leslie Jordan, a comic actor who after a late start in his performing career became a recognizable face from roles on numerous television shows, most notably “Will & Grace,” then achieved even more fame during the pandemic when his quirky homemade videos attracted millions of Instagram followers, died on Monday in a car crash in Hollywood, Calif. He was 67.David Shaul of the BRS/Gage Talent Agency, which represented him, confirmed the death. News reports quoting the police said Mr. Jordan’s car crashed into the side of a building after he had apparently experienced a medical emergency. A spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department confirmed that someone driving a BMW collided with a wall in Hollywood at 9:30 a.m. and died, but he declined to identify the victim.“Not only was he a mega-talent and joy to work with,” Mr. Shaul said of Mr. Jordan by email, “but he provided an emotional sanctuary to the nation at one of its most difficult times.”That was a reference to Mr. Jordan’s surprising foray into viral videos during the pandemic. Sitting out Covid-19 in Tennessee, near his family, he began posting vignettes on Instagram — simple, amusing moments from his life — and was surprised to find his number of followers balloon into the millions. He had accumulated more than 130 television and film credits, so he hadn’t been exactly undiscovered, but the Instagram stardom at age 65 was an unexpected treat.“I’ve loved attention, wanted it my whole career,” he told The New York Times in 2020, “and I’ve never gotten this kind of attention.”He also found that he had become a sort of de facto comforter to those fans.“What I love, though,” he said, “are people that pull me aside and say: ‘Listen, I don’t want to bother you, but I’ve had a rough go. I’ve been locked down. I’ve got kids, and I looked forward to your posts and you really, really helped me through this tough time.’ When people tell you things like that, you realize comedy is important.”Mr. Jordan in 2020. The popular home videos he made during the Covid-19 pandemic “provided an emotional sanctuary to the nation at one of its most difficult times,” his agent said.Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesComedy came easily to Mr. Jordan, though it took him a while to find his way to a performing career. At under five feet tall, he was small enough that in his 20s he made a stab at becoming a jockey. But in his later 20s he gave up that idea, earned a theater degree and in 1982 took a bus to Hollywood.It was a difficult period for a gay actor like Mr. Jordan to find work, but he began getting jobs, first in commercials.“I was like Flo,” he said in the 2020 interview, a reference to the Progressive Insurance pitchwoman. “People would recognize me. I was the PIP Printing guy. I was the elevator operator to Hamburger Hell for Taco Bell, where you went if you didn’t eat tacos.”He began to get TV roles in 1986 — guests spots on “The Fall Guy,” “Murphy Brown,” “Newhart” and others, then recurring roles on “The People Next Door,” “Top of the Heap,” “Reasonable Doubts,” “Hearts Afire” and more.He made a particular impression on the sitcom “Will & Grace,” about the friendship between a gay lawyer and a straight interior designer sharing a New York City apartment. Mr. Jordan played the tart-tongued socialite Beverley Leslie, appearing both in the original series beginning in 2001 and in the recent reboot.In 2006, he won an Emmy for the role, for outstanding guest actor in a comedy series.Leslie Allen Jordan was born on April 29, 1955, in Memphis to Allen and Peggy Ann Jordan and was raised in Chattanooga, Tenn. His Southern drawl was as distinctive a part of his résumé as his height.Mr. Jordan said he knew from early in life that he was gay — he liked to say that he went directly from his mother’s womb into her high heels and had been “on the prance ever since.”The household was conservative, and his father, who was in the Army and died in a plane crash when Leslie was 11, was concerned enough about Leslie’s effeminate qualities to send his son to an all-boys summer camp one year. As Mr. Jordan told the story to The Times in 2020, at the camp’s parents day, awards were handed out, with the moms and dads looking on.“So here’s one for the best archer, here’s for the best horseback rider, here’s for the best swim person,” he said, “and I didn’t win anything. And my mother said my dad was just sinking lower and lower.”But the staff eventually brought out a trophy, presented it to Leslie, and someone announced: “This is for the best all-around camper. We have this kid who wasn’t actually the best at anything, but boy, he sure did make us laugh.”He loved horses but realized he wasn’t suited to be a jockey.“People think it’s size, or something,” he told The Telegraph of Britain in 2021. “It has nothing to do with that. You have to weigh about 104 pounds, and honey, my ass alone weighs 104.”When he decided to try showbiz, he said, “I had $1,200 that mother pinned into my underpants,” and he had to decide which direction to go from Tennessee, to New York or Hollywood.“If I was going to starve, I wanted to starve with a tan,” he said. He headed west.Mr. Jordan in 2010. In recent years he was much in demand, with recurring roles on several TV series.Richard Perry/The New York TimesAs he wrote in his book “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet” (2008), he knew that being gay might not help his prospects in Hollywood.“I decided I was going to make a real effort to ‘butch it up’ and hide any signs that I was a Big Homo,” he wrote. “The funny thing is, I am, without a doubt, the gayest man I know.”Once he began landing roles, they came quickly, but Mr. Jordan also had substance abuse problems.“I tell people: If you want to get sober, try 27 days in the L.A. men’s county jail,” he told The Guardian in 2021. At 42, he kicked his addictions to alcohol and crystal meth.Information on his survivors was not immediately available.Most of Mr. Jordan’s work was in television, but he also took the occasional film role, including in “The Help” (2011). He also had a one-man stage show that he performed frequently, titled, like his first book, “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet.” It was an autobiographical collection of stories.“I am a high school cheerleader stuck in a 55-year-old man’s body,” he confessed in one memorable line. “If you were to cut me open, Hannah Montana would jump out.”David Rooney reviewed it for The Times when the show was presented in New York in 2010.“Many gay rites-of-passage stories are echoed here: hostile small-town environment (Chattanooga, Tenn.); rigidly masculine father; humor as armor against bullies; unrequited loves; drug and alcohol dependency; internal homophobia; weakness for rough trade,” Mr. Rooney wrote. “But Mr. Jordan’s candor gives them a fresh spin.”In recent years Mr. Jordan was much in demand, with recurring roles in the TV series “American Horror Story,” “Call Me Kat,” “The Cool Kids” and “Living the Dream.” In 2021 he published another book, “How Y’All Doing? Misadventures and Mischief From a Life Well Lived.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Geoff Nuttall, First Among Equals in Acclaimed Quartet, Dies at 56

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      With the St. Lawrence Quartet, he played with such enthusiasm that often he swept himself from his seat. At the Spoleto Festival USA, he was a shaping force.Geoff Nuttall, a charismatic musician who played boldly as the first violinist of the acclaimed St. Lawrence String Quartet for more than three decades, and who was widely admired as the leader of the chamber music series at the Spoleto Festival USA, died on Wednesday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 56.The cause was pancreatic cancer, the quartet’s management company, David Rowe Artists, said.Mr. Nuttall founded the St. Lawrence in Toronto in 1989 with the violinist Barry Shiffman, the violist Lesley Robertson and the cellist Marina Hoover. Training with the fabled Tokyo and Emerson quartets and taking first prize at the Banff International String Quartet Competition in Canada in 1992, they came to prominence quickly and distinctively, with Mr. Nuttall first among the group’s equals.“The quartet’s stage manner was hip and casual,” though it had “an unmistakable seriousness of intent,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New York Times after its New York debut at the 92nd Street Y in 1992. “The performance had a dangerous, unchecked edge,” Mr. Ross reflected on a performance of Berg, “I have never heard anything quite like it. In the future, this quartet should make its presence felt.”The St. Lawrence did so. Its repertoire was individual, even quirky, focusing as strongly on new music by the likes of Osvaldo Golijov as on older scores. It recorded pieces by the contemporary composers Jonathan Berger and John Adams with the same intensity as those by Shostakovich, Schumann and Tchaikovsky that it released on the EMI label. (Mr. Adams wrote the St. Lawrence two quartets as well as the quartet-and-orchestra “Absolute Jest.”)If the quartet’s palpable commitment remained characteristic — even as the violinists Scott St. John and Owen Dalby and the cellist Christopher Costanza replaced outgoing members — that was because its brio seemed to emanate bodily from its longstanding first violinist. Mr. Nuttall often played with such enthusiasm that he swept himself from his seat.“Nuttall is the St. Lawrence’s ‘secret weapon,’ as the rest of the group admits,” Mr. Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2001. “His phrasing often upsets the central pulse of a movement, and the others either follow his lead or scramble to restore rhythmic order. As a result, despite the rigorous discipline of the quartet’s rehearsal process, many passages sound riotously improvised.”Mr. Nuttall’s electrifying ability to engage flowed from his deep desire to communicate even at the expense of other, blandly technical virtues, and he was fully aware of the risks of failure; indeed, he welcomed them as imperative to a good performance.Mr. Nuttall, a vinyl collector whose living room held more than 10,000 LPs that offered as much inspiration from Miles Davis as from the Busch Quartet, told American Artscape in 2014: “A string quartet is officially really about being together. You really want to be unified and blended together. And I remember being inspired by ‘Nashville Skyline,’ the Bob Dylan record. He does a duet with Johnny Cash. It’s such a great record, and they’re not together at all. They’re totally doing their own thing, but it’s totally unified and really powerful at the same time.”“And that was a great lesson on ensemble playing,” he continued. “Because if each one of the duet is doing their own thing in a really committed and convincing way, even if you’re saying the same thing, which they were in that case, it can be more powerful.”Mr. Nuttall performing with Livia Sohn in 2010 in a chamber music concert in New York. Jennifer Taylor for The New York TimesGeoffrey Winston Nuttall was born on Nov. 22, 1965, in College Station, Texas, to John and Suzanne (Shantz) Nuttall. His mother was a nurse; his father a physics professor who relocated from Texas A&M University to the University of Western Ontario, Canada, when Geoff was 8.He took up the violin shortly after the family moved to London, Ontario, and played in his first quartet at age 10 or 11. He studied with Lorand Fenyves, a renowned former concertmaster of the Israel Philharmonic and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, at the University of Toronto, the school from which he graduated.With the St. Lawrence, Mr. Nuttall was later in residence at the Juilliard School, Yale University, and the Hartt School of Music. He and his colleagues joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1998, leading its chamber music program and making the music of Franz Joseph Haydn — Mr. Nuttall’s favorite composer and one whom he thought was perpetually overlooked — as much a core of their campus activities as of their concert programs.“Arrestingly dynamic teamsmanship among the four players allowed every gesture to be for the moment and every moment to be in your face,” the Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed wrote of a 2018 recital of Haydn’s six Op. 20 works, which the St. Lawrence also recorded with gritty drama rather than poised elegance. “The string quartet as theater doesn’t get more exhilarating.”What Haydn’s music demands, Mr. Nuttall said in a presentation at Google in 2017, is “active participation, active listening, following the game.”He had a rare talent for inspiring exactly that with his spirited talks during concerts about what made music worth getting fully involved with. That, along with his eclectic taste in repertoire, made him the ideal frontman to succeed Charles Wadsworth as the director and host of the early-summer Spoleto chamber series in Charleston, S.C., in 2009.Mr. Nuttall performing this year. He was 10 or 11 when he first played in a quartet. Bill StruhsThe St. Lawrence played regularly at Spoleto from 1995, and for Mr. Nuttall, South Carolina became a home away from his Bay Area home.He married Livia Sohn, another violinist, in a Charleston garden in 2000. She survives him along with their two sons, Jack and Ellis, his mother, and his sister, Jenny Nuttall. “It was an inspired choice,” Johanna Keller wrote of the Spoleto appointment in The New York Times in 2013. “Mr. Nuttall turns out to be chamber music’s Jon Stewart,” she continued, a “creatively daring, physically talented performer who can go goofball in a nanosecond, maintaining a veneer of entertainment while educating his base about serious matters.”Mr. Nuttall did not particularly mind the comparison.“Whether you’re 7 years old and have never seen a violin up close or you’re an expert with a doctorate in music, I want you to leave humming, elated, or having felt emotionally put through the ringer,” he explained to the Charleston Magazine in 2019.“Music connects us all. There’s no secret code to understand in order to feel moved.” More

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      Lucy Simon, Singer and Broadway Composer, Dies at 82

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      She and her sister Carly Simon were a folk duo in the 1960s. Years later, she wrote the Tony-nominated music for “The Secret Garden.”Lucy Simon, who with her sister Carly began performing and recording as the Simon Sisters during the folk revival of the 1960s, and who then almost three decades later became a Tony Award-nominated composer for the long-running musical “The Secret Garden,” died on Thursday at her home in Piermont, N.Y., in Rockland County. She was 82.Her family said the cause was metastatic breast cancer.Ms. Simon was the middle of three musical sisters. Her younger sister, Carly, became a best-selling pop star after their folk-duo days, and her older sister, Joanna, was an opera singer with an international career. Joanna Simon, at 85, died in Manhattan a day before Lucy Simon’s death.Lucy and Carly started singing together as teenagers. Their father, Richard, was the “Simon” of Simon & Schuster, the publishing house, so a heady list of guests came through the household, including Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Their mother was Andrea (Heinemann) Simon.“We would go to cocktail parties and bring our guitar and sing,” Lucy Simon told The New York Times in 2015. “And people loved it.”Eventually, she added, they said to each other, “Let’s see if we can pay our way by singing.”Carly was a student at Sarah Lawrence College and Lucy was studying at the Cornell University-New York Hospital School of Nursing in New York in the early 1960s when, during summer break, they took a bus to Provincetown, Mass. (They had wanted to hitchhike, but their mother squashed that plan.) They quickly landed a gig at a bar called Moors, whose musical act had just been drafted. They arrived for their first show in carefully selected matching blouses.“Only later did we learn that the Moors was a gay and lesbian bar,” Carly Simon wrote in her 2015 memoir, “Boys in the Trees.” “What the mostly uncombed, ripped-jeans-and-motorcycle-jacketed audience made of these two sisters is lost to time. Lucy and I had taken our wardrobe at the Moors pretty seriously, and in return the audience probably thought we were twin milkmaids from Switzerland, or escapees from a nearby carnival.”They called themselves the Simon Sisters, even though, as Carly Simon wrote, “Lucy and I agreed that our stage name sounded schlocky and borderline embarrassing, plus neither of us wanted to be labeled — or dismissed — as just another novelty sister act.”In that book, Ms. Simon recalled the sisterly dynamic during that first foray into performing.“Anyone paying close attention would have seen how hard I, Carly, the younger sister, was trying to look and act like Lucy, the older sister,” she wrote. “I was now taller than Lucy, but emotionally speaking, Lucy was still the high-up one, the light, the beauty, the center of it all. Then as now, my sister was my grounding influence, my heroine, my pilot.”Soon they had a contract with a management company and were booked into the Bitter End, the Greenwich Village club that gave numerous future stars their start. An appearance on the musical variety television show “Hootenanny” in the spring of 1963 (along with the Chad Mitchell Trio and the Smothers Brothers) further boosted their profile. They appeared on the show again in early 1964.Some years earlier, Lucy Simon had composed a setting of the Eugene Field children’s poem “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” and the song became a staple of the Simon Sisters’ performances. Released as a single in 1964, titled “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” it reached No. 73 on the Billboard chart. It also anchored one of the two albums they quickly recorded.The two sisters toured for a time, but after her marriage in 1967 to Dr. David Y. Levine, a psychiatrist, Lucy Simon pulled back from performing to focus on their two children. In 1975, she released a solo album, titled simply “Lucy Simon,” followed in 1977 by another, “Stolen Time.” But she found she had lost her zeal for performing.In the early 1980s, she and her husband produced two compilation albums featuring James Taylor, her sister Carly, Linda Ronstadt, Bette Midler and other stars singing children’s songs. The albums, “In Harmony: A Sesame Street Recording” and “In Harmony 2,” both won Grammy Awards for best children’s album.In the 1980s, Ms. Simon took a stab at musical theater, working on an effort to make a musical out of the “Little House on the Prairie” stories. That project never bore fruit, but a connection provided by her sister Joanna led her to one that did.Joanna Simon was for a time the arts correspondent for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS, and in 1988 she interviewed the playwright Marsha Norman. She asked Ms. Norman what she was working on, and the playwright mentioned an adaptation of “The Secret Garden,” the Frances Hodgson Burnett children’s novel, and said that she and the producer Heidi Landesman were looking for a composer.Lucy, left, and Carly Simon singing in Shubert Alley along Broadway in 1982. Lucy Simon was later nominated for a Tony Award for best original score, for the hit musical “The Secret Garden.”Nancy Kaye/Associated PressLucy Simon proved to be a good fit for Ms. Norman’s lyrics. The show opened on Broadway in April 1991. Reviews were mixed — Frank Rich, in The Times, said that Ms. Simon’s music was “fetching when limning the deep feelings locked within the story’s family constellations” but not always successful — yet the show was a hit, giving 709 performances over almost two years. Ms. Simon earned a Tony nomination for best original score. (The award went to Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green for “The Will Rogers Follies.”)Ms. Simon reached Broadway again in 2015 as composer of the musical “Doctor Zhivago,” but the show lasted just 23 performances.That year, in the interview with The Times, she said that she thought music had the potential to be more emotionally powerful than other art forms, like dance or painting.“There’s something intangible and mysterious about music,” she said. “It can get you more; you can sob more. It’s got a stronger engine.”Lucy Elizabeth Simon was born on May 5, 1940, in Manhattan.“We all came out singing,’‘ she once said of herself and her sisters. “And we kept on singing. At dinner we wouldn’t just say, ‘Please pass the salt, thank you.’ We’d sing it. Sometimes in the style of Gershwin. Sometimes as a lieder.”Carly Simon wrote in her book that the pass-the-salt singing started as a way to help her — Carly — with a vexing stammer. Their mother had suggested that instead of speaking the phrase, Carly try singing it. With Joanna and Lucy joining in to encourage their sister, it worked.Lucy and Carly Simon during an interview with The New York Times in 2015 at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.Ryan Conaty for The New York TimesLucy Simon’s greatest hit as a folk singer, the “Winkin’” song, had a self-help element to it. At 14, she was given a school assignment to memorize a poem, but dyslexia made it difficult. She found that she could memorize the Eugene Field poem by setting it to music. Her version was later recorded by numerous artists.Ms. Simon’s credits also included composing the music for a wild 1993 HBO movie, “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom,” which won Emmy Awards for Holly Hunter and Beau Bridges.Ms. Simon’s brother, Peter, a photographer, died in 2018. In addition to her husband and her sister Carly, she is survived by two children, Julie Simon and James Levine, and four grandchildren.In 1985, Ms. Simon was in the hospital for surgery. She told a reporter that her two sisters had turned up to give her support.“When the stretcher came to take me to the operating room, we sang three-part harmony,” she said. “It lifted me.” More

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      Lenny Lipton, ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ Lyricist and 3-D Film Pioneer, 82, Dies

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      He used the royalties earned from the hit folk song, based on a poem he wrote in college, to fund decades of research into stereoscopic projection.Lenny Lipton, who as a college freshman wrote the lyrics to the classic folk tune “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and then used the song’s bountiful royalties to fund years of pioneering research in 3-D filmmaking, died on Oct. 5 in Los Angeles. He was 82.His wife, Julia Lipton, said the cause was brain cancer.Few people leave much of a mark on popular culture; Mr. Lipton was among the few who got to leave two, and in such wildly divergent corners as folk music and cinema technology.He was a 19-year-old student at Cornell when he sat down at the typewriter of his friend and fellow physics major Peter Yarrow. He had just read a 1936 poem by Ogden Nash titled “The Tale of Custard the Dragon” and felt inspired to write his own.Some time later, Mr. Yarrow found the poem, still in his typewriter, and felt a similar inspiration. He put the poem to music, and in 1963 he and his folk trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, released it as “Puff the Magic Dragon.” It begins: “Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea / And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.”Mr. Yarrow tracked down Mr. Lipton, who was working as a journalist in Manhattan, and gave him credit as a co-writer. (As Mr. Lipton told reporters repeatedly, despite persistent rumors, “Puff” had nothing to do with marijuana.)The song was such an immediate and lasting hit — Mr. Lipton called it his “MacArthur ‘genius’ grant” — that it allowed him to leave his job and move to California. In the Bay Area, he fell in with a circle of independent filmmakers and made several short films of his own.He received even more royalty income from his book “Independent Filmmaking” (1972), which became a niche but durable success, giving him enough of a financial cushion to explore yet another abiding interest: stereoscopy, the technical name for 3-D technology.Mr. Lipton had fallen for it as a boy in early 1950s Brooklyn when the first wave of 3-D films arrived in theaters. He saw them all: “House of Wax,” “Bwana Devil,” “The Maze.” And while the craze passed — the technology was crude, the projectors were hard to synchronize, the cheap eyeglasses that had to be worn to see images in 3-D were clunky — his belief that 3-D was the future of film did not, and in California he began tinkering with ideas to make that belief a reality.“‘Puff’ gave me a lot of freedom,” he said in a 2021 interview with Moving Images, a YouTube channel. “I didn’t have to get a job. I spent years in my little lab in Point Richmond developing my stereoscopic inventions.”Mr. Lipton accumulated some 70 patents related to 3-D technology, among them a screen that switches rapidly between left- and right-eye images, and a companion pair of eyeglasses fitted with shutters that open and close in sync with the screen.He developed that technology, which he called CrystalEyes, in the early 1980s. It soon found applications far beyond the movie theater: Versions were used by the military for aerial mapping, by scientists for molecular modeling, and by NASA for driving Mars rovers.CrystalEyes equipment developed by Mr. Lipton. He had some 70 patents related to 3-D technology.CrystalEyes and other advances devised by Mr. Lipton seeded the emergence of a new generation of stereoscopic filmmaking, used in 3-D versions of movies like “Avatar,” “Chicken Little” and “Coraline.” Today, some 30,000 movie screens across the United States use 3-D techniques that evolved from his innovations.Mr. Lipton “changed the paradigm of the audience’s experience in cinema culture entirely,” Sujin Kim, assistant professor of 3-D animation at Arizona State University, said in an email.Leonard Lipschitz was born on May 18, 1940, in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel, owned a soda shop and died when Leonard was 12. His mother, Carrie (Hibel), a teletype operator, later changed their surname to Lipton.His mother inspired his love for film by taking him to some of Brooklyn’s many grand old movie palaces, like the Ambassador and the Paramount, while his father inspired his love for filmmaking by bringing home a toy film projector. Leonard soon assembled his own, using aluminum foil, a toilet-paper roll and a magnifying glass.He entered Cornell intending to study electrical engineering but quickly switched to physics, where he felt more freedom to experiment.After graduating in 1962, he got a job at Time magazine in New York, then became an editor at Popular Photography. After work he would head to a small theater in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, where he and some friends presented the latest movies to emerge from the city’s underground film scene.He did much the same in California, though without the need for a day job. He wrote a weekly film column for The Berkeley Barb, an alternative newspaper, and made several short documentaries shot on 16 mm film, including “Let a Thousand Parks Bloom,” about the clashes surrounding People’s Park in Berkeley, and “Children of the Golden West,” a rambling, touching portrait of his countercultural friends.In addition to “Independent Filmmaking,” Mr. Lipton wrote several other books, among them “The Super 8 Book” (1975), “Lipton on Filmmaking” (1979) and, in 2021, “Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era,” an 800-page opus on the history of movie making.Along with his wife, he is survived by his children, Noah, Jonah and Anna. He lived in Los Angeles and died in a hospital there.Mr. Lipton had an idealistic certainty about the coming dominance of 3-D films, but he was also critical of the way Hollywood had limited its use to cartoons and action movies.“I had hoped that stereoscopic cinema would be about actors and acting and involve people in stories about the human condition, but that’s not what happened,” he told Moving Images. “What happened is, it’s a cinema of spectacle.”Still, he held out hope for something different around the corner.“As soon as someone has success, financial success, a stereoscopic documentary or a stereoscopic buddy comedy, then the studios will copy it,” he said. More

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      Joanna Simon, Opera Singer from Famously Musical Family, Dies at 85

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      A renowned mezzo-soprano, she grew up alongside her younger sisters, Carly and Lucy, both of whom became singer-songwriters.Joanna Simon, a smoky-voiced mezzo-soprano who grew up in a family loaded with musical talent, including her younger sisters Carly and Lucy, before forging an acclaimed career as an opera and concert singer, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 85.Mary Ascheim, a first cousin of Ms. Simon’s, said the cause was thyroid cancer. Ms. Simon died in a hospital a day before Lucy Simon’s death at 82 at her home in Pierpont, N.Y.Ms. Simon was one of the best-known American opera singers to emerge in the 1960s, a time when arts funding was flush, audiences were full and gleaming new music palaces were opening, chief among them the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York.She made her professional debut in 1962 as Cherubino in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” at New York City Opera. The same year, she won the Marian Anderson Award, an annual prize given to a promising young singer.She stood out for her range of material, mastery of foreign languages and willingness to take risks on contemporary composers. She was the first to sing the role of Pantasilea, a courtesan in 16th-century Italy, in “Bomarzo,” by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, when it made its debut in 1967 at the Opera Society of Washington (today the Washington National Opera). That performance won her worldwide acclaim, and she reprised it in New York and Buenos Aires.She was equally regarded as a concert singer, performing classical and contemporary songs, including “Over the Rainbow.”A few days before one recital in New York, in 1975, she tripped on a rug in her apartment and broke her leg. Rather than call off the show, she mounted the stage on crutches.“As soon as I was sure that my voice hadn’t been affected, I knew I would go on,” she told The New York Times.Her easy grace and glamorous good looks made her a popular guest on television talk shows. She sang and sat for interviews on “The Tonight Show” and “The Dick Cavett Show,” and she was a featured performer on the last original telecast of “The Ed Sullivan Show” before it went off the air in 1971.In her embrace of popular culture, Ms. Simon was not too far removed from her singer-songwriter sisters. Carly Simon achieved lasting fame in the early 1970s with pop hits like “Anticipation” and “You’re So Vain.” Lucy Simon sang with Carly early on — they were billed as the Simon Sisters — and later found success as a composer. She received a Tony nomination in 1991 for best original score, for the musical “The Secret Garden.”The sisters occasionally crossed paths. Joanna sang backup on Carly’s album “No Secrets” (1972) and Lucy’s album “Lucy Simon” (1975), and Carly played guitar offstage during Joanna’s performance on “The Mike Douglas Show” in 1971. Carly wrote her own opera, “Romulus Hunt,” released as an album in 1993; it featured a character named Joanna, a mezzo-soprano.The sisters grew up singing and playing music together and remained close as adults, avoiding the petty jealousies that often ensnare siblings engaged in similar careers.“When Lucy was 16, I envied her hourglass figure,” Joanna Simon told The Toronto Star in 1985. “When Carly first became successful, I envied her first $200,000 check. But those feelings lasted for 20 minutes, and I didn’t dwell on them. I knew it was a given in the operatic world that very few achieved that kind of success. I never expected it, so I wasn’t disappointed.”Ms. Simon in “Bomarzo” with New York City Opera in 1967, the year the opera, by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, had its debut. She was the first to sing the role of Pantasilea, a courtesan in 16th-century Italy, in that opera. New York City OperaJoanna Elizabeth Simon was born on Oct. 20, 1936, in Manhattan, the oldest child of Richard L. Simon, a publisher and founder of Simon & Schuster, and Andrea (Heinemann) Simon, a singer and homemaker. The family lived in Manhattan and, later, the Fieldston neighborhood of the Bronx.The Simon children took to music early; Joanna could play piano at 6 years old. In high school she thought she would become an actress, though by college, at Sarah Lawrence (which Carly also later attended), she had switched to musical comedy. Then a voice coach encouraged her to consider opera.Upon graduating in 1958 with a degree in literature, she continued her opera training in Vienna, then returned to New York to start her career.Ms. Simon, who lived in Manhattan, married Gerald Walker, a novelist and editor at The New York Times Magazine, in 1976. He died in 2004. She dated Walter Cronkite until his death in 2009.In addition to her sister Carly, she is survived by her stepson, David Walker, and a step-grandson. Her brother, Peter, a photojournalist, died in 2018.Ms. Simon continued to sing professionally through the early 1980s, then gradually pulled back before retiring in 1986 to join “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS as a cultural correspondent. She won an Emmy Award in 1991 for a documentary on creativity and manic depression.Funding for arts programming at “MacNeil/Lehrer” eventually dried up, and her position was cut. Casting about for a new career, she became a real-estate broker. Within six months, she told The Times in 1997, she had sold $6 million in property. She later became a vice president of her company, Fox Residential Group.While her musical background wasn’t the key to her newfound success, she said it sometimes came in handy.“When I take customers into potential apartments, I go into the next apartment and vocalize,” she said. “If they can hear me, it’s no deal.” More