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    Hinton Battle, Three-Time Tony Winner in Musicals, Dies at 67

    He won awards for his roles in “Sophisticated Ladies,” “The Tap Dance Kid” and “Miss Saigon” — the most ever in the category of best featured actor in a musical.Hinton Battle, a dazzling dancer who won the first of his three Tony Awards in 1981 for his performance in the Duke Ellington musical revue “Sophisticated Ladies” after learning how to tap dance in the weeks leading up to opening night, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 67.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by Leah Bass-Baylis, a family spokeswoman, who danced with him on Broadway. She did not provide a cause.“Some people are born with the spirit of the dance,” said Debbie Allen, the dancer, choreographer and actress, who had known Mr. Battle since he was 16. “Hinton Battle was that kind of person.” She added: “He was just technically superior to anyone who came close to him. He had rhythm and style. You were looking at a supernova.”Mr. Battle auditioned for “Sophisticated Ladies” several years after he originated the role of the Scarecrow in “The Wiz,” the all-Black adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz,” when he was 18. Trained as a ballet dancer, he didn’t know how to tap and felt the pressure of being in a show with virtuoso tappers like Gregory Hines and Gregg Burge.Mr. Battle playing the Scarecrow with Stephanie Mills as Dorothy in the Broadway musical “The Wiz” around 1975. Hulton archive/Getty ImagesAt his audition, Mr. Battle said that he fudged a soft-shoe routine.“I panicked,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “It used to be you didn’t need to know how to tap. Tap was out for so long, and there wasn’t much of it to see.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Elton John Secures EGOT With Emmy Win

    Elton John secured an EGOT on Monday night, joining the select group who have won all four major entertainment awards — an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony — when he won an Emmy for outstanding variety special for his livestreamed farewell concert at Dodger Stadium.John has won five Grammys, a Tony Award for best original score for “Aida,” and two Oscars for songs in “The Lion King” (“Can You Feel the Love Tonight”) and “Rocketman” (“I’m Gonna Love Me Again”).With his Emmy for “Elton John Live: Farewell From Dodger Stadium,” which streamed on Disney+, John became the 19th person to gain the title. The rather elite club includes Audrey Hepburn, Rita Moreno, Mel Brooks, Whoopi Goldberg, John Legend, Jennifer Hudson and Viola Davis.John, 76, was not present at the Emmys ceremony because of a knee operation, said Ben Winston, an executive producer of the show who accepted the award on John’s behalf.John said in a statement that he was “incredibly humbled” by the honor.“The journey to this moment has been filled with passion, dedication and the unwavering support of my fans all around the world,” he said in the statement. “Tonight is a testament to the power of the arts and the joy that it brings to all our lives. Thank you to everyone who has supported me throughout my career, I am incredibly grateful.”The live concert, which took place at the Los Angeles stadium in 2022, carried echoes of the pop star’s pair of shows at the same venue in 1975, when, in his late 20s, John played hits such as “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and “Bennie and the Jets” to a sold-out venue. More

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    Glynis Johns, a Tony Winner and Actress in ‘Mary Poppins,’ Dies at 100

    In a trans-Atlantic career that endured for more than 60 years, she was also known for her role in the hit 1965 Disney movie “Mary Poppins.”Glynis Johns, the British actress who in a trans-Atlantic career that endured for more than 60 years won a Tony Award for her role in “A Little Night Music,” giving husky, emotion-rich voice to the show’s most memorable number, “Send In the Clowns,” and played an exuberant Edwardian suffragist in the Disney movie classic “Mary Poppins,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 100.The death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by her manager, Mitch Clem.Ms. Johns was 49 and on the brink of her fourth divorce when the Stephen Sondheim musical “A Little Night Music” opened at the Shubert Theater in February 1973. The New York Times described her character, Desirée Armfeldt, as “a slightly world‐weary and extremely lovewise actress in turn‐of‐the‐century Sweden.”The critics adored her. To Clive Barnes of The Times, “the misty-voiced and glistening-eyed Glynis Johns was all tremulous understanding.”To Walter Kerr, also writing in The Times, she was “that cousin of bullfrogs and consort of weary gods”; she was “discreet, dangerous … and gratifyingly funny.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Mbongeni Ngema, Playwright Best Known for ‘Sarafina!,’ Dies at 68

    Before the fall of apartheid, his plays, which also included “Woza Albert!” and “Asinamali,” challenged the South African government’s racial policies.Mbongeni Ngema, a South African playwright, lyricist and director whose stage works, including the Tony-nominated musical “Sarafina!,” challenged and mocked his homeland’s longtime policy of racial apartheid, died on Wednesday in a hospital in Mbizana, South Africa, after a car accident. He was 68.Mr. Ngema was a passenger in a car that was struck head on when he was returning from a funeral in Lusikisiki, in Eastern Cape Province, according to a family statement cited in the South African news media.“His masterfully creative narration of our liberation struggle honored the humanity of oppressed South Africans and exposed the inhumanity of an oppressive regime,” President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said in a post on X after Mr. Ngema’s death.In the decade before the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990 and the dismantling of apartheid in the early ’90s, the South African system of institutionalized racism was an overwhelming concern to Mr. Ngema. During that decade he cocreated the play “Woza Albert!,” wrote and directed the play “Asinamali!” and wrote the script and collaborated on the music for “Sarafina!”“Sarafina!” evolved out of a conversation he had in the 1980s with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a prominent anti-apartheid activist who was then married to Mandela.“I was sitting with Mama Winnie Mandela, and I started thinking, ‘This country is in flames,’” he told the South African television show “The Insider SA” in 2022. “So I asked a question. I said, ‘Mama, what do you think is finally going to happen to this country?’“Mama looked at me, and she said, ‘I wish I had a big blanket to cover the faces of the little ones so they do not see that bitter end.’”Mr. Ngema soon began to envision young people, running and singing “Freedom Is Coming Tomorrow,” a song that he would write for “Sarafina!,” a musical that follows Black high school students in the township of Soweto in 1976 during the uprising against the government’s imposition of Afrikaans, rather than Zulu, as the official language in schools.Mr. Ngema wrote the book and collaborated with the trumpeter and composer Hugh Masekela on the score.Mr. Ngema, left, with former President Nelson Mandela in 2002.Lewis Moon/Agence France-Presse“Sarafina!” opened in Johannesburg in 1987. It moved that fall to the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center and then, in early 1988, to Broadway, at the Cort Theater, where it played 597 performances.In his review of the production at the Newhouse, Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Ngema had “brought forth a musical that transmutes the oppression of Black townships into liberating singing and dancing that nearly raises the theater’s roof.”The score, he added, “evokes the cacophony of life in a Black society both oppressed and defiant, at once sentenced to hard labor and ignited by dreams of social justice.”“Sarafina!” received five Tony nominations, including three for Mr. Ngema: for best direction of a musical (won by Harold Prince for “The Phantom of the Opera”), best original score (won by Stephen Sondheim for “Into the Woods”) and best choreography, which he shared with Ndaba Mhlongo (won by Michael Smuin for “Anything Goes”).“Sarafina!” was also nominated for best musical and best featured actress in a musical.It was adapted as a film in 1992, starring Leleti Khumalo, who had starred in the South African and Broadway productions, with Whoopi Goldberg as an inspirational teacher and the singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba as Sarafina’s mother.Mbongeni Ngema (pronounced mmm-bon-GEN-i nnn-GAY-ma) was born on June 1, 1955, in Verulam, a town north of Durban.According to his official biography for the film “Sarafina!,” he was separated from his parents at 11, then lived for a time with extended family in Zululand and later on his own in the poor neighborhoods around Durban. From age 12, he taught himself to play guitar.“When I grew up all I wanted to be was a musician, and I was influenced greatly by the Beatles,” he said on “The Insider SA.”Working in a fertilizer factory in the mid-1970s, a fellow worker asked him to play guitar to accompany a play he had written.“And then I fell in love with the part of the lead character in the play,” he told the magazine Africa Report in 1987. “When he was onstage, I would mimic him backstage — making the other musicians laugh.” One night, when the actor did not show up, he played the role.Mr. Ngema and the playwright began to collaborate, which led Mr. Ngema to start directing and writing his own small pieces. In 1979, he began working in Johannesburg with Gibson Kente, a playwright and composer, to understand the magic in his productions. After two years, he left and began working with the performer Percy Mtwa.He, Mr. Mtwa and Barney Simon created “Woza Albert!,” a satire that imagines the impact of the second coming of a Christ-like figure, Morena, who arrives in South Africa on a jumbo jet from Jerusalem, through the lives of ordinary people, vigorously played over the course of 80 minutes by Mr. Ngema and Mr. Mtwa.The white government tries to exploit Morena, then labels him a Communist and locks him up on Robben Island, where Mandela and other political prisoners were incarcerated.The play opened in South Africa in 1981 and was staged over the next three years in Europe, Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater and around the United States.In The Washington Post, the critic David Richards wrote in 1984 that “Woza Albert!” “tackles such harsh realities as injustice, poverty and apartheid in South Africa, but does so with far more spirit, humor and, yes, hope, than the subject generally inspires.” He added that “with only their wonderful, wide-eyed talent,” Mr. Mtwa and Mr. Ngema “can summon up a landscape, a society, a history.”The trumpeter Hugh Masekela, third from right, with members of the cast of “Sarafina!” during a rehearsal at Lincoln Center in 1987. Mr. Masekela and Mr. Ngema collaborated on the score for the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Ngema then wrote and directed “Asinamali!” (1983), in which five Black men in a single South African prison cell describe — through acting, dancing, singing and mime — why they were incarcerated and how they were victimized by racist laws, unemployment and police violence.The play’s name (which means “We have no money”) comes from the rallying cry of rent strikers in 1983 in the Lamontville township.Mr. Ngema said that “Asinamali!” was alarming enough to authorities in Duncan Village, in the Eastern Cape, that they arrested the audience for attending a performance.“They said it was an illegal political gathering,” Mr. Ngema said in an interview in 2017 on a South African podcast.He called “Asinamali!” a celebration of resistance.“It shows that no matter how bad things get, victory is inevitable,” he told The Times in 1986 during rehearsals before the play opened in Harlem at the New Heritage Repertory Theater. “The spirit of the people shall prevail.”Later that year, “Asinamali!” was part of a South African theater festival at Lincoln Center.Information on Mr. Ngema’s survivors was not immediately available. His marriage to Ms. Khumalo, the star of “Sarafina!,” ended in divorce. Mr. Ngema, who wrote several other plays, was involved in a controversy in 1996 when his sequel to “Sarafina!,” “Sarafina 2” — commissioned by the South African Health Department to raise awareness about the AIDS epidemic — led to a government corruption investigation over accusations that its cost was an excessive “unauthorized expenditure” and that its message was inadequate.He defended the show’s price tag, saying it was necessary to bring Broadway-quality shows to Black townships.“People have said it’s a waste of government money,” Mr. Ngema told The Associated Press in 1996. “It think that’s a stupid criticism.” More

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    Michael Blakemore, a Single-Season Double Tony Winner for Directing, Dies at 95

    Acclaimed in Britain, he had the unique distinction of winning awards for best musical and best play in 2000, for his Broadway revival of “Kiss Me, Kate” and “Copenhagen.”Michael Blakemore, an acclaimed stage director in Britain and the only one in Broadway history to win Tony Awards for both best play and best musical in the same season, died on Sunday. He was 95.His death was announced by his agents on Tuesday. It did not say where he died.Mr. Blakemore was nominated seven times for Tonys, notably for his productions of Peter Nichols’s “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” in 1968 and Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off” in 1983.But it was the flair and care he brought to a revival of “Kiss Me, Kate,” the Cole Porter show about a troupe of players presenting a musical version of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” and to a later Frayn play, “Copenhagen,” that won him the unique double of best direction of a musical and best direction of a play in 2000. (“Kiss Me, Kate” garnered five Tonys altogether, including for best revival of a musical and for best actor in a musical, given to Brian Stokes Mitchell.)Mr. Blakemore was born in Sydney, Australia, but built his career in Britain, first as an actor and later as one of Laurence Olivier’s associate directors at the National Theater in London.A scene from Mr. Blakemore’s 2009 Broadway production of Noël Coward’s comedy “Blithe Spirit.” From left were Deborah Rush, Rupert Everett, Angela Lansbury, Jayne Atkinson and Simon Jones.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere, he staged some highly successful productions: “The National Health,” Mr. Nichols’s sardonic portrayal of British hospitals, and revivals of “The Front Page,” Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s satire of newspaper journalism, and Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in which he directed Olivier.It had been widely thought that Mr. Blakemore would succeed Olivier, who stepped down as the National’s artistic director in 1973. Instead, the theater appointed Peter Hall, who had directed Mr. Blakemore in Stratford-upon-Avon during his acting years and with whom he had an intense rivalry. Their relationship soured, and Mr. Blakemore resigned in 1976.But he went on to prosper as a freelance director. He staged Mr. Nichols’s “Privates on Parade,” a burlesque musical comedy set in post-World War II Malaysia, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he began a long association with Mr. Frayn in 1980 when he directed his drama “Make and Break,” about a businessman who loses his soul.Then came Mr. Frayn’s “Noises Off,” an inventive farce about second-rate provincial stage actors performing a slapstick sex farce of their own. It transferred from London to Broadway in 1983 and ran for 553 performances there.“‘Noises Off’ couldn’t have arrived in New York a moment too soon,” Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times. The show, he said, was “as cleverly conceived and adroitly performed a farce as Broadway has seen in an age.”It was a triumph that, Mr. Blakemore later said, left him feeling that he had at long last ended “the bad dream the National had become.”Mr. Blakemore in London in 1983 during a production of Michael Frayn’s farce “Noises Off,” which transferred to Broadway that year.Peter Kevin Solness/Fairfax Media, via Getty ImagesMichael Howell Blakemore was born on June 18, 1928, in Sydney to Conrad Howell Blakemore, an eminent eye surgeon, and Una Mary (Litchfield) Blakemore. He said he was a descendant of John Quincy Adams through his American grandmother, who supported Michael’s artistic leanings while his father discouraged them. In the first of two memoirs, “Arguments With England” (2004), Mr. Blakemore described his father as an “unpredictable adversary” who disliked “scruffy bohemians and longhaired intellectuals.”Mr. Blakemore survived what he remembered as the “martinet discipline” of a boarding school, but not a course of study in medicine that his father had persuaded him to take at the University of Sydney. “I solved the problem of how not to be a doctor by failing all my third-year examinations,” he said.He was more fascinated with theater and film, especially American movies of the 1930s and ’40s, but it was seeing Olivier as Richard III in Sydney that inspired him to go to London to become an actor. He achieved that ambition thanks to another touring British actor, Robert Morley, who befriended the stage-struck Mr. Blakemore, employed him as his publicist and arranged for him to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1950.After graduating in 1952, Mr. Blakemore was cast in a series of regional repertory productions. Before long he was touring Europe as a Roman captain in Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” a revival starring Oliver and staged by the British director Peter Brook, who became an inspiration to Mr. Blakemore. Mr. Brook, he wrote, “had that concentration, in which empathy and detachment are somehow combined, that I was beginning to recognize as the mark of the good director.”By 1959 he was in Stratford performing more Shakespeare — as the First Lord in “All’s Well That Ends Well,” in small parts in an Olivier-led “Coriolanus,” and alongside Charles Laughton in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” directed by the fast-rising Mr. Hall.A scene in 2000 from Mr. Blakemore’s Tony-winning Broadway production of Mr. Frayne’s drama “Copenhagen.” Michael Cumpsty, center, played the physicist Werner Heisenberg; Philip Bosco played his fellow physicist Niels Bohr; and Blair Brown, left, played Bohr’s wife, Margrethe.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Blakemore had a difficult relationship from the start with Mr. Hall, who he felt had an overly intellectual approach to directing. He also vied with Mr. Hall for the affections of a company member, Vanessa Redgrave: “Vanessa’s lover was my enemy,” he later wrote. “I would gladly have killed him.” He found himself unwanted when Mr. Hall began to transform Stratford’s summer repertory into the Royal Shakespeare Company.But by then Mr. Blakemore was determined to become a director, and after playing major roles in the Open Air Theater in London’s Regents Park, he was asked to perform and direct at the prestigious Citizens Theater in Glasgow. It was there that he had his first major success, in 1967, with “Joe Egg,” a darkly comic tale of parents coping with a severely disabled child. Mr. Blakemore had helped his friend Mr. Nichols rework the script, which had been rejected elsewhere. The play transferred to London and then to Broadway (with Albert Finney and Zena Walker) to great acclaim.Olivier invited Mr. Blakemore to the National in 1969, and he was appointed an associate director in 1971. When Mr. Hall arrived in 1973, he retained Mr. Blakemore in his position, but trouble soon followed.In his second memoir, “Stage Blood” (2013), Mr. Blakemore gave his version of a conflict that peaked at Mr. Hall’s London apartment, after he had presented a paper to his National colleagues accusing Mr. Hall of failing to consult with his subordinates and taking too much paid work outside the National. He failed to win his colleagues’ support, however, and, after telling Mr. Hall that he was “an extremely greedy man,” Mr. Blakemore resigned. (He later published, in the newspaper The Observer, what he called “The Claudius Diaries,” a satire that cast Olivier as the murdered king in “Hamlet” and Mr. Hall as his killer.)Mr. Blakemore accepting one of the two Tony Awards he won in 2000. He defined directing as “the imposition of harmony on a gathering of divergent talents.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Blakemore was back at the National in 1997 and 2003 (Mr. Hall had stepped down in 1988), staging “Copenhagen” (which opened on Broadway in 2000) and “Democracy” (which transferred in 2004), productions that demonstrated his ability to bring clarity to extremely complex works. “Copenhagen” is centered on a discursive, argumentative conversation that the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg had in 1941, in part about the building of an atomic bomb. “Democracy” centers on the West German chancellor Willy Brandt and an East German spy who falls in love with him.Wrestling with complexity was a strength that Mr. Blakemore also brought to “City of Angels,” an intricate Broadway musical with music by Cy Coleman, book by Larry Gelbart and lyrics by David Zippel, in 1989, earning a Tony nomination for his direction.Known for his calmness in the rehearsal room and, in his words, for “getting my way without anyone particularly noticing,” Mr. Blakemore defined directing as “the imposition of harmony on a gathering of divergent talents.”It was an ideal he strove to attain, usually successfully, in other Broadway productions, including the Coleman musical “The Life” in 1997, a belated world premiere for Mark Twain’s “Is He Dead?” in 2007 and, in 2009, a revival of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” with Angela Lansbury at her funniest as the eccentric medium Madame Arcati.Mr. Blakemore was married twice: in 1960 to Shirley Bush, with whom he had a son, and, after their divorce in 1986, to Tanya McCallin, with whom he had two daughters. He and Ms. McCallin later separated, according to the news release that announced Mr. Blakemore’s death. He is survived by Ms. McCallin; his children, Conrad, Beatrice and Clemmie; and three grandchildren.Alex Marshall More

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    Steven Lutvak, Whose Darkly Comic Show Won a Tony, Dies at 64

    He wrote several musicals without attracting much notice. Then he struck Broadway gold with “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.”Steven Lutvak, a composer and lyricist whose only Broadway show, “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” — a black comedy about a killer in London who bumps off the relatives who stand in the way of his becoming a wealthy royal — won the Tony Award for best musical, died on Oct. 9 at his work studio in Manhattan. He was 64.The cause was a pulmonary embolism, said Michael McGowan, his husband.Over the years, Mr. Lutvak wrote several musicals that were staged in regional theaters and Off Off Broadway. But none were nearly as successful as “A Gentleman’s Guide.”Set in Edwardian England, it is the story of Monty Navarro, a poor man who, after learning that he is a distant relative of the rich D’Ysquith clan (and then being denied a claim to its lineage), kills the eight kinfolk (all played by one actor) in the line of succession between him and the head of the family, the Ninth Earl of Highhurst.The show opened in November 2013 and ran for 905 performances over more than two years.In his review in The New York Times, Charles Isherwood said that the score — Mr. Lutvak wrote the music and collaborated on the lyrics with Robert L. Freedman — “establishes itself as one of the most accomplished (and probably the most literate) to be heard on Broadway in the past dozen years or so, since the less rigorous requirements of pop songwriting have taken over.”“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” was nominated for 10 Tonys in 2014 — Mr. Lutvak and Mr. Freedman were nominated for original score — and won for Mr. Freedman’s book, Darko Tresnjak’s direction and Linda Cho’s costume design, as well as for best musical.“Steve was a gifted composer, lyricist and musician, but more than anything he was a born storyteller,” Mr. Freedman said by phone. “I was able to speak to him in my own language about story, plot and characters in a way that not every composer can do.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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    Michael McGrath, Tony Winner and ‘Spamalot’ Veteran, Dies at 65

    He clanged coconuts in the Monty Python stage musical in 2005; seven years later, he won a Tony for “Nice Work if You Can Get It.”Michael McGrath, who won a Tony Award in 2012 for his work in the musical “Nice Work if You Can Get It” and was a regular on Broadway, Off Broadway and regional stages, known especially for comedic roles and for his ability to conjure the likes of Groucho Marx, George M. Cohan and Jackie Gleason, died on Thursday at his home in Bloomfield, N.J. He was 65.His family announced the death through the publicist Lisa Goldberg. No cause was provided.Mr. McGrath was one of those stage actors who might rarely be recognized on the street yet worked steadily for decades, drawing good notices throughout. He did much of his early work at Theater by the Sea in Matunuck, R.I., where he appeared regularly from 1977 to 1991, including in the title role of a 1989 production of “George M!,” the musical about Cohan, the famed song-and-dance man.“Exuding confidence and manic energy,” Michael Burlingame wrote in a review in The Day of New London, Conn., “McGrath struts and crows like a bantam rooster.”By the late 1980s he was appearing in New York shows, including “Forbidden Christmas,” a 1991 holiday edition of the long-running parody revue “Forbidden Broadway”; in one sketch he was Luciano Pavarotti, “wearing,” as Mel Gussow wrote in a review in The New York Times, “a white shirt as big as a bedsheet.”A year later he made his Broadway debut in the ensemble of “My Favorite Year,” a backstage musical based on the 1982 movie about the golden age of television. That show closed after a month, but it was the start of regular Broadway work for Mr. McGrath — sometimes as an understudy or standby player, sometimes in featured roles.Mr. McGrath, left, as Patsy and Tim Curry as King Arthur in the 2005 Broadway musical “Spamalot.” Mr. McGrath played three roles and earned a Tony nomination.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHe played three different parts in “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” the hit 2005 musical based on “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” including Patsy, the servant who banged coconuts together to imitate the sound of a galloping horse. His performance earned him a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a musical.His Broadway run continued with “Is He Dead?” (2007), “Memphis” (2009) and “Born Yesterday” (2011). Then, in 2012, came his Tony-winning turn in “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” a musical that showcased the songs of George and Ira Gershwin. Matthew Broderick and Kelli O’Hara got most of the attention in the lead roles, but it was Mr. McGrath (as a bootlegger) and Judy Kaye (as a temperance leader) who earned the show’s two Tonys, for best actor and actress in a featured role in a musical.Mr. McGrath with Judy Kaye in “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” for which they both won Tonys.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore recently on Broadway, Mr. McGrath was in “She Loves Me” (2016) and “Tootsie” (2019), among other shows. In between Broadway roles, he worked Off Broadway and in regional houses. He also continued to perform in productions of “Forbidden Broadway” and, in 1996, a movie-themed offshoot, “Forbidden Hollywood,” in which he imitated both John Travolta’s character in “Pulp Fiction” and Tom Hanks’s Forrest Gump.That same year, he tapped his inner Groucho in “The Cocoanuts,” a revival of an ancient Marx Brothers show mounted at the American Jewish Theater in Manhattan. Mr. McGrath had always been known for doing a bit of ad-libbing from time to time. (“It’s gotten me in trouble with authors,” he acknowledged in a 1996 interview with The Times. “A lot of them don’t like you going off the script.”) But in “The Cocoanuts,” ad-libs, Groucho style, were expected.“There are a lot of guys who do better Grouchos,” Mr. McGrath told The Times, “but Groucho and I share the same sense of humor, so I find it very easy to ad-lib as him. I wouldn’t say my timing is as great, but we’re in the same ballpark.”He brought another famed figure back to life in 2017, when he played Ralph Kramden, Jackie Gleason’s role, in a musical version of “The Honeymooners” at Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey.If Mr. McGrath wasn’t an A-list star, he sometimes went on in place of one. On Broadway he understudied Martin Short twice, in “The Goodbye Girl” in 1993 and “Little Me” in 1998. A Times reporter was in the audience of “Little Me” in December 1998 when Mr. McGrath stepped in for Mr. Short, who had a cold. Many might have been disappointed at first not to be seeing Mr. Short, but by the show’s end, The Times reported, the theatergoers “gave Mr. McGrath the special ovation for people who leap into impossible situations full throttle and soar.”Mr. McGrath understudied Martin Short in the 1998 musical “Little Me.” One night when he stepped in for Mr. Short, The New York Times reported, the audience gave him “the special ovation for people who leap into impossible situations full throttle and soar.” Ruby Washington/The New York Times“They rose to their feet, screaming, ‘Bravo! Bravo!’”Michael McGrath was born on Sept. 25, 1957, in Worcester, Mass. After graduating from high school there, he studied briefly at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, but he left after three months to start his acting career.Among his fellow players in the “Forbidden Broadway” series was Toni Di Buono. In a 1988 version of the show, he parodied Joel Grey’s “Cabaret” character; she did the same for Patti LuPone, belting out “I Get a Kick Out of Me.” Ms. Di Buono and Mr. McGrath later married.She survives him, as does their daughter, Katie Claire McGrath.In a 2012 interview with The Cape Codder of Massachusetts, Mr. McGrath talked about Cookie, the character he played in his Tony-winning turn in “Nice Work if You Can Get It.”“There is a little bit of Gleason in everything I do,” he said. “For Cookie, I’ve also incorporated elements of Groucho Marx, Moe Howard of the Three Stooges, Skip Mahoney from the Bowery Boys, and even a little Bugs Bunny.” More

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    Franne Lee, Tony Winner Who Also Costumed Coneheads, Dies at 81

    She worked on “Sweeney Todd” and “Candide” and also on the early seasons of “Saturday Night Live,” contributing to the look of the Blues Brothers and the Killer Bees.Franne Lee, a costume and set designer who while doing Tony Award-winning work on Broadway in the 1970s also made killer-bee suits and cone-shaped headwear for early “Saturday Night Live” sketches, helping to create some of that era’s most memorable comic moments, died on Sunday in Atlantis, Fla. She was 81.Her daughter, Stacy Sandler, announced the death, after a short illness that she did not specify.Ms. Lee did some of her most high-profile work in the 1970s while in a relationship with the set designer Eugene Lee. She collaborated with him on productions including an acclaimed “Candide,” directed by Harold Prince at the Chelsea Theater Center in Brooklyn in 1973. It moved to the Broadway Theater in Midtown Manhattan the next year and ran there for 740 performances.“The production has been designed by those experts, Eugene and Franne Lee,” Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times, reviewing the Broadway incarnation, “and they have knocked the innards out of this respectable Broadway house and made it into an obstacle course of seats, musicians’ areas, catwalks, drawbridges and playing platforms, with one conventional stage thrown in at the end of the space for good measure and convenience.”The Lees shared the 1974 Tony Award for scenic design, and Ms. Lee won another for costuming, her specialty. As the story goes, one person who saw that “Candide” was a young producer named Lorne Michaels, who was creating an unconventional late-night show for NBC. He was impressed and brought the Lees in as designers on the show that, when it made its debut in October 1975, was called “NBC’s Saturday Night” but soon became “Saturday Night Live.”The original “S.N.L.” cast quickly made its mark with outlandish sketches, and Ms. Lee was integral to the look of those now famous bits — dressing John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in black when they became the Blues Brothers, turning cut-up long johns into the yellow-striped Killer Bee costumes, and more.Dan Aykroyd, left, and John Belushi as the Blues Brothers on “Saturday Night Live.” Ms. Lee designed their costumes.Edie Baskin/OnyxIt was costume designing on the cheap. Ms. Lee’s father, a tool-and-die maker, came up with the bouncy springs that were the Killer Bees’ antennae, which she finished off by sticking Ping-Pong balls on the ends. John Storyk, who first met Ms. Lee in 1968 when both worked at the short-lived Manhattan club Cerebrum, recalled in a phone interview dropping by the Lees’ apartment and seeing on her work table the beginnings of the cones that became the defining feature of the Coneheads, the extraterrestrials who were a recurring presence on the show in the late 1970s and later got their own feature film.In an interview for the book “Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers and Guests” (2002), by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, James Signorelli, a longtime “S.N.L.” producer, said that Ms. Lee influenced fashion beyond the studio walls.“The way Franne Lee, our costume designer, dressed Lorne for the show suddenly became the way everybody in New York was dressing,” he said. “Lorne used to come out onstage wearing a shirt, jacket and bluejeans. Nobody had ever seen it. But before you knew it, everybody was sitting around in Levis and a jacket.”Laraine Newman, an original “S.N.L.” cast member, recalled one time when Ms. Lee herself became part of the action — not on the show, but during a photo shoot Ms. Newman was doing with Francesco Scavullo, the noted fashion and celebrity photographer. Ms. Newman was working a vampire look, complete with fangs.“Franne found me this incredible Edwardian black lace dress,” Ms. Newman said by email, “and we did wonderful shots with that, and then Scavullo had this idea that Franne should be my victim, and so there are shots of me like biting Franne’s neck. It was so hard not to laugh because Franne was making these faces trying to look horrified or drained of blood. It’s a wonderful memory, and it still makes me laugh when I think about it. She was so very talented.”Len Cariou, left, and Angela Lansbury in the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd.” Ms. Lee won a Tony Award for her costumes.Martha Swope/New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman CenterThat talent earned Ms. Lee another Tony Award in 1979 for her costume designs for the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd,” the Stephen Sondheim musical about a murderous barber who has his victims made into meat pies. The show was directed by Mr. Prince, who Ms. Lee said initially told her he was reluctant to take on the project despite her urging.“He told me: ‘You’re crazy, absolutely crazy! You can’t do a musical about people eating people,’” she recalled in a 2002 interview with The Tennessean newspaper. “‘I said, ‘Why not?’”Frances Elaine Newman was born on Dec. 30, 1941, in the Bronx to Martin and Anne (Marks) Newman. Her father had a small machine shop on Long Island, and her mother was an offset printing supervisor.Ms. Lee was studying painting at the University of Wisconsin, her daughter said, when she discovered her love of theater and costume design. She was married to Ralph Sandler at the time and relocated to Pennsylvania when his job took him there, doing costume and design work for local theaters. The couple divorced in 1967, and Ms. Lee relocated to New York.“Franne and I both answered the same ad,” Mr. Storyk said, recalling how they found themselves working at Cerebrum. Mr. Storyk designed the club; Ms. Lee was what was called a guide, leading patrons through the place, which promoted consciousness-raising and featured various interactive environments. It closed in less than a year.Ms. Lee, though, continued to pursue her theatrical interests, creating costumes for groups including Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia. She also met Mr. Lee. Among their earliest collaborations as scenic designers — with Ms. Lee still credited as Franne Newman — was a version of “Alice in Wonderland” staged by the director André Gregory in 1970 that drew rave reviews.Ms. Lee in 2015.Amber Arnold/Wisconsin State JournalThe two became a couple and Franne adopted Mr. Lee’s name, though the nature of their relationship remained hazy; Patrick Lynch, a longtime aide to Mr. Lee, said the two were never formally married. (Mr. Lee died in February.) In any case, their personal and professional partnership continued until 1980, the year Ms. Lee left “Saturday Night Live.”She continued to design costumes for shows in New York in the 1980s and ’90s, including a few short-lived Broadway productions and, in the mid-’90s at the Public Theater, Christopher Walken’s examination of the life and legend of Elvis Presley, “Him.”She also tried the West Coast for a time, working on a few television shows and made-for-TV movies. In 2001 she settled in Nashville, where she was involved in founding Plowhaus, a gallery and artists’ cooperative. She later lived in Wisconsin, and since 2017 she had lived in Lake Worth Beach, Fla., about 65 miles north of Miami, designing costumes for theaters in that area.In addition to her daughter, from her marriage to Mr. Sandler, Ms. Lee is survived by a son from that marriage, Geoffrey Sandler; a son with Mr. Lee, Willie Lee; a brother, Bill Newman; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.The frugal D.I.Y. ethos of her “S.N.L.” years stayed with Ms. Lee throughout her costume-designing career. In 2018 she worked on costumes for a production of Conor McPherson’s thriller “The Birds” (based on the same source material as the Alfred Hitchcock movie) at the Garden Theater in Winter Garden, Fla. It required a wedding dress, which she bought at a thrift shop for $45.“I’m a senior citizen,” she told The Orlando Sentinel, “so if I go on Wednesday, things are half price.” More