Thomas Meehan; Tony-winning musical writer

Thomas Meehan, a onetime magazine writer who became a three-time Tony winner on Broadway, writing the plot and dialogue for the blockbuster hit musicals "Annie," "The Producers" and "Hairspray," died Aug. 22 at his home in New York City. He was 88.

The cause was cancer, said his wife, Carolyn Meehan.

Meehan once aspired to be a serious novelist, but he turned toward journalism and humor because "whenever I wrote Faulkner-esque, it came out lousy-esque."

He worked for a decade at the New Yorker, where he wrote one of the magazine's classic humor pieces, "Yma Dream," about an imaginary cocktail party for the Peruvian singer Yma Sumac. In a feat of dazzling wordplay, Meehan portrayed a beleaguered host opening his door to a series of guests, all with disyllabic first names, including Ava Gardner, Abba Eban, Ida Lupino, Ilya Ehrenburg and on and on: "The bell rings again, and I am pleased to find Oona O'Neill, Charlie Chaplin's wife, at the door. She is alone. I bring her into the room. 'Oona, Yma. Oona, Ava. Oona, Abba,' I say."

Finally, actress Uta Hagen joins the party, and the roundrobin introductions become a blizzard of dadaist nonsense: "Uta, Yma; Uta, Ava; Uta, Oona; Uta, Ona; Uta, Ida; Uta, Ugo; Uta, Abba; Uta, Ilya; Uta, Ira; Uta, Aga; Uta, Eva."

Director Martin Charnin asked Meehan to adapt "Yma Dream" for an Emmy Awardwinning 1970 television special featuring actress Anne Bancroft. While working on the project, Meehan met Bancroft's husband, writerdirector Mel Brooks.

"All the major people in my life," he later said, "and we met on the same day."

Two years later, Charnin asked Meehan to help write a musical based on the comic strip "Little Orphan Annie." "I said it was a horrible idea," Meehan told the Toronto Star in 2004. "Fortunately, I changed my mind."

As a devotee of the novels of Charles Dickens, Meehan began to sense the dramatic possibilities in a story about Annie, a poor girl from an orphanage, the mogul Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks — and Annie's dog, Sandy. With heart-tugging songs by Charles Strouse (and lyrics by Charnin), "Annie" opened on Broadway in 1977 and ran for six years.