Tony Tanner Legacy Project
A nonprofit fundraiser supporting
SST Productions IncProject to catalogue, preserve and publish the collected works of Tony Tanner
$2,950
raised by 7 people
$50,000 goal
From the New York Times:
Tony Tanner, a versatile actor, writer and director whose biggest Broadway success was directing âJoseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoatâ in 1982, a production that helped make that musical a staple of American community and high school theater, died on Sept. 8 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.
âJosephâ was perhaps the high point of Mr. Tannerâs respectable if not flashy career in both his native Britain and the United States. A colorful telling of the biblical story of Joseph, it had started out in the 1960s as a school project by Andrew Lloyd Webber (music) and Tim Rice (lyrics) and had been performed in Britain and the United States over the years. But Mr. Tannerâs Broadway version elevated its profile considerably.
The show started Off Broadway at the Entermedia Theater in the East Village before transferring to Broadway, where it ran for more than a year and a half and earned Mr. Tanner two Tony Award nominations, for best direction of a musical and best choreography. Its most lasting effect â vital to high school and college theater departments everywhere â was its casting a woman in the part of the Narrator, a role as important as that of Joseph himself; itâs now standard practice.
Anthony Roy Tanner was born on July 27, 1932, in Hillingdon, England, west of London, to Herbert and Frances Tanner. He attended the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London.Â
In the 1950s, he worked in British repertory companies, playing, as he put it, âSaint Peter, Jimmy Porter in âLook Back in Anger,â a cigar-smoking American Air Force colonel (at age 21) and the front end of a cow in âJack and the Beanstalk,ââ among other roles.
In the early 1960s, he replaced Anthony Newley as Littlechap, Mr. Newleyâs signature role, in âStop the World, I Want to Get Offâ at the Queenâs Theater in London. He also played the part in a 1966 film version.
A chance to replace Tommy Steele in the lead role of the 1965 Broadway production of âHalf a Sixpenceâ took Mr. Tanner to the United States. His next turn on Broadway was in 1973, in a leading role in âNo Sex Please, Weâre British,â a play that didnât last long but gave him a chance to use everything in his comedic bag of tricks.
âTony Tanner,â Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times, âin the leading role of the absurd friend, pulls faces with vigor, whines in a nasal, distorted and effeminate cockney, has a funny trick trying to get from a chair while loaded down with a pile of books, and jumps through windows with a pleasing disregard for personal safety.â
Mr. Tanner directed and choreographed âSomethingâs Afootâ on Broadway in 1976, then returned two years later as director of âGorey Stories,â a work by the writer and artist Edward Gorey. The piece had received a strong review in The Times when it opened the previous year Off Broadway under Mr. Tannerâs direction: Mel Gussow called it âa merrily sinister musical collage of Goreyana.â The review, Mr. Tanner wrote on his website, led the producers to move the show to the Booth Theater on Broadway.
âI was kicking and screaming all the way,â he told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, when he restaged the work in Hollywood. âThe Booth is too big a theater. People paying $27.50, or whatever the price was then, donât want to be told to use their imagination. They want to see it.â
Not helping matters was that there was no New York Times rave â by October 1978, when the Broadway version opened, the paper was on strike. Other reviews were generally mixed.
âThe day after we opened,â Mr. Tanner recalled, âwe got telephone calls from the theater to come pick up our makeup because we werenât going to be playing that night,â he added. âItâs one of those delightful experiences that really does make you want to go into selling cosmetics door to door.â
Mr. Tanner had a late-career success with a one-man show that he wrote and performed, âCharlatan,â about the life and times of the Russian ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev, who had fascinated Mr. Tanner since he read a book about him when he was 12. He performed the show at theater festivals in the United States and abroad.