Broadway mourns a singular sensation

BROADWAY has paused to pay tribute to Marvin Hamlisch, the composer behind A Chorus Line, who died this week.

Marvin Hamlisch

BROADWAY has paused to pay tribute to Marvin Hamlisch, the composer behind A Chorus Line, The Way We Were and The Sting, who died this week aged 68.

In Sydney yesterday, the matinee performance of A Chorus Line was dedicated to his memory. And in the US, Broadway theatres were planning to dim their marquees overnight for one minute.

"I'm devastated," his longtime friend and collaborator, singer Barbra Streisand, wrote on her website. "He was a true musical genius, but above all that he was a beautiful human being."

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg described Hamlisch's life as a "great New York success story".

A child prodigy, Hamlisch was playing the piano by ear at five and he went on to become the youngest student ever at New York's Juilliard School for the performing arts.

Hamlisch got to know Liza Minnelli and Streisand in their early years. As a teenager he co-wrote The Travelin' Life, with lyrics by Howard Liebling, and it was included on Minnelli's 1964 debut album. After composing the soundtrack and theme song to 1968 drama The Swimmer, starring Burt Lancaster, Hamlisch found himself in demand. He composed the music for Woody Allen comedies Take the Money and Run (1969) and Bananas (1971) and got his first Oscar nomination, in 1973, for the song Life is What You Make It.

But it was his remarkable hat-trick of Oscars two years later that cemented his position as one of Hollywood's leading composers. In the late 1960s and early 70s, he worked on musical arrangements for several Broadway shows.

A Chorus Line was his first full-blown original musical. Working with the lyricist Edward Kleban, he took the simple notion of a group of dancers auditioning for roles in a new musical, milked all the drama and passion of the occasion, and turned it into a musical in its own right.

A Chorus Line, which included the infectious One Singular Sensation (officially just called One), opened on Broadway in 1975, and was showered with awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It ran for more than 6000 performances and became the longest running musical of all time.

Hamlisch co-wrote Nobody Does It Better, the theme song for the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, with his then girlfriend Carole Bayer Sager, and it was an international hit for Carly Simon. The song and the film's score brought him another couple of Oscar nominations. Other Broadway productions included They're Playing Our Song in 1978, The Goodbye Girl in 1993 and Sweet Smell of Success in 2002.

Hamlisch scored more than 40 films, including The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977, Sophie's Choice in 1982 and Three Men and a Baby in 1987. Most recently, he teamed up with Steven Soderbergh in 2009 for the soundtrack of The Informant!

The last projects on which he worked were a new musical, Gotta Dance, and a made-for-television film by Soderbergh, Liberace, now in production, starring Matt Damon and Michael Douglas.

ADDITIONAL REPORTING: THE TIMES