Merle Louise Simon, an award-winning stage actor and the only person to play roles in the original Broadway productions of four Stephen Sondheim musicals, died on Jan. 11 in Lake Katrine, N.Y., in Ulster County. She was 90.
Her daughter Laura Simon confirmed the death, in a nursing home.
Ms. Simon — who worked for most of her career under the name Merle Louise — began her run in Sondheim shows with “Gypsy,” in 1959, and continued with “Company” (1970), “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (1979) and “Into the Woods” (1987), Mr. Sondheim and James Lapine’s interpretation of fairy tales. (Mr. Sondheim wrote the lyrics for “Gypsy,” and the music and lyrics for the other shows.)
“Steve had a real history with Merle,” Mr. Lapine, who directed Ms. Simon in three roles, including the Giant in “Into the Woods,” said in an email. Mr. Sondheim, he added, “loved the energy she brought to the rehearsal room and the stage. Merle was usually the smallest person in the room but always the most ebullient and with the most glorious voice.”
When “Gypsy” opened, Ms. Simon had a minor role. But she was promoted in early 1960 to be the understudy to the actress playing June, one of two daughters pushed into show business by their ambitious mother, Rose, played by the powerhouse Ethel Merman.
Soon after becoming the understudy, she went on for the actress, who was ailing, and ended up becoming the full-time June. “Because I just got the part, I had never practiced onstage,” Ms. Simon told The Morning Call, of Allentown, Pa., in 1979. “I went on and did the show, and I heard Ethel Merman say that I was great.” She said Ms. Merman told David Merrick, one of the show’s producers, that she wanted Ms. Simon to stay in the role; Ms. Simon played it for more than a year, starting in 1960.
“In a way, they’re right,” she said, “when they say, ‘Beware of understudies.’”
She played Susan, a Southern belle going through a divorce, in “Company,” a series of vignettes that revolve around a bachelor learning about love, marriage and divorce from his married friends. She was then cast as the Beggar Woman, the crazed, long-lost wife of the title character in “Sweeney Todd,” a barber who slits the throats of unsuspecting clients.
The critic Allan Wallach, of Newsday, wrote that Ms. Simon’s “crude sexual advances” as the beggar “suggest the horrors of subterranean London.”
Her performance won her the Drama Desk Award for best featured actress in a musical.
Merle Louise Letowt was born on April 15, 1934, in Manhattan and grew up largely in Bethlehem, Pa. Her father, Alvin Letowt, was a machine-shop inspector at Bethlehem Steel; her mother, Merle (Barnes) Letowt, managed the home. Merle dropped her surname soon after appearing in “Gypsy.”
She acted in high school productions and, after graduation, took a job operating a mechanical calculator for the Lehigh Valley Railroad. Her earnings helped pay for acting lessons in New York on nights and weekends; she rode the railroad there free of charge.
She performed in regional productions of “The Boy Friend,” “Born Yesterday,” “Carousel” and other shows. In 1956, she nearly made her Broadway debut in a musical called “Four Dolls on a Dime,” and the railroad agreed to give her a six-month leave of absence so she could be in the show. But shortly before rehearsals were to begin, the show was canceled.
“And I had to go back to work on Monday,” she told the interviewer Rian Keating in 1984.
She met Peter Simon, an actor and lighting designer, in 1963, while they were working at the Barn Theater, in Augusta, Mich. They married later that year.
In addition to the four Sondheim shows, Ms. Simon appeared on Broadway in three other musicals: “La Cage aux Folles” (1987); “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993); and “Billy Elliot: The Musical” (2008). She also performed in another Sondheim show, “A Little Night Music,” at the North Shore Music Theater, in Beverly, Mass., in 2000. She played Madame Armfeldt, a former courtesan and the mother of the character Desiree, who sang “Send in the Clowns.”
To make up for not having gone to college after high school, Ms. Simon studied psychology at Marymount Manhattan College for about a dozen years and received her bachelor’s degree in 2004.
In addition to her daughter Laura, she is survived by another daughter, Heather Simon; her son, Matt Simon; her sister, Jane Halteman; and her brother, Alvin Letowt Jr. Her marriage to Mr. Simon ended in divorce.
In 1961, while on tour with “Gypsy” in Detroit, Ms. Simon recalled that she, Ms. Merman and other cast members were invited to a gay club. Although she had seen Ms. Merman turn down requests to sing at parties and soirees, this was different.
“She stood on top of this rickety piano and sang ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business,’” Ms. Simon told Mr. Keating. “And this piano is shaking like this and she was wobbling, and the piano was out of tune.”
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