Broadway producer Roger Berlind dead at 90

NEW YORK — Roger Berlind, a prolific Broadway producer who collected 25 Tony Awards during his four-decade career, died Dec. 18, The New York Times and Variety reported. He was 90.

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Berlind died at his home in Manhattan, according to the Times. According to his family, the cause of death was cardiopulmonary arrest, the newspaper reported.

Berlind produced or co-produced more than 100 Broadway shows, including such recent smashes as “The Book of Mormon,” “Hello, Dolly!” and “Dear Evan Hansen,” Variety reported.

Berlind’s credits stretched across four decades, from early flops like 1976′s “Rex” and 1977′s “The Merchant” to the 2019 revival of “Oklahoma!,” “Mean Girls” and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” Variety reported.

Other credits included “Amadeus,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Nine,” “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,” “City of Angels,” “Gypsy,” “Kiss Me, Kate” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

Berlind’s last Tony Award came in 2019 for his revival of “Oklahoma!” In 2017 he won a pair of Tonys for best musical (”Dear Evan Hansen”) and best musical revival (”Hello, Dolly!”).

Berlind’s dream of being a songwriter fizzled during the 1970s and he became a partner for a brokerage firm on Wall Street, the Times reported.

Then Berlind’s wife and three of his four children were killed in an airliner crash at New York’s Kennedy International Airport. Within days, he resigned from his firm.

“The whole idea of building a business and making money didn’t make sense anymore,” Berlind told the Times in 1998. “There was no more economic motivation.”

“The significant thing about Roger is that he made an incredible turnaround,” Brook Berlind, his second wife, told the newspaper in a telephone interview. “His life was utterly bifurcated by the accident. There was Act I and Act II. I don’t think many other people could have gone on to such success after such catastrophe.”

Scott Rudin, who produced about 30 shows with Berlind, said Berlind had “enormous fortitude and persistence.”

“He was not dissuaded by the obstacles that dissuaded other people,” Rudin told the Times in an email. “He had enormous positivity, which is much, much more rare than you might think.”

Broadway veteran Betty Buckley called Berlind “a lovely man and wonderful producer” in a tweet sent on Christmas Eve. Actor David Aron Damane added that Berlind produced his first Broadway show, “The Life,” a musical that ran from April 1997 to June 1998.

“Always a kind word, always an affirming handshake, always a love for our show and theatre in general,” Damane wrote on Twitter. “Thank you for sharing it all.”

Cox Media Group