Ken Wydro, a playwright, director and producer who together with his spouse, Vy Higginsen, poured their life financial savings into the Off Broadway gospel musical “Mama, I Wish to Sing,” an everlasting work of Black theater that ran for greater than 2,800 performances, died on Jan. 21 at his residence in Harlem. He was 81.
The trigger was coronary heart failure, his daughter, Ahmaya Knoelle Higginson, stated.
“Mama, I Wish to Sing” tells the story of a minister’s daughter who rises to worldwide fame as a soul singer. The present is loosely based mostly on the lifetime of Ms. Higginsen’s older sister, Doris Troy, who honed her singing chops at her father’s Pentecostal church in Harlem and later tasted the massive time by co-writing and recording “Simply One Look,” which was a High 10 single for her in 1963 and later turned successful for each the Hollies and Linda Ronstadt.
Ms. Troy additionally made her mark as a backup singer on rock anthems just like the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t At all times Get What You Need,” and in 1970 she launched a solo album on the Beatles’ label, Apple Information, with a supporting solid that included George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Billy Preston.
“Mama, I Wish to Sing” is “a Black Cinderella story,” Mr. Wydro stated in a 2013 interview with Name Me Adam, an leisure web site. “Coming from behind, discovering oneself by way of loss, ache and household love.”
Though “Mama” in the end had a marathon run, success was something however assured. Almost each main theatrical producer in New York rejected the present, fearing {that a} gospel-heavy musical would appeal to a restricted viewers.
The present was a household affair. Mr. Wydro was the director; he and Ms. Higginsen produced it in addition to writing the e-book and the lyrics for its many authentic numbers (Wesley Naylor and Grenoldo Frazier wrote the music). Ms. Troy herself was solid within the function of her mom, whereas Ms. Higginsen — a outstanding disc jockey and tv host in New York — supplied onstage narration from inside a sales space, within the method of a radio announcer. (Their daughter finally took over the lead function).
With a finances of solely $20,000, Mr. Wydro and Ms. Higginsen opened removed from the lights of Manhattan’s theater district, as a substitute elevating the curtain in 1983 within the long-dormant August Heckscher Theater in East Harlem. With out the cash to promote in main newspapers, they largely relied on phrase of mouth.
“We did grass-root advertising and marketing, went round to Black church buildings after which touched base with the faculties, sororities {and professional} enterprise teams within the Black neighborhood,” Mr. Wydro stated in a 1990 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Phrase did certainly get out. In a 1984 overview in The New York Occasions, Stephen Holden wrote that “a current efficiency culminated in an viewers singalong of the gospel customary ‘This Little Gentle of Mine,’ and the temper within the theater was jubilation.”
An article in The Occasions the following 12 months famous that “Mama” was drawing audiences “actually by the busload, from as distant as Boston and Decatur, Ga.” One other article, in 1987, described the theater’s “whooping, cheering, whistling” crowds whereas noting that the musical had already logged 1,500 performances, making it the longest-running Black present in Off Broadway historical past.
Kenneth Wayne Wydro was born on Feb. 11, 1943, in Queens, the elder of two sons of Kashmir Wydro, an insurance coverage salesman, and Olga (Savich) Wydro, an actual property dealer. His father was the son of Polish immigrants; his mom’s mother and father have been from Ukraine.
After graduating from the Choate Rosemary Corridor boarding faculty in Wallingford Conn., in 1960, he attended the College of Rochester in Rochester N.Y. He earned a bachelor’s diploma in psychology there in 1964 earlier than heading to the College of California, Berkeley, the place he obtained a grasp’s in theater in 1966.
Mr. Wydro spent the early a part of his profession working seminars in public talking and communications for firms like IBM and Normal Meals. He wrote 4 books, together with “Suppose on Your Toes: The Artwork of Considering and Talking Beneath Stress” (1981).
He and Ms. Higginsen, who modified the “o” in her final identify to an “e” when she entered present enterprise, married in 1981 and commenced outlining “Mama” whereas strolling on a seaside in Jamaica just a few months later. They spun off a sequel, “Mama, I Wish to Sing: Half II,” in 1990, and a 3rd installment, “Born to Sing,” in 1996.
In February 1994, hundreds turned out to see the unique present carried out on the Paramount Theater in Madison Sq. Backyard. In its numerous types, “Mama” toured extensively in the USA, in addition to in Europe and Japan. A movie adaptation with Ciara, Lynn Whitfield, Patti LaBelle and others was launched in 2011. In 2023, their daughter directed a Fortieth-anniversary revival of “Mama,” which ran for 3 weeks in its former residence, now El Teatro in El Museo del Barrio.
In 1998, the couple and their daughter began the Mama Basis for the Arts to assist musical artists working in historically Black genres.
The couple continued to work as producers through the years. Mr. Wydro additionally wrote performs, together with the 2006 drama “Secrets and techniques: The Untold Story of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.”
Along with his spouse and their daughter, Mr. Wydro is survived by a brother, Laurence.
In later years, Mr. Wydro typically expressed pleasure within the influence “Mama” had on Black theater. “What we have been in a position to do,” he instructed The Inquirer, “was to attraction to an viewers that had not historically been invited to theater earlier than.”
