Craig Zadan

Broadway producer who brought big budget musicals to television

Craig Zadan, Broadway producer. Born: 15 April 1949, Miami, Florida, United States. Died: 20 August 2018, Los Angeles, California, aged 69

Craig Zadan, an ebullient showman who helped engineer a revival of Broadway musicals on US television with live NBC broadcasts of The Sound of Music, Peter Pan, Hairspray and The Wiz, died on Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills. He was 69.

Robert Greenblatt, the chairman of NBC Entertainment, said the cause was complications after shoulder replacement surgery last week.

He had a vision, Zadan’s producing partner, Neil Meron, said in a telephone interview. He could look at a property and knew what it would look like in the end.

Zadan and Meron were a remarkably busy team, working in television and movies and on Broadway.

They were the executive producers of the film version of Chicago, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2003. They staged Broadway revivals of the musicals Promises, Promises (2010) and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (2011).

They produced Smash, a TV drama series with original songs about a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe. They also produced the Academy Awards shown in 2013, 2014 and 2015. Their productions won six Oscars, 17 Emmys, five Golden Globes and two Peabody Awards.

Their last major show together was a live version of the Andrew Lloyd Webbertim Rice musical Jesus Chris Superstar, which was broadcast this year on Easter Sunday. Starring John Legend and Sara Bareilles, it was staged as a concert – as the composers originally conceived it – in Brooklyn.

Lloyd Webber was mixing the music in the production truck when, during an adverts break, he burst into the part of the truck where Zadan was. In an interview with entertainment website Indiewire in June, Zadan recalled Lloyd Webber excitedly asking: “What do you think of the audience response? It’s so overwhelming. Do you think it’s too much?”

Zadan told him that there was not much he could – or would – do. “We can’t go out there and tell them to cool it, he said of the audience. We want them to be as enthusiastic as they are.” Zadan and Meron had planned their next live musical for NBC, a production of Hair, and were working on a live TV version of A Few Good Men in collaboration with Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the original stage drama and the screenplay for the film, which starred Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson. Both projects will proceed without Zadan.

Although they did not have a conscious division of labour as producing partners, Meron said that Zadan was more the deal maker and promoter. And, Will & Grace actor Sean Hayes said, Zadan was also a comforting presence who persuaded people to believe in themselves. “I had no idea what made him think I could be in Promises, Promises,” Hayes, who starred in the revival with Kristin Chenoweth, said. “I had this tremendous bout of stage fright when I started, and he never left my side, not for a minute. I never could have gotten through it without him.”

Zadan was born in Miami to Murray and Naomi Zadan. Growing up in Brooklyn, and later in Far Rockaway, Queens, he became interested in Broadway and attended Saturday matinees. At Hofstra University, on Long Island, he ended a brief stint in the drama department to focus more on being the arts editor of the student newspaper. “It was very, very difficult to be a student in the drama department and also review my professors’ schoolshows”,hetoldthenew York Times in 1989. “I got a lot of pressure from them to quit the paper and concentrate on studying dramatic literature.”

He stayed on at the paper and, after college, began writing freelance articles about the theatre for New York and After Dark magazines. But he was moving toward a career in the theatre.

He organised a musical tribute to Stephen Sondheim at the Shubert Theatre in 1973; wrote Sondheim & Co (1974), a book about the making of Sondheim’s musicals; and found a job as producer of a series of cabaret shows at the Ballroom in Manhattan, in which Broadway composers like Charles Strouse, Sheldon Harnick and Stephen Schwartz sang their songs.

At one of those shows, Lloyd Webber sang Don’t Cry for Me Argentina, well before Evita, the musical of which the song is a part, opened in London. Andrew jokes that it was the first time anyone ever directed him – and it was Craig, said Meron, who had begun working with Zadan by then.

The success of the Broadway at the Ballroom series led to positions for both men with Joseph Papp at the Public Theatre, producing cabaret shows at the theatre’s Martinson Hall. After two years, they began working in Hollywood, but their pitches to make musicals in the 1990s fell almost completely on deaf ears. “We’d go to studios with ideas to do movie musicals and they’d literally kick us out”, Zadan said in 2012.

“They said audiences aren’t interested in movie musicals. You’re wasting our time.”

Taking their pitch to TV networks, they found a taker at CBS for Gypsy, but not before they had secured Bette Midler as the domineering Mama Rose. “Craig got her on the phone after she had gotten out of the sauna, so she was very relaxed”, Meron said. “He said, ‘Is this not the greatest role written for a woman?’ And she said yes. And Craig said, ‘Is this not the opportunity of a lifetime?’ She said yes, and she said she’d do it.”

The success of Gypsy, broadcast in 1993, led them to ABC, where they produced Annie (1997), with Kathy Bates and Alan Cumming, and Cinderella (1999), with Whitney Houston as the fairy godmother. All those shows were choreographedbyrobmarshall,who a few years later would win an Oscar for directing Chicago.

Zadan and Meron produced several TV movies (including The Reagans and A Raisin in the Sun) and series (including Veritas: The Quest) before getting a surprise telephone call from Steven Spielberg, asking them if they would meet him in his Los Angeles office to consider his idea of a television series about the making of a Broadway musical.

“He outlined the whole thing in three minutes, got up and said, ‘You’ll do this with me, right?’ ” Zadan said. That turned out to be 2012’s Smash, starring Debra Messing, Megan Hilty and Anjelica Huston. The series was cancelled after 32 episodes over two years.

“Craig was trying to be positive, as we figured out what to do next”, Greenblatt said. “Out of those talks came The Sound of Music. But he’d been thinking about doing that prior to Smash, so I think their doing all the live musicals since then might have happened regardless of the fate of Smash.”

Zadan is survived by his partner, Elwood Hopkins. RICHARD SANDOMIR The Scotsman welcomes obituaries and appreciations from contributors as well as suggestions of possible obituary subjects.

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