Margo Lion

Baltimorean, producer brought ‘Hairspray’ to Broadway

Margo Lion, a theater producer who was largely responsible for bringing “Jelly’s Last Jam” and “Hairspray” to Broadway and played a major role in other important shows, including “Angels in America,” died Friday in Manhattan. She was 75.

Her son, Matthew Nemeth, said the cause was a brain aneurysm. She had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, one of several causes she supported, and had a lung transplant in 2018.

In an era when big-budget theater was an increasingly corporate affair, bankrolled by companies like Disney Theatrical Productions, Lion was an independent producer, putting up her own money and recruiting other investors to get a show mounted.

Unlike some producers, who commit to a show only after it has proved itself in workshops or out-of-town trial runs, she was known for getting on board early — often initiating a project, as she did with “Jelly’s Last Jam” (1992) and “Hairspray” (2002). And she stuck with shows she believed in despite the considerable risk of losing money, as most Broadway productions do. She often put up her West Side apartment as collateral in support of a project.

People who worked on her productions knew her to be interested more in the art than in the bottom line. One admirer was Susan Birkenhead, the lyricist for “Jelly’s Last Jam,” a show about jazz pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton that Lion began developing in the mid-1980s. Where other producers might be cautious, Birkenhead found Lion to be encouraging and open.

Margo Allison Lion was born on Oct. 13, 1944, in Baltimore to Albert and Gloria (Amburgh) Lion. Her father was chairman of Lion Brothers, a company that made embroidered emblems, and her parents were supporters of arts institutions in Baltimore. Both were killed in a plane crash in Egypt in 1963 when Margo was finishing her freshman year at Mills College in Oakland, California.

Lion transferred to George Washington University and earned a bachelor’s degree in history and politics before going to work on Capitol Hill for Sen. Daniel B. Brewster, D-Md., and then for Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in his New York office. After Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, “I just said I never wanted to do politics again,” she said.

She became a teacher at the Town School in Manhattan, but when her husband at the time, Ted Nemeth, enrolled in the playwriting division of the Iowa Writers Workshop, she followed him there and rediscovered a love of theater she had nursed in school productions as a girl.

She and her husband soon separated and later divorced, and back in New York, she grew more serious about theater.

A second cousin, choreographer Martha Clarke, introduced her to Lyn Austin, who had founded the nonprofit Music-Theater Group, which produced idiosyncratic performance works. Austin brought Lion aboard. She eventually became a producing director alongside

Austin.

After five years there, she struck out on her own, and by 1984, she was working on a musical tentatively titled “Mr. Jelly Lord.” The show, retitled “Jelly’s Last Jam,” didn’t make it to Broadway until eight years later — a measure of how long it can take before a new musical reaches the stage.

The show ran for 569 performances. It was nominated for 11 Tony Awards and won three, although it lost out on the prize for best musical to “Crazy for You.”

Lion had her share of failures, perhaps none bigger than “Triumph of Love,” a musical that died on Broadway 85 performances after opening in 1997. But it wouldn’t be long before she was struck by the brainstorm that would become her biggest hit.

Lion had seen the movie “Hairspray” (1988), directed by fellow Baltimorean John Waters, soon after it came out, but admitted that she didn’t embrace it initially.

But in 1998, she rented the video and watched the movie again while recovering from a cold.

She had not yet met Waters. By the time she did, she had acquired the rights and had sent him the first few songs for the musical, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. When they finally did meet, Waters said in a phone interview, she promised him that she would make sure that the musical, about a chubby Baltimore teenager who wins a spot on a local television dance show, stayed true to his voice and vision.

“She stuck to her word,” he said, “and we were lucky. It went right, right from the beginning. She honored everything about the original intentions of the movie.”

The musical version of the Waters movie, with a book by Mark O’Donnell, opened on Broadway on Aug. 15, 2002, and ran for almost 6 1⁄2 years, a total of 2,642 performances. It won eight Tony Awards, including best musical.

Lion’s other Broadway producing credits included the August Wilson plays “Seven Guitars” (1996) and “Radio Golf” (2007), as well as “Elaine Stritch at Liberty” (2002), “Caroline, or Change” (2004), “The Wedding Singer” (2006) and “Catch Me if You Can” (2011).

Lion was an early supporter of Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy. In 2009, he named her to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

In addition to her son, she is survived by two grandchildren.