Jay Malcolm Harnick

Jay Harnick, 78, Advocate of Theater for Children, Dies

The New York Times

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

MARCH 1, 2007

Jay Harnick, the founder of Theaterworks/USA, the nation’s largest touring children’s theater company, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 78.

He died at the Isabella House nursing home after a long illness, said his daughter, Jane Harnick.

Since Mr. Harnick helped start Theaterworks/USA in 1961, the company has toured shows in 49 states and Canada, playing to millions of children every year, and assembled a repertory of 117 musicals and plays.

Mr. Harnick, who was artistic director from the company’s founding until he retired in 2000, attracted top talent, bringing in directors like Jerry Zaks, songwriters like Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, and writers like Marta Kauffman and David Crane. The company also helped start the careers of many actors, including F. Murray Abraham and Henry Winkler.

The idea for Theaterworks came about as Mr. Harnick was directing a musical for children called “The Young Abe Lincoln.” The show, which had been well received Off Broadway, quickly transferred to Broadway, where, straining under the costs of a Broadway production, it ran for only 27 performances.

Photo

Jay Harnick Credit Theaterworks/USA About a year later, Mr. Harnick and a producing partner began taking the show around to schools, and when that succeeded, they decided to form a company to produce historical plays for children.

The plan was to expand children’s theater beyond shows with “dancing vegetables,” Mr. Harnick said in a 1988 interview in The New York Times. “We realize that it’s a very weighty responsibility to influence young minds,” he said. “I believe that no show is more important than the first one you see.”

The company later began presenting shows in theaters rather than in schools and sending multiple shows on tour simultaneously. The repertory also expanded to include original issue-oriented plays and adaptations of children’s classics like “The Velveteen Rabbit.”

Mr. Harnick continued working as a manager and a director for projects outside children’s theater, staging a 1966 production of Mozart’s “Abduction From the Seraglio” for the New York City Opera and a tour of “Fiddler on the Roof,” for which his brother Sheldon had written the lyrics.

Jay Malcolm Harnick was born on June 8, 1928, in Chicago, to a dentist and a homemaker. After graduating from the University of Illinois, he moved to New York and performed in the chorus and in small roles in revues and several Broadway shows.

Besides his daughter, Jane, and his brother, Sheldon, Mr. Harnick’s survivors include his wife, the actress Barbara Barrie; his son, Aaron; a sister, Gloria; and a granddaughter.