Michael Leonard — musicals failed, but his songs endured

Michael Leonard, a composer and arranger whose songs, especially from the 1965 musical “The Yearling,” lived on as standards for singers like Barbra Streisand and Nancy Wilson, died Oct. 31 at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.

His nephew Neal said the cause was cardiac arrest.

Mr. Leonard wrote the arrangements for jazz pianist Bill Evans’ album “From Left to Right” (1970) and music for television programs like “Happy Days” and “The Merv Griffin Show.”

But most of the Broadway shows he worked on, among them “How to Be a Jewish Mother” (1967), closed within a month. (The exception was the original production of “Grease,” for which Mr. Leonard was the musical supervisor.)

“The Yearling,” a musical adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and the Academy Award-winning film adaptation with Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman, was “a total disaster,” said Mr. Leonard, who created the music to Herbert Martin’s lyrics. (Lore Noto and Martin wrote the book.)

“We opened on Friday and closed on Saturday,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2011.

But some of his songs for the production, like “I’m All Smiles,” “Why Did I Choose You?” and “The Kind of Man a Woman Needs,” had staying power. They were covered by Marvin Gaye, Melissa Manchester, Johnny Mathis and Mel Tormé, as well as Streisand and Wilson.

Michael Leonard, better known as Mickey, was born in Rockville Centre, on Long Island, on Aug. 16, 1931, and grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A piano prodigy, he had begun composing music by the time he was a teenager.

He studied classical music in Munich and received a master’s degree from the Juilliard School.

After studying arranging with the composer, arranger and trumpet player Sy Oliver, Mr. Leonard conducted for the singer Dick Haymes.

His songs were featured in the Broadway show “Barbara Cook: A Concert for the Theater” in 1987. A revue containing dozens of his songs, titled “Words Fail Me,” was presented by the Penguin Rep in Stony Point, New York, in 1990.

A brief marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his nephew, he is survived by a brother, Maury.