Theater performer, producer, director who founded CLO Mini Stars

Joe Franze had an eye for talent and a gift for nurturing it.

A musical theater performer, producer and director, Mr. Franze spent many years with the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera, including as the founder of CLO’s Mini Stars program and Academy of Musical Theater for young artists.

For performers such as Billy Porter, his guidance and support made all the difference.

“There’s a bunch of people in this town who showed up and showed out for me, and he was one of them,” said Mr. Porter, a Grammy-, Tonyand Emmy-winning Pittsburgh native who was one of the Mini Stars as a teenager in the early 1980s.

“Joe was the first person to see my talent and to see my potential,” said Mr. Porter, who is in town filming his directorial debut, “What If?” “It was my introduction to the CLO, and it was an amazing training ground for me.”

Mr. Franze, of Downtown, died July 7 after a series of recent health setbacks. He was 72.

He started his theatrical career at Seton LaSalle High School — where he would later serve as drama director.

After high school, Mr. Franze performed as a Jet in a CLO performance of “West Side Story,” and enrolled at Point Park College, where he studied theater and joined a professional work-study program sponsored by the Pittsburgh Playhouse.

After living in New York City in the mid-1970s, Mr. Franze returned to Pittsburgh, where he began producing his own cabaret shows and musicals.

“I tried New York for a while,” Mr. Franze told The Pittsburgh Press in May 1980. “And I went for readings and got some callbacks, but I was a waiter more than a performer. That wasn’t for me.”

“He did a lot of shows — he was a performer, and everybody loved him as a producer and director,” said Broadway actress and Pittsburgh native Lenora Nemetz, who met Mr.

Franze when they were teenagers, auditioning for roles at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. “I had just come back from doing ‘ Cabaret’ on Broadway. We became instant friends.”

The shows Mr. Franze produced and directed routinely ranked among the year’s top theater picks in local newspapers, but it was the success of his take on the 1980 live musical production “The Wiz” that launched him into the local stratosphere as top talent.

In a glowing 1980 review of “The Wiz” in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the fledgling producer and director was given credit as “a performer who demonstrated comic abilities ... and made an impressive debut as a producer with stylish little revues,” who “set new standards for cabaret shows in Pittsburgh, and has given the city an exciting new attraction for entertainment seekers.”

It didn’t hurt that the musical starred Etta Cox, whom Mr. Franze performed with in local dinner theater tours as a teenager.

“I was always interested in shows,” Mr. Franze said in the 1980 interview. “I did a little bit of everything, from prop designer to acting. I liked being onstage, but I’m also enjoying this end of it, as producer.”

His performance credits included teaming up with Phyllis Stern to form a comedy duo that performed on cruises and as part of a crosscountry dinner theater tour with Don Brockett’s very successful “Amen!”

With a budget of $200 for sound and costumes for 26 child performers, Mr. Franze pulled off a stunning show at Kidfest in 1981, convincing leaders at the CLO to create its Mini Stars program, which he produced.

Mr. Franze was named special production director at Pittsburgh CLO in 1987, and in 1990, he became founding director of the Academy of Musical Theater, an afterschool program for young performers.

He took CLO performances on the road to local high schools, where he staged entertaining productions such as “Freedom Train,” about the life of Harriet

Tubman and the Underground Railroad, and a show about Mark Twain.

“He was a sweet, generous man who loved watching the successes of the kids he taught,” said local performer, writer and director Jason Coll, who later served as associate artistic director at CLO. “I followed in his footsteps in a lot of ways and took over a path set by him. I had something to build on and a blueprint to go by.”

After his work at CLO, Mr. Franze passed up other job offers to return to Point Park, where he became a resident artist and faculty member of the school’s Conservatory of Fine Arts in 1999.

Ms. Nemetz, of Pittsburgh’s West End, said she would always remember her friend’s legendary sense of humor, especially the inside joke that Mr. Franze shared with his friends about his time in New York.

“He came to stay with me in New York while I was doing ‘ Chicago,’ and he ended up staying for two years, but never got a job on Broadway,” said Ms. Nemetz, who was with her friend when he died. “So he used to call himself, ‘Joe Franze, last seen hailing a cab on Broadway.’ ”

Mr. Franze was so proud of her accomplishments, Ms. Nemetz said, and he was over the moon about the many successes of Mr. Porter, who was able to visit his old friend the day before he died.

“I speak about angels in my life, and he is one of those angels,” said Mr. Porter, who wrote about Mr. Franze’s influence in his upcoming book “Unprotected.” “I didn’t have a lot of money or a family who understood living one’s life like an artist. Joe cast me as a CLO Mini Star when I was 14, then proceeded to make sure that I got back and forth to rehearsals and performances. He personally drove me — that was the only way I could be in it, because I didn’t have a family that could drive me and we performed in places where the buses didn’t always go.”

Mr. Franze is survived by his sister, Joan Butchko, of Pleasant Hills.

A celebration of life is being planned for a future date.