Ken Page, the beloved baritone who starred in Broadway’s” Cats” and” The Wiz” and who voiced Oogie Boogie in the film” The Nightmare Before Christmas”, died Monday. He was 70.
Dorian Hannaway, Page’s near friend and developer, Todd M. Eskin, and The Times on Tuesday confirmed his passing. No specifics about the reason were soon made available.
Hannaway initially announced Page’s dying Monday, writing on , Facebook , that the Broadway former “passed onto the next show”. Another of Page’s agencies, Lance Kirkland, told , TMZ , that Page died “very happily” Monday in his house in St. Louis. The Times contacted Kirkland for post on Tuesday, but Kirkland did not respond right away.
The actor, who played the Cowardly Lion in” The Wiz” in the 1970s and Old Deuteronomy as the first Broadway musical” Cats,” had a decades-long acting career. However, his powerful speech in Henry Selick and Tim Burton’s 1993 stop-motion classic,” The Nightmare Before Christmas,” is most recognized as the abstract Boogie in the abstract Boogieyman.
Born in St. Louis on Jan. 20, 1954, Page launched his step job in the song of the Muny, also known as the St. Louis Municipal Opera Theatre, before heading to New York. In the first Broadway manufacturing of” The Wiz,” he made his Broadway debut as the Lion in 1975. In 1976, he starred in the first Broadway restoration of” People and Dolls” with an all-Black solid, in which he played Nicely-Nicely. Two years later, he performed on the Great White Way in” Ain’t Misbehavin'”, the Tony Award-winning music that paid tribute to the Harlem of the 1920s and ‘ 30s, and returned to the position in a 1989 generation. Page even directed an , celebration production , of” Ain’t Misbehavin ‘” directly at the Cabrillo Music Theatre in Thousand Oaks.
He returned to Broadway for” Cat” in 1982 and in 1999 for” It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Music”.
On camera, Page somewhat played nightclub owner Max Washington in the Oscar-winning” Dreamgirls” and had several visitor elements in TV series like as” Sable”,” Family Matters”,” Captivated” and” Touched by an Angel”, as well as childrens ‘ plans on which he did words work. He even voiced King Gator in Disney’s 1989 animated picture” All Dogs Come to Heaven”.
In later years, Page developed and performed his cabaret-singer present, Page by Page, and wrote, directed and starred in several local and touring works.
___
© 2024 Los Angeles Times
Distributed by , Tribune Content Agency, LLC.