Tony Tanner, who brought ‘Joseph’ to Broadway, dies at 88

Tony Tanner, a versatile actor, writer and director whose biggest Broadway success was directing “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” in 1982, a production that helped make that musical a staple of American community and high school theater, died on Sept. 8 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.

His husband, Henry Selvitelle, confirmed the death but did not specify the cause.

Tanner had respectable if not particularly flashy careers in his native Britain as well as in the United States, with his staging of “Joseph” perhaps the high point. A colorful telling of the biblical story of Joseph, it had started out in the 1960s as a school project of Andrew Lloyd Webber (music) and Tim Rice (lyrics), and had been performed regularly in Britain and the United States over the years. But Tanner’s Broadway version elevated its profile considerably.

The show started offBroadway at the Entermedia Theater in the East Village before transferring to Broadway, where it ran for more than a year and a half and earned Tanner two Tony Award nominations, for best direction of a musical and best choreography. Its most lasting effect — vital to high school and college theater departments everywhere — was to make it standard practice to cast a woman in the part of the Narrator, a role as important as that of Joseph himself.

Most, though not all, previous productions had made the Narrator male. Tanner, in an essay on his website, said that had originally been his concept as well.

“Someone

did

it

in

Brooklyn with a Black man playing the Narrator, so that’s what we looked for,” he wrote.