Charles Strouse, the famed Broadway composer who acquired Tony Awards for his scores for Bye Bye Birdie, Applause and Annie, died Thursday at his house in New York Metropolis, his household introduced. He was 96.
A member of the Songwriters Corridor of Fame and Theater Corridor of Fame, Strouse wrote music for greater than a dozen Broadway reveals.
He and lyricist Martin Charnin have been answerable for the immortal tunes “Tomorrow” and “It’s the Onerous Knock Life” from Annie, and he and his most frequent collaborator, lyricist Lee Adams, partnered on such basic present tunes as “Placed on a Joyful Face” from Bye Bye Birdie, “You’ve Obtained Potentialities” from It’s a Fowl … It’s a Aircraft … It’s Superman and “This Is the Life” from Golden Boy.
Requested by Playbill in 2009 why he obtained into the theater, Strouse replied: “You may make some huge cash and also you meet stunning women. That was beneath many different issues. Primarily, I’ve been taught by many great, very high-quality academics all through my life, and I’ve what I consider each composer has at coronary heart — the way in which a high-quality tailor feels about his materials, I really feel about musical notes.”
Strouse’s sounds prolonged past the stage, along with his movie scores for Bonnie & Clyde (1967), The Night time They Raided Minsky’s (1968) and the animated All Canine Go to Heaven (1989). He and Adams additionally wrote “These Have been the Days,” the theme music for the Norman Lear sitcom All within the Household.
Born on June 7, 1928, Charles Louis Strouse grew up on the Higher West Facet of Manhattan. His mom, Ethel, was a pianist and launched him to music. “She was a really unhappy girl,” he mentioned. “I began tinkering on the piano to amuse her, to make her glad. She preferred it, I suppose. I had an excellent ear and took classes.” Considered one of his associates within the neighborhood was Burt Bacharach.
When he was 15, Strouse started finding out classical composition on the Eastman College of Music in Rochester, New York. His preliminary curiosity was in “critical music,” and after Eastman, he acquired a fellowship at Tanglewood Music Middle in Massachusetts, the place he met Leonard Bernstein and studied underneath Aaron Copland. (Through the course of his profession, Strouse wrote many classical works, together with the 1982 opera The Nightingale, starring Sarah Brightman.)
He met Adams at a Christmas get together within the late Forties, and the 2 wrote music for revues on the camp Inexperienced Mansions within the Adirondacks. A stage supervisor there pitched the concept for a present about youngsters initially referred to as Let’s Go Regular; it will change into 1960’s Bye Bye Birdie, Strouse’s first Broadway present.
“Lots of people of our technology — Sheldon Harnick, Carol Burnett — labored in these summer time camps,” he instructed NPR. “They have been locations the place younger New Yorkers went to satisfy one another, to eat, to play tennis, to swim. We had a full theater workers at Inexperienced Mansions — units, costumes, orchestra. We wrote an unique revue each Saturday evening all summer time.”
An enormous hit, Birdie starred Chita Rivera and Dick Van Dyke and featured a few of Strouse’s best-known songs, together with “Placed on a Joyful Face” and “A Lot of Livin’ to Do.”
“Birdie was joyous and enjoyable, listening to ‘Spanish Rose’ the primary time was thrilling, and day-after-day we liked what we have been doing, due to Charles and the group,” Rivera said on the event of Strouse’s ninetieth birthday. “Thanks for filling my life with music and being part of who I’m.”
Strouse and Adams went on to jot down a number of musicals collectively, together with 1962’s All-American; 1964’s Golden Boy, starring Sammy Davis Jr.; 1966’s It’s a Fowl … It’s a Aircraft … It’s Superman, with Linda Lavin; and 1970’s Applause, an adaptation of All About Eve that starred Lauren Bacall.
Strouse described their relationship as a wedding.
“We’ve all the time been very carefully collaborative,” Strouse told Playbill in 2008. “I’m that manner, sort of, with everybody, however I’m extra married to Lee, in a way. That’s, we gave and took from each other and argued like married individuals. I nonetheless have that closeness to him. One of many causes we don’t work a lot at the moment is that he leads a more healthy life than I do. He likes sitting round within the nation and studying. I don’t — I’m misplaced until I’m composing.”
Strouse mentioned their course of usually started with him placing a music on tape and Adams offering concrete suggestions on the music. “I’d say that was the key of Lee’s and my working collectively and being ‘married,’ so to talk: That he was very open with me,” Strouse mentioned. “If he didn’t prefer it, or if he did, he would say, ‘Can’t we do the center part sooner …?’ or one thing.”
Nevertheless, Adams didn’t work with Strouse on Annie. Charnin, an outdated buddy of Strouse’s, had the concept for a musical primarily based on the caricature character Little Orphan Annie, however Strouse was skeptical.
“I hated the concept. I hated it as a result of I had performed a present referred to as It’s a Fowl … It’s a Aircraft … It’s Superman, and it closed in 4 months,” Strouse mentioned. “Hal Prince, its producer and director, all the time mentioned to me that in the event you ever write one thing for kids, you higher be sure that it’s marketed as an grownup present {that a} dad or mum can convey a toddler to. If it’s a kids’s present, it gained’t be as profitable. And certain sufficient, he hit on one thing.”
The musical would go on to play for two,377 performances on Broadway and spurn productions all around the globe and little women in every single place singing “Tomorrow.” The present gained the Tony for greatest musical and has twice been revived on Broadway.
“Once I was a 6-year-old woman, I solely primarily based my opinion on individuals from how they made me really feel and the way they handled me. Once I first met Charles Strouse, I used to be one hundred pc enamored with him,” Danielle Brisebois, who performed Molly within the unique manufacturing, mentioned. “His heat smile and his soulful eyes … He was all the time encouraging, considerate and sort. I had no concept I used to be within the presence of a legend!”
He additionally gained Emmys for his work on the TV diversifications of Annie and Bye Bye Birdie and a pair of Grammys for Annie.
However Strouse’s careers wasn’t all hits. All-American, his follow-up to Bye Bye Birdie that he wrote with Adams and Mel Brooks, closed after three months in 1962. Dance a Little Nearer, with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, shuttered after one efficiency in 1983, and Nick & Nora closed after 9 performances in ’93.
“Everyone has flops,” he mentioned. “Once I train, the scholars say, ‘How are you going to work three or 4 years on a present … and it flops? How do you get better from that?’ The one reply is, you’ve performed your greatest, it didn’t work, what’s subsequent?”
He revealed his memoir, Placed on a Joyful Face, in 2008.
Survivors embody his kids, Nicholas, Benjamin (an writer), Victoria (a screenwriter on Discovering Dory) and William (additionally a screenwriter), and eight grandchildren. His spouse, Barbara Siman, a director and choreographer whom he married in 1964, died in February 2023.