Rep founder Baker dies in New York

Cliff Fannin Baker, who founded the Arkansas Repertory Theatre and who had been working to restore it to artistic and financial health after it suspended operations in April, died early Thursday in a New York City hospital with his husband, Guy Couch, at his side. He was 70, just a week shy of his 71st birthday.

Tributes to Baker and memories poured onto Facebook and other social media from Couch’s posting last week that Baker had suffered an intracranial brain hemorrhage Aug. 27 while participating in a corporate workshop in New York and was rushed to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he underwent surgery. He never recovered.

Baker had been serving as the Rep’s artistic adviser since the April 24 announcement that the theater was in severe financial distress and was suspending its MainStage productions. He was very much involved in planning for its reopening and a new season in 2019.

“Cliff ’s counsel has been invaluable these past four months,” said Rep board member and interim general manager Bill Rector. “And when we announce our new season, you will recognize Cliff’s influence in our choices of productions. As we get this theater back on solid ground, the Rep will be a testimony to the gift that Cliff gave to all of us.”

Baker had been working with Rector, also a longtime Little Rock real estate executive, and board chairman Ruth Shepherd to return the Rep to a solid fiscal footing, which included raising hundreds of thousands of dollars against two matching grants and the sale of one of the two apartment buildings the Rep had owned. He was scheduled to direct a show in February, the title of which has not yet been announced.

Over 23 years, Baker built the theater into a well-regarded, Actors’ Equity-certified organization. The Rep’s acclaim, former colleagues say, promoted Arkansas as a place that can support major cultural institutions.

“His legacy, his influence, was having the insight to start a nationally recognized theater in the state,” said Natalie Canerday, a Russellville-native stage-and-screen actress whose first show with Baker was a production of the comedy The Foreigner in January 1986. “That’s just amazing, that’s remarkable, in kind of a poor state that isn’t really known for the arts, we did become known for the arts after [the Rep].”

A native of Hermann, Mo., Baker first came to Arkansas in 1968 after being impressed by a touring production from the Arkansas Arts Center theater department that visited the University of Missouri, where he was studying journalism.

After the Arts Center’s program closed, he spent time in Birmingham, Ala., and Miami before returning to Little Rock in the early ’70s. In 1976 he founded the Theatre of the Arkansas Philharmonic in a former ice cream shop on Kavanaugh Boulevard in the Heights.

Those Philharmonic productions caught the attention of Couch, who met Baker in 1976 when Baker tried to cast him — then a dancer with an Arts Center company — in a show.

He recalls being captivated by Baker’s production of Paul Zindel’s play And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little. “I just thought, ‘Oh my God, this is real. This is real theater. This is not children’s theater, this is not college theater, this is theater.’ It was so well done,” Couch said.

They became domestic partners in 1976. Later that year Baker created the Repertory Theatre, the state’s first professional stage company, with a grant of $12,000 from the state Office of Arts and Humanities (which later became the Arkansas Arts Council), which he moved into the vacant Hunter Memorial Methodist Church east of MacArthur Park, with a company of 10 performers from around the state that eventually included Couch.

Over the next several years, the company expanded, moving in October 1988 to the Galloway Building, which had previously housed the Dillard’s Home Center, at Sixth and Main streets. It tripled the Rep’s seating capacity and the fully equipped, large-scale stage allowed the Rep to put on larger-scale productions. Under Baker’s leadership, the Rep achieved a national reputation that led professionals from across the country to vie to work there, including actor-director Jason Alexander, who directed the world premiere of Scooter Pietsch’s dark comedy Windfall at the Rep in June 2016.

Actors, choreographers and other professionals who worked with him remember a man with a wry sense of humor and a magnetic personality. While he encouraged his actors to find and develop their own strengths, he took pride in and was dedicated to the craft of directing, offering thorough rehearsal notes that he’d usually scratch on a yellow legal pad. Colleagues also described him as a natural diplomat who always had an opinion of his own but also was open to hearing the other side.

Baker continued in his principal role at the Rep until 1999, when he announced he was stepping down in need of a change and to continue to work more closely with corporate leadership programs he began in 1994.

He subsequently guest-directed shows around the world, from New York to Beijing, but continued to make central Arkansas his home — he and Couch lived in Little Rock’s Quapaw Quarter before moving to a farm outside Greenbrier in 2016. He also kept his hand in central Arkansas’ theater scene, guest-directing one Rep show each season and even appearing onstage in a small role in the Rep’s 2015 production of August: Osage County. He served as producing artistic director at Wildwood Park for the Arts from 2008-13.

Baker stepped back in as the Rep’s interim artistic director for a few months after his successor, Bob Hupp, left at the end of the 2014-15 season, before the Rep hired John Miller-Stephany, who took over as only the theater’s third producing artistic director early in the 2016-17 season.

The last show Baker directed at the Rep was the 2017 production of the musical Sister Act. He had been scheduled to direct the June production of God of Carnage that was canceled when the board announced it was out of money and would be suspending operations.

Baker is survived by Couch, whom he married in July 2015; an extended family, including a brother, sister-in-law, nephews and grandnephews in Missouri; and the theater community he leaves behind. Arrangements for a funeral or memorials have yet to be announced.

“Cliff’s counsel has been invaluable these past four months . ... As we get this theater back on solid ground, the Rep will be a testimony to the gift that Cliff gave to all of us.”

— Bill Rector, Rep board member and interim general manager

Baker