Cy Coleman has died.

[Guest Chaney]

November 19, 2004

Cy Coleman, Broadway Composer, Dies at 75

By ROBERT BERKVIST

Cy Coleman, the debonair jazz pianist and composer of such legendary Broadway tunes as "Witchcraft," "Big Spender" and "The Best Is Yet to Come," died on Thursday night at New York Hospital. He was 75 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was heart failure, said John Barlow, a spokesman for Mr. Coleman's family.

A fixture along Broadway for the better part of five decades, Mr. Coleman had just attended the premiere of Michael Frayn's new play, "Democracy," at the Brooks Atkinson Theater.

"He felt unwell at the party afterward and collapsed at the hospital," Mr. Barlow said.

A fluent stylist, Mr. Coleman produced an impressively varied body of work. His Broadway scores touched many styles, from noirish film music ("City of Angels") to country ("The Will Rogers Follies") to rhythm and blues ("The Life"), but they always remaining firmly anchored in a razzle-dazzle show-tune tradition that embraced the spirit of burlesque. His musical signature was the strutting, swaggering star turn: "Hey, Look Me Over," (from "Wildcat"), "I've Got Your Number" (from "Little Me") and "Big Spender" and "If My Friends Could See Me Now" (from "Sweet Charity").

Mr. Coleman was prolific as well, frequently working on three or four projects at once - "One feeds the other," was his explanation - and constantly revising the work at hand.

"I don't like to let go," he once said. "I will drain to the last drop."

At the time of his death, Mr. Coleman was juggling work on several productions, including a revival of "Sweet Charity"; separate musical biographies of Napoleon, Grace Kelly and Elaine Kaufman, the proprietor of Elaine's restaurant in Manhattan; and "Pamela's First Musical," based on the playwright Wendy Wasserstein's book for children. And as late as last month, he was performing in cabaret at Feinstein's in the Regency Hotel.

"When you can play piano, and I say this unabashedly, as well as I do," he said in an interview in The New York Times on Oct. 8, "you don't like for people not to be able to hear you."

Mr. Coleman, whose collaborators over the years included Carolyn Leigh, Dorothy Fields, and Betty Comden and Adolph Green, had his share of flops on Broadway, but his successes rank high on the list of memorable stage musicals. "Sweet Charity" (1966), an adaptation of Federico Fellini's film "Nights of Cabiria," had a book by Neil Simon and lyrics by Fields; it was directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse. Starring Gwen Verdon as a dance hall hostess looking for love, the show overcame lukewarm reviews and ran for more than 600 performances.

Adapted for the screen in 1969, with Shirley MacLaine in the lead role, "Sweet Charity" brought Mr. Coleman an Oscar nomination for best score of a musical. A revival of that show, produced by Barry and Fran Weissler, is scheduled to open on Broadway in April, starring Christina Applegate in the role Ms. Verdon originated.

"Now the entire production of 'Sweet Charity' will be dedicated to him," Mr. Weissler said in a telephone interview yesterday. "And that is as it should be."

In 1978 Mr. Coleman teamed up with Comden and Green to turn out "On the Twentieth Century," based on a 1932 play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and staged by Hal Prince. The action took place aboard the 20th Century Limited, an express train en route from Chicago to New York, and involved Oscar Jaffe, a flamboyant theater impresario down on his luck, and Lily Garland, his former protégée and lover who has left him for movie stardom. Oscar (John Cullum) tries everything to woo Lily (Madeline Kahn) back into his theater and his life. The show won Mr. Coleman his first Tony Award for best score of a musical along with his lyricists, Comden and Green, who also won a Tony for best book of a musical.

No stranger to Hollywood, having composed a number of film scores (and received an Oscar nomination for his adaptation of "Sweet Charity"), Mr. Coleman joined the writer Larry Gelbart and the lyricist David Zippel in a project that became "City of Angels," a satirical double-vision portrait of the mogul-ridden film world of the 1940's. The musical, which opened on Broadway in December 1989, became one of Mr. Coleman's biggest hits, with his jazzy, swinging score punctuating Mr. Gelbart's wickedly funny portraits of Stine, a writer peddling his screenplay, and Stone, the hard-boiled private eye who springs to life from its pages. Frank Rich, reviewing the show in The Times, called Mr. Gelbart's book "flat-out funny" and Mr. Coleman's score "a delirious celebration of jazz and pop styles." "City of Angels" went on to win several Tony Awards, including best musical, best book and best score.

Mr. Coleman's musical education began early. Seymour Kaufman was born on June 14, 1929, the son of Russian immigrants, Max and Ida Kaufman; he grew up in a Bronx apartment house owned by his mother. As he later told it, one of the tenants moved out and left a piano behind.

The Kaufmans made the piano their own, and soon their 4-year-old son made it his. The boy was good enough to attract the attention of the building's milkman, who in turn mentioned the prodigy to his own son's piano teacher. The teacher was impressed and offered classical lessons, and as a result young Coleman (he was still Kaufman then) made his Carnegie Hall debut at age 7.

He went on to attend the High School of Music and Art as well as the New York College of Music, and he earned money by playing popular music in cocktail lounges and on the club circuit. He was irresistibly drawn to jazz and soon put all thoughts of a classical career behind him, although in later years he made many guest appearances with major ensembles, including the Detroit, Syracuse and Milwaukee symphony orchestras.

In the early 1950's Mr. Coleman met the lyricist Carolyn Leigh and began the frequently stormy collaboration that would lead them both to Broadway. A majority of Mr. Coleman's finest songs came out of this partnership.

Her words, dripping with innuendo, carried the savory erotic zest of Cole Porter into the modern age. These lyrics perfectly matched Mr. Coleman's spiky, syncopated pop-jazz melodies, and they remain the ultimate musical distillation of sophisticated cocktail party banter of the period.

Among their early hits were the songs "Witchcraft" and "The Best Is Yet to Come." Then, in 1960, they wrote the songs for "Wildcat," which starred Lucille Ball as Wildcat Jackson, a hard-as-nails prospector looking to strike oil.

The next - and final - Coleman-Leigh collaboration was "Little Me" (1962), adapted by Neil Simon from a novel by Patrick Dennis and directed by Fosse. The musical followed the rise from poverty to fame of a young woman named Belle Poitrine (Virginia Martin).

Notable chiefly for the performance of its star, the comedian Sid Caesar, who played all seven of Belle's suitors, "Little Me" ran only a few months. Soon after, Mr. Coleman and Ms. Leigh parted company. Summing up their often prickly relationship, Mr. Coleman said simply, "We fought constantly."

Harmony returned when he worked with Dorothy Fields, first on "Sweet Charity" and then on "Seesaw" (1973). Based on William Gibson's hit play, "Two for the Seesaw," the musical, written and staged by Michael Bennett and starring Ken Howard, Michele Lee and Tommy Tune, was the story of a brief romantic encounter between a Nebraska lawyer and a young dancer from the Bronx. It, too, had only a modest run.

After Fields died in 1974, Mr. Coleman teamed up with Michael Stewart to write "I Love My Wife" (1977), a comedic look at the possibilities of wife-swapping in suburbia, and "Barnum" (1980), which had a book by Mark Bramble and starred Jim Dale as the ultimate showman, P.T. Barnum. The show became a long-running hit, and Mr. Dale's dazzling performance won him a Tony Award.

Mr. Coleman added to his own collection of Tonys with "The Will Rogers Follies" in 1991, in which Keith Carradine, as the folksy, rope-twirling humorist, presided over the director Tommy Tune's version of a Ziegfeld extravaganza. "Will Rogers," with a book by Peter Stone and lyrics by Comden and Green, received a tepid reception from the critics but played for two and a half years.

The last Coleman musical to make it to Broadway was "The Life" (1997), which focused on the corroding life of a Times Square hooker, played by Lillias White, and the pimps and other prostitutes who surround her. "The Life" had lyrics by Ira Gasman and a book written by him, David Newman and Mr. Coleman. The show's highlight was Ms. White's bluesy rendition of "The Oldest Profession."

The year 1997 not only brought "The Life" to Broadway but also brought Mr. Coleman to the altar. An enthusiastic bachelor for many years, Mr. Coleman married Shelby Brown that October. She survives him, along with their daughter, Lily Cye, 4, whose miniature white Steinway piano stands alongside Mr. Coleman's rather grander one in the family's Sutton Place townhouse.

Mr. Coleman had no time for retirement, he said.

"It won't work for me," he told The Times in October. "I'm lucky to be in a profession where you can keep getting better. To put it in musician's terms, my chops are good."

[catesta]

The guy wrote some great music.

RIP, Mr. Coleman.

[Honest Tim M.]

Yeah, I heard the news. Sad. Rest in peace and keep up the good work.

[Chuck Nessa]

G'by Cy.

[ASNL77]

'Witchcraft' is one of my favourite tunes.Sad day for jazz.