Producer Elizabeth McCann won 9 Tony Awards
Elizabeth McCann, a theater producer known for what one journalist called her “steel and wit” and who in a dizzying four-decade career won nine Tony Awards, many of them as half of McCann & Nugent Productions, and gave New York audiences more than 60 Broadway productions, including such hits as “Equus,” “Amadeus” and “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” died Wednesday in the Bronx. She was 90.
Her death, in a hospital, was announced by her longtime associate and friend Kristen Luciani, who said McCann had cancer.
McCann & Nugent, which McCann formed in 1976 with Nelle Nugent, had a remarkable five-year winning streak, taking the Tony for either best play or best revival every year from 1978 to 1982. The first was for “Dracula,” a sexy variation on the classic vampire story; the rest were for dramas or satires.
These included “The Elephant Man” (1979), the story of a physically disfigured man in Victorian England; “Amadeus” (1981), about the composer Antonio Salieri’s bitter musical rivalry with Mozart in 18thcentury Vienna; and “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby” (1982), an 8 1/2-hour adaptation, imported from London, of Charles Dickens’ 19th-century social satire.
After her partnership with Nugent ended in the mid-1980s, McCann won four more Tonys: best revival for productions of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” (1998) and “Hair” (2009), one of the few musicals she produced, and best play for Michael Frayn’s “Copenhagen” (2000) and Edward Albee’s “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” (2002).
Elizabeth Ireland McCann was born March 29, 1931, in Manhattan, the only child of Patrick and Rebecca (Henry) McCann. Her father was a subway motorman, her mother a homemaker. Both her parents were born in Scotland.
Although the McCanns lived in midtown Manhattan — Elizabeth recalled
roller-skating throughout the garment district as a child — they were not a theatergoing family. Elizabeth was 14 when she saw her first Broadway show, “Cyrano de Bergerac,” starring José Ferrer; she went only because a cousin from New Jersey had an extra ticket and her mother insisted that she go. Luckily and fatefully, she said decades later, the play, for which Ferrer won a Tony, “blew me away.”
Giving some thought to teaching drama, she graduated from Manhattanville College in 1952 and earned a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University two years later. She worked in theater for about 10 years, beginning as an unpaid intern for Proscenium Productions,
a company based at the Cherry Lane Theater in lower Manhattan. (“Eventually they paid me $25 a week,” she recalled.) Frustrated with her lack of advancement, she decided that practicing theatrical law might be a way to go.
“By the time I got out of law school, I was 35,” she recalled in 2002 in a CUNYTV interview. After receiving her law degree from Fordham University in 1966 and passing the New York bar, she briefly worked for a Manhattan law firm and took some jobs in theater management.
Her big break was not a legal job: In 1967, she was hired by James Nederlander as managing director of the Nederlander Organization. Nugent was a co-worker there.
After teaming up to found their own firm, McCann and Nugent became general managers of six productions in their first two years together, including the original Broadway staging of “The Gin Game.” They then tried their hand at producing.
Their first show, “Dracula” (1977), starring Frank Langella, ran 2 1/2 years and won two Tonys, one for costume design and one for best revival. (The category was called “most innovative revival” that year.) McCann considered it a sign of good luck when she learned that her mother, who had immigrated from Glasgow in her youth, had sailed on the passenger liner Transylvania.