Charles Strouse obituary

The Guardian

3 days ago

Like his fellow Broadway composers Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, Charles Strouse, who has died aged 96, had a classical music education. But his breakthrough hit – for which he won his first Tony award – with lyrics by his early career collaborator, Lee Adams, was Bye Bye Birdie (1960), a satirical take on the new teenage culture of rock'n'roll, with reference to the kerfuffle surrounding Elvis Presley's call up to the US army.
His biggest hit of all, though, and the first without lyrics by Adams, was the uplifting Depression-era musical Annie (1977), based on the cartoon strip little orphan girl melting the heart of billionaire Daddy Warbucks. The show ran on Broadway for over 2,300 performances, and for more than three-and-a-half years at the Victoria Palace in London, and was made into a film in 1982.
Mike Nichols's production of Annie had lyrics (and direction) by Martin Charnin and book by Thomas Meehan. Strouse's punchy, irresistible score, for which he won his third Tony award, included several songs that have entered the musical theatre pantheon: Annie's indomitably optimistic Tomorrow, the upbeat, rhythmic orphanage lament It's the Hard-Knock Life (later sampled by Jay-Z for a single in 1998) and the equally upbeat suggestion that You're Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile, an appropriate placebo – in musical theatre terms, at least – for child poverty and misery.
The whole was feelgood to an extent that would be unbearable without Strouse's sly, plangently melodic, beautifully crafted songs and the occasional high-quality belter.
As in the standout song of Bye Bye Birdie (the 'Elvis' hero was named Conrad Birdie, played on the London stage in 1961 by Marty Wilde), Put on a Happy Face (sung by Birdie's promoter and played on Broadway and in the 1963 movie by Dick Van Dyke), Strouse operated in a pre-Sondheim non-ironic world of musical theatre escapism. Birdie won him his first Tony.
He was born in New York, growing up on the Upper West Side, the son of Ira Strouse, a travelling salesman, and his wife, Ethel (nee Newman), and was educated at a Manhattan prep school, Townsend Harris Hall in the city, and the Eastman School of Music, in Rochester, New York, graduating in 1947. He won two scholarships to the Tanglewood summer festival and music centre in Massachusetts, where he studied with Aaron Copland.
Copland then arranged a further scholarship for him with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Although he wrote many orchestral works, including a piano concerto and an opera for children, Nightingale (seen at the Lyric Hammersmith in London in 1982, with Sarah Brightman, fresh from Cats, delivering an astonishing vocal performance of coloratura trills and soaring melodic lines) based on a moral fable by Hans Christian Andersen, he found his musical theatre groove after meeting Adams at a New York party in 1949.
The duo started by writing songs for summer revues in the lakeside resorts of the Adirondacks and developed this work through the 50s in off-Broadway revues and cabarets with writers including Neil Simon, Vernon Duke and Ogden Nash.
Their second musical, All American (1962), was a flop, though it contained a poignant, lyrical ballad about lost love, Once Upon a Time, which was recorded by Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett and sung by Bob Dylan among others.
The show had a book by Mel Brooks, who took from the debacle the germ of an idea for an intentionally disastrous musical that is a fluke triumph. His movie masterpiece The Producers, containing the calculatedly tasteless-as-possible hit show Springtime for Hitler, appeared in 1967.
After Annie, there was a string of flops and a misguided sequel to the first hit. Bring Back Birdie (1981) closed after just four performances on Broadway. It should have been called 'Bye Bye, Bye Bye Birdie'. Similarly, a famous flop with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, Dance a Little Closer (1983), shuttered on the same night as it opened, having been dubbed during previews 'Close a Little Sooner'.
That followed on the heels of another failure, Charlie and Algernon (1980, lyrics by David Rogers) which was presented – as Flowers for Algernon – in the West End by the producer Michael White in the previous year. It lasted barely three weeks at the Queen's (now Sondheim).
Despite these setbacks, Strouse's reputation remained, and remains, secure. He and Adams provided Sammy Davis Jr with a spectacular leading role as a prize-fighting boxer escaping from the Harlem ghetto in Golden Boy (1964) – best song, This Is the Life – directed by Arthur Penn and based on a 1937 play by Clifford Odets.
It ran for nearly two years on Broadway and was the first musical produced at the London Palladium (in 1968) when Davis Jr reprised the role for a three-month run.
In 1965, Strouse provided a clever, quasi-rocky score for Hal Prince's production of It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman! (lyrics by Adams, book by David Newman and the film director Robert Benton – who later wrote the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie).
And in 1970, Lauren Bacall headed the duo's Applause, accurately based on the movie All About Eve, with a book by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, for which Strouse won his second Tony.
Bacall was younger and more supple as Margo Channing than Bette Davis in the movie, and in London, at the Her (now His) Majesty's in 1972, the show had a solid 11-month run with Angela Richards superb as the aspirant, dethroning lead Eve Harrington.
In the same year, in London, Strouse and Adams launched a spectacular musical starring Polly James as Queen Victoria, I and Albert, at the Piccadilly, directed by John Schlesinger, but this was a seriously skewed fiasco, managing just 120 performances, though Adams remains proud of his lyrics.
The New York Times critic Frank Rich averred that Strouse often wrote rousing scores for frail shows, citing both Rags (1986) – lyrics by Rogers, book by Joseph Stein, librettist of Fiddler on the Roof – about Jewish immigrants in early 20th-century New York, starring the opera singer Teresa Stratas; and the misfired Nick & Nora (1991), based on the sleuthing married couple in Dashiel Hammett's novel The Thin Man, lyrics by Richard Maltby Jr, book by Arthur Laurents. The first lasted four performances, the second – also known as 'Nick & Snora' – doubled up with just nine.
Strouse wrote several notable film scores: for Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968), There Was a Crooked Man (1970), starring Henry Fonda and Kirk Douglas, and Sidney Lumet's Just Tell Me What You Want (1980), which featured a hilarious romantic punch-up in a department store between Ali MacGraw and her feckless millionaire lover, played by the hangdog comedian Alan King.
As Lerner nearly once observed, the lyrics of any show tune are only as good as the music lets them be, and for one glorious decade the lyrics of Adams flourished thanks to Strouse, who subsequently flattered the efforts of less ideal creative partners.
Strouse is right up there with the best of the old Broadway musical theatre greats before Sondheim broadened the genre's horizons while, according to the critic Mark Steyn, reducing the popular audience to a sophisticated metropolitan elite.
He married the actor and choreographer Barbara Simon in 1962; she died in 2023. He is survived by their four children, Benjamin, Nicholas, Victoria and William, and by eight grandchildren.
Charles Louis Strouse, composer, born 7 June 1928; died 15 May 2025