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Arthur Kopit, playwright of early promise who later found ?Phantom? success, dies at 87


His death was announced by publicist Rick Miramontez, but no further information was disclosed.

Mr. Kopit (pronounced COPE-it) was an engineering student at Harvard in the 1950s when he began to study creative writing, almost as a lark.

“There were all these courses listed, and they all seemed like pure fun!” he told the Boston Globe in 1987. “Recognition just for writing fiction! No more making a fool of myself in calculus!”

He won several playwriting prizes as a student, including one for “Oh Dad, Poor Dad,” a dark comedy influenced by the absurdist works of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. In Mr. Kopit’s play, an eccentric woman named Madame Rosepettle travels around the world with her timid son and with a coffin containing the stuffed corpse of her murdered husband. It also features a talking fish and a man-eating Venus’ flytrap.

“Oh Dad, Poor Dad” was hailed as a modernist breakthrough by critics and brought Mr. Kopit immediate attention from agents and producers. In 1962, when it opened in an off-Broadway theater, it was the first nonmusical play to be directed by Jerome Robbins, the renowned choreographer. “Oh Dad” won several awards, moved to Broadway in 1963 and made Mr. Kopit a rising star in the theater.

“I wasn’t really prepared for what happened after that,” he told the Globe. “Had anyone told me ‘Oh Dad’ was going to be a commercial success, was eventually to be made into a movie, I’d have thought the person crazy.”

(New York Times drama critic Frank Rich called the 1967 movie version of “Oh Dad,” starring Rosalind Russell, “surely among the worst screen desecrations of a hit play ever filmed.”)

After several other plays that failed to catch on with audiences or critics, Mr. Kopit’s “Indians” debuted on Broadway in 1969. With Buffalo Bill Cody (initially played by Stacy Keach) as the central character, the play examines Western myths and the genocide of American Indians.

His next major play, “Wings,” which premiered in 1978 and reached Broadway a year later, portrayed the interior world and struggles of a stroke victim. The central character was a woman who had done wing-walking stunts in the 1920s, but the experience was drawn from Mr. Kopit’s observations of his stepfather after a stroke.

He incorporated disorienting techniques — loudspeakers in the back of the theater, overlapping dialogue, flashing lights, fragments of music and garbled speech — to suggest an injured brain trying to regain equilibrium. Mr. Kopit was nominated for Tony Awards for both “Indians” and “Wings.”

In 1982, Mr. Kopit collaborated with composer Maury Yeston on “Nine,” a musical based on Federico Fellino’s 1963 film “8½,” about a creatively blocked Italian movie director. Mr. Kopit wrote the musical’s “book” — the dialogue and everything not expressed in song — and revised the show up until its Broadway premiere, which was directed by Tommy Tune.

With Raul Julia the featured actor in the original cast, “Nine” ran for almost two years and won five Tony Awards, including for best musical. Mr. Kopit was nominated for best book but did not win.

Soon afterward, Mr. Kopit and Yeston began to work on another project: a musical version of Gaston Leroux’s novel “The Phantom of the Opera,” to be directed by Geoffrey Holder.

At first, Yeston told the Baltimore Sun in 2000, he thought “Phantom” was a “terrible idea, but something strange happened. I couldn’t stop writing it, and that told me something. I would go home and say, ‘This is a ridiculous idea. Why are we doing this?’ and a song would occur.”

Mr. Kopit read Leroux’s 1911 novel about a disfigured masked man haunting the Paris Opera house, secretly in love with a singer. He watched earlier filmed versions, then brought a fresh backstory to the Phantom, giving additional depth and nuance to the character.

Just when Yeston and Mr. Kopit were seeking investors, they read that Andrew Lloyd Webber, who had just scored a huge hit with “Cats,” was undertaking a musical version of “Phantom.” Investors backed out of the Yeston-Kopit project, which seemed doomed to oblivion.

Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of Opera” premiered in London in 1986 and on Broadway in 1988. It was still running 32 years later, when Broadway theaters went dark because of the coronavirus.

Mr. Kopit called it “the British juggernaut,” but added, “I thought ours was better.”

In 1987, after he wrote “Hands of a Stranger,” a police drama miniseries for NBC, the network asked Mr. Kopit if he had any other ideas. He suggested a dramatic version of his “Phantom” script. Filmed on location at the Paris Opera and starring Burt Lancaster and Charles Dance, it ran in two parts in 1990.

“Wouldn’t it be interesting if somebody saw it,” Mr. Kopit told Yeston, “and said it would make a great musical, and we’re all set?”

That’s exactly what happened. A Houston theater presented an elaborate production in 1991 and released a cast recording of the musical, which was called simply “Phantom.” Other versions were staged in Seattle, San Bernardino, Calif., and Chicago, where it ran for more than a year. Mr. Yeston once called it “the greatest hit never to be produced on Broadway.”

By 2007, there had been more than 1,000 productions of what became known in theatrical circles as “the other ‘Phantom,’ ” with hundreds more in the years since. It toured German theaters for eight years and has been seen in cities across North America, but it has never been on Broadway.

When a Long Island theater staged Yeston and Mr. Kopit’s musical in 2003, New York Times writer Alvin Klein urged people to see the intimate show, which he called “the ‘Phantom’ of choice.”

“When history tells the tale,” Klein added, “the ‘other “Phantom” ’ may well be the winner.”

Mr. Kopit was born Arthur Lee Koenig on May 10, 1937, in New York. His parents divorced when he was young, he took the last name of his stepfather, a jewelry salesman. His mother had been a hat model and later was her son’s business manager for a time.

As a child in the New York suburbs, Mr. Kopit put on puppet shows and was an avid listener to radio dramas. Nonetheless, he studied engineering because he didn’t consider writing a stable career.

Yet by the time he graduated from Harvard in 1959, Mr. Kopit had written several plays and made a connection with Roger L. Stevens, the founding chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts who produced several of his early plays.

Mr. Kopit’s output was sporadic and varied, and plays on such subjects as nuclear war and computer hacking received indifferent or sometimes scathing reviews. Robert Altman’s 1976 film “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” was loosely based on Mr. Kopit’s “Indians,” and a filmed version of “Nine,” with Daniel Day-Lewis, Penélope Cruz and Judi Dench, was released in 2009.

Mr. Kopit lived most recently in Manhattan. Survivors included his wife of 53 years, writer Leslie Garis; three children; a sister; and three grandchildren.

“I was famous once,” Mr. Kopit said in 1987. “I started out with a bang, and I know what it’s like to be on the cover of magazines and be the starlet of the week or the month or whatever. I also know that none of this is directly related to the quality of the work. . . . In the long run, all you hope is that the work will matter and have quality. The rest is a crap shoot.”



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