Ronny White, a debonair New York cabaret singer and pianist who brought a Cole Porter vision of yesteryear Manhattan elegance to life as a premier interpreter of the Great American Songbook, died on Aug. 19 in Fredon, a town in northern New Jersey. He was 88.
His friend and caretaker Ben Cassara said he died of bone cancer at a hospice facility.
Mr. Whyte’s performances conjured “a nighttime world of tinkling pianos, rustling gowns and tipsy people,” Stephen Holden wrote in a 1990 profile in The New York Times.
His repertoire of songs numbered in the thousands, including gems by the likes of George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Rodgers and Hart, as well as by personal favorites like Cy Coleman, Bart Howard and the team of Tommy Wolf and Fran Landesman.
He was also noted for lightening the mood with obscure Jazz Age novelty songs and comic numbers like the British duo Flanders and Swann’s “Have Some Madeira M’Dear.”
Over the decades, Mr. Whyte performed around the world. But his natural habitat was the intimate Manhattan cabaret: the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, Rainbow and Stars in Rockefeller Center, the St. Regis Room of the St. Regis Hotel and Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle hotel, along with the adjacent Café Carlyle, the longtime home of the world’s most famous saloon singer, Bobby Short, Mr. Whyte’s friend and mentor.
A part-time actor as well as a suave musician, Mr. Whyte seemed perfectly cast in the role of an “upscale Manhattan version of Billy Joel’s ‘Piano Man,’” as Mr. Holden put it.
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The post Ronny White, Cabaret Singer Who Personified Elegance, Dies at 88 appeared first on New York Times.
