Marin Mazzie

Musical-theatre star nominated for Tony Award three times

Marin Mazzie, Broadway star. Born: 9 October, 1960 in Rockford, Illinois. Died: 13 September 2018 in New York City aged 57

Marin Mazzie, a sought-after musical-theatre actress whose Broadway work earned her three Tony Award nominations in six years, has died at the age of 57.

Her husband, actor Jason Danieley, said the cause was ovarian cancer, a disease she had spoken about often since being diagnosed in 2015.

Mazzie’s impressive Broadway career spanned three decades, beginning with her debut as a replacement player in the original production of Big River in 1985. Her breakout role was as Clara in Passion, the 1994 musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, for which she was nominated for a Tony as best featured actress in a musical.

Her next two Broadway appearances also brought her Tony nominations, both for best actress in a musical. One, in 1998, was for her performance as the stifled Mother in Ragtime. The other, in 2000, was for a role that was in some ways the polar opposite of Mother: the female lead in the 1999 revival of Kiss Me, Kate.

Ben Brantley, in a glowing review in The New York Times, found Mazzie’s versatility in the handling of her musical numbers especially noteworthy.

“Her outlandishly entertaining take on that great exercise in animosity, I Hate Men,’ which here includes a vivid simulation of giving birth, goes over the top, for sure,” he wrote. “But it doesn’t go out of control. And when Ms Mazzie needs to switch to a lyric sincerity, for So in Love and I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple, her soprano shimmers like polished silver.”

Mazzie continued to perform after her cancer diagnosis, appearing most recently on Broadway in 2016 in The King and I as a replacement for Kelli O’hara in the role of Anna.

She also sang on concert stages and in cabarets all over the country. She and her husband often performed together, creating two-handers from the American songbook. They were to unveil a new one, Heart to Heart, at the nightclub Feinstein’s/54 Below in Manhattan in mid-june, but had to cancel because of Mazzie’s health.

Marin Joy Mazzie was born on October 9, 1960, in Rockford, Illinois. Her father, John, ran a television station, and he and her mother, Donna, were devotees of musical theatre, a passion reflected in their record collection. “I just glommed onto the cast albums,” Mazzie said in 1998. “I would play the records in my bedroom and act out all the characters.”

She began taking singing lessons at 12. Then her family moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she attended Westernmichigan university, graduating in 1982 with a minor in music and a major in theatre.

From 1980 to 1982, Mazzie was also a Barnie, working at the Barn, a famed summer theatre in Kalamazoo. It was a fast-paced training ground that mounted a new show every couple of weeks, the actors performing in one while rehearsing the next. She earned her Equity card there, and she returned several times in later years as a guest artist.

With the card and the college degree, Mazzie moved to New York, following a dream that was somewhat underinformed. “I always wanted to move to New York and be on Broadway even before I had really been here,” Mazzie said years later. “I didn’t know what either of those things meant, but that’s what I wanted.”

She soon landed a dinnertheatre job in Westchester County, New York, in the chorus of Barnum. In 1984, she was cast in a touring version of Doonesbury, the musical based on garry trudeau’ s comics trip, which had been tepidly received on Broadway in 1983. That landed her in California, where, at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, Sondheim was reworking another musical that had failed on Broadway, with Lapine directing.

“I first met Marin when she was 24 and came in to audition for a production of Merrily We Roll Along at La Jolla Playhouse,” Lapine recalled. “She seemed very young and very unsophisticated. She sang Not a Day Goes By with such force and beauty that sond heim and I hired her on the spot to play Beth.

“Years later she came in to audition for Clara in Passion. We were stunned when she walked into the room. Suddenly Marin had matured into this gorgeous, sexy woman. She sang the first song from the show, and again, we hired her on the spot.”

Back in New York, the connection paid off as Mazzie became a replacement player in Into the Woods, the Sondheim-lapine hit. She then received a starring role in Passion alongside Donna Murphy and Jere Shea.

Passion opened with Mazzie and Shea naked in bed singing a duet, a scene that left some theatre-goers wondering where the body microphones and battery-pack transmitters were.

Mazzie’s other Broadway credits included the shortlived play Enron (2010) and the Woody Allen musical Bullets Over Broadway (2014). One of her most rewarding Broadway experiences, she said, came in 2010, when she and her husband took over for Alice Ripley and Brian d’arcy James as a couple struggling with her manic depression in Next to Normal, which had opened the year before.

Mazzie also worked extensively off-broadway and in regional theatres. She met her future husband when they were both in a 1996 production of Charles L. Mee Jr’s The Trojan Women: A Love Story on the Lower East Side.

She was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame last year.

Besides her husband, whom she married in 1997, Mazzie is survived by her mother and a brother, Mark.

New York Times 2018. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service.

NEIL GENZLINGER

The Scotsman welcomes obituaries and appreciations from contributors as well as suggestions of possible obituary subjects.

Please contact: Gazette Editor The Scotsman, Level 7, Orchard Brae House, 30 Queensferry Road, Edinburgh EH4 2HS; gazette@scotsman.com