Marvin Laird, a conductor for Broadway musicals and for performers like Bernadette Peters who also composed the music for “Ruthless!,” the campy, award-winning Off Broadway show about a girl who will do anything — including kill — to star in a school play, died in a hospital on Dec. 2 in Bridgeport, Conn. He was 85.
His partner in marriage, Joel Paley, said his death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of an infection.
Mr. Laird was the assistant musical director for a summer stock production of “Gypsy” in Lambertville, N.J., in 1961 when he met Ms. Peters, who was 13 and was playing two small roles.
“He was just the most energetic, charismatic fellow you’d ever want to meet,” Ms. Peters said in a phone interview.
He later conducted the orchestras for her concerts and for two Broadway revivals in which she starred: “Annie Get Your Gun” in 1999 and “Gypsy” in 2003. When Ms. Peters appeared in a revival of “Follies” in 2011, he was the associate conductor.
“The orchestras loved him,” Ms. Peters said. “He had a great sense of humor and they respected his musicianship.” She added: “He knew what I was going to do before I did it. I don’t sing a song the same way twice; it’s whatever happens to the song. And Marvin could get the whole orchestra to breathe with him.”
Ms. Peters was one of many performers he worked with onstage and on television. Among the others were Diana Ross, Juliet Prowse, Cass Elliot, Goldie Hawn, Dusty Springfield and Joel Grey.
But his most personal collaboration was with Mr. Paley, whom he met in 1976 during rehearsals for a television special starring Shirley MacLaine. Mr. Laird was the musical director, and Mr. Paley was a dancer in Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the cross-dressing parody troupe.
The two clicked quickly, and Mr. Paley showed Mr. Laird the script for his parody of “The Bad Seed,” the novel, play and 1956 film about a seemingly sweet girl who is actually a murderous psychopath.
Mr. Laird agreed to write the music. But after several years of working on what they turned into “Seedy,” Mr. Paley and Mr. Laird were unable to secure the rights to “The Bad Seed” from the estate of Maxwell Anderson, who had acquired the rights to the novel and wrote the 1954 play. They decided to alter the story and add allusions to the movie version of “Gypsy” as well as to the films “All About Eve,” “The Children’s Hour” and John Waters’s “Female Trouble.”
“In ‘The Bad Seed,’ Rhoda Penmark does in one of her classmates over a penmanship medal,” Mr. Laird said in an interview in 2022 on the website of Concord Theatricals, which licenses “Ruthless!” “I asked Joel what he would’ve killed for when he was a child” — to which Mr. Paley responded, “The lead in the school show!”
“Thus,” Mr. Laird said, “‘Ruthless!’ was born.”
“Ruthless!,” which opened in 1992 at the Players Theater in Manhattan, tells the story of 8-year-old Tina Denmark, whose ambition to be a star — stoked by a histrionic agent named Sylvia St. Croix — leads her to kill her rival for the lead role in a silly school musical called “Pippi in Tahiti.” In all, she slays six people. (Laura Bell Bundy originated the role; Britney Spears and Natalie Portman were her understudies.)
In his review in The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote that “such shows stand or fall on their humor” and that, until late in the second act, the musical “delivers a fairly steady quotient of laughs.”
“Ruthless!” won the Outer Critics Circle Award for best Off Broadway musical and the Drama Desk Award for Mr. Paley’s lyrics. According to Concord Theatricals, it has been performed around the world hundreds of times by both amateur and professional groups.
Ms. Peters played Tina’s mother in a concert version of “Ruthless!” in 1995 in Los Angeles that raised money to fight H.I.V. and AIDS.
Marvin Eugene Laird was born on Oct. 26, 1939, in Kansas City, Mo. His father, Herman, was an electrician, and his mother, Vivalore (Johnston) Laird, managed the home.
Marvin started taking piano lessons at age 4 and within a few years was playing at local churches. He studied classical music and theory at the University of Kansas in 1958 and 1959 before starting his career on the road.
In 1960, shortly before a performance of “The Mirror Under the Eagle,” starring Shelley Berman, at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pa., Mr. Laird stepped in when the production’s pianist, Billy Goldenberg, who had composed the music, took sick.
“The apprentice-volunteer spent 90 minutes on the phone with the stricken composer before he had the proper notations,” The Philadelphia Daily News wrote.
Mr. Laird went on to become an occasional presence on Broadway. He was a musical assistant on “Ben Franklin in Paris” in 1964; a dance arranger for five other musicals; musical director of “Broadway Follies” and “Oh, Brother!” both in 1981; and later, the conductor of “Annie Get Your Gun” and “Gypsy.”
On television, he wrote music for episodes of series like “Maude,” “Quincy M.E.,” “The Love Boat” and “Cher” and for “The Shirley MacLaine Special: Where Do We Go From Here?” in 1977. He was also the musical director of a special starring Telly Savalas in 1976 and music supervisor of a Liza Minnelli special taped at Radio City Music Hall in 1992.
In addition to Mr. Paley, Mr. Laird is survived by his brother, Larry.
Mr. Laird and Mr. Paley also wrote a revue, “The Yiddish Are Coming … The Yiddish Are Coming,” a tribute to the Yiddish language. It was staged in Denver in 2006, but it has not had the same success as “Ruthless!”
Collaborating with Mr. Laird, Mr. Paley said, was easy.
“I liked the challenge of him figuring out what I wanted to say musically,” he said. “When we started working together, I couldn’t believe he could make music out of my poetry. He could say in music what I said in words.”
With admiration, he added: “My entire life with Marvin, this is what I heard: ‘You’re so talented. But Marvin.’ My whole life was ‘But Marvin.’”
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