Year-end closing notices
Remembering the stars of the stage we lost in 2017
LET’S salute a few showbiz folks who took their final bows this year. Some were Broadway fixtures, while others found fame on TV or in Hollywood but couldn’t resist the lure of the stage.
Mary Tyler Moore, who died in January, had a scarring experience in the 1966 musical “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” which closed before it opened, while still in previews. She headed to Los Angeles and eventually became one of TV’s iconic characters, Mary Richards, in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
Even so, she returned to theater in 1980 as a quadriplegic in “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” Though the role was written for a man, Moore said, “It’s important that a play can sur- vive with a woman [in the lead]. ‘Whose Life Is It Anyway?’ is not a story about a man. It’s essentially a story about bravery [that] the character never knew she had until she had to call on it.”
Moore received a special Tony for her performance. “I was told they voted it because I was a Hollywood persona who had come to Broadway,” she told The Post. “But I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
A.R. Gurney, who left us in June, was the John Cheever of the theater, chronicling the insular, privileged world of WASPs in such plays as “The Cocktail Hour” and “The Dining Room.” It was a world he knew well, having grown up in a blue-blood family in Buffalo, NY.
“I’ve written some darkly satirical plays which say that the WASP culture is . . . peculiarly rigid,” Gurney told writer Leslie Bennetts. “[But] there are many things . . . I admire . . . There’s a sense of pluck and endurance and tenacity — some of the val- ues Katharine Hepburn embodies — a kind of stoic, chin-up, unselfish . . . sense of getting on with it.” Roger Moore will forever be remembered as a dashing, if lightweight, James Bond in seven 007 flicks, including “The Spy Who Loved Me.” But the actor, who died in May, got his start in the West End, understudying several parts at the same time, bicycling from theater to theater. He made his Broadway debut in “A Pin To See the Peepshow.” “We opened on Sept. 17, 1953, and closed on Sept. 17, 1953,” Moore once told me. Andrew Lloyd Webber enticed Moore to return to the stage in his 1989 musical “Aspects of Love.” But Moore never made it to opening night.
“Andrew was under the illusion that I could sing, and therefore convinced me that I could,” Moore said. “I loved practicing my scales. But came the day when I had to sing with a full orchestra, and I knew that I could not do it. There were no recriminations from Andrew, thankfully. He agreed to let me go immediately. I said, ‘Well, you could at least protest.’ ”
Barbara Cook was one of the leading ingénues of her day, starring on Broadway in “The Music Man,” “She Loves Me” and “Candide.” But her career fell apart due to battles with depression and alcohol.
“I was not some lady drunk,” she told the Times several years before her death, in August. “I was a real nonfunctioning alcoholic . . . The kitchen a mess . . . Everything a mess.”
But she pulled her life together, got sober and became one of the leading interpreters of the Great American Songbook. She once told “60 Minutes” that the key “is having the courage to let people really, really into what life has done to us . . . [and] it does take courage.”