Charles Strouse, the famed Broadway composer who received Tony Awards for his scores for Bye Bye Birdie, Applause and Annie, died Thursday at his home in New York City, his family announced. He was 96.
A member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame and Theater Hall of Fame, Strouse wrote music for more than a dozen Broadway shows.
He and lyricist Martin Charnin were responsible for the immortal tunes “Tomorrow” and “It’s the Hard Knock Life” from Annie, and he and his most frequent collaborator, lyricist Lee Adams, partnered on such classic show tunes as “Put on a Happy Face” from Bye Bye Birdie, “You’ve Got Possibilities” from It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman and “This Is the Life” from Golden Boy.
Asked by Playbill in 2009 why he got into the theater, Strouse replied: “You can make a lot of money and you meet beautiful girls. That was underneath many other things. Primarily, I’ve been taught by many wonderful, very fine teachers throughout my life, and I have what I believe every composer has at heart — the way a fine tailor feels about his material, I feel about musical notes.”
Strouse’s sounds extended beyond the stage, with his film scores for Bonnie & Clyde (1967), The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968) and the animated All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989). He and Adams also wrote “Those Were the Days,” the theme song for the famed Norman Lear sitcom All in the Family.
Born on June 7, 1928, Charles Louis Strouse grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His mother, Ethel, was a pianist and introduced him to music. “She was a very sad woman,” he said. “I started tinkering at the piano to amuse her, to make her happy. She liked it, I guess. I had a good ear and took lessons.” One of his friends in the neighborhood was Burt Bacharach.
When he was 15, Strouse began studying classical composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. His initial interest was in “serious music,” and after Eastman, he received a fellowship at Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts, where he met Leonard Bernstein and studied under Aaron Copland. (During the course of his career, Strouse wrote many classical works, including the 1982 opera The Nightingale, starring Sarah Brightman.)
He met Adams at a Christmas party in the late 1940s, and the two wrote music for revues at the camp Green Mansions in the Adirondacks. A stage manager there pitched the idea for a show about teenagers initially called Let’s Go Steady; it would become 1960’s Bye Bye Birdie, Strouse’s first Broadway show.
“A lot of people of our generation — Sheldon Harnick, Carol Burnett — worked in these summer camps,” he told NPR. “They were places where young New Yorkers went to meet each other, to eat, to play tennis, to swim. We had a full theater staff at Green Mansions — sets, costumes, orchestra. We wrote an original revue every Saturday night all summer.”
A huge hit, Birdie starred Chita Rivera and Dick Van Dyke and featured some of Strouse’s best-known songs, including “Put on a Happy Face” and “A Lot of Livin’ to Do.”
“Birdie was joyous and fun, hearing ‘Spanish Rose’ the first time was exciting, and every day we loved what we were doing, thanks to Charles and the team,” Rivera said on the occasion of Strouse’s 90th birthday. “Thank you for filling my life with music and being a part of who I am.”
Strouse and Adams went on to write several musicals together, including 1962’s All-American; 1964’s Golden Boy, starring Sammy Davis Jr.; 1966’s It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman, with Linda Lavin; and 1970’s Applause, an adaptation of All About Eve that starred Lauren Bacall.
Strouse described their relationship as a marriage.
“We’ve always been very closely collaborative,” Strouse told Playbill in 2008. “I’m that way, kind of, with everyone, but I’m more married to Lee, in a sense. That is, we gave and took from one another and argued like married people. I still have that closeness to him. One of the reasons we don’t work much today is that he leads a healthier life than I do. He likes sitting around in the country and reading. I don’t — I’m lost unless I’m composing.”
Strouse said their process often began with him putting a song on tape and Adams providing concrete feedback on the music. “I would say that was the secret of Lee’s and my working together and being ‘married,’ so to speak: That he was very open with me,” Strouse said. “If he didn’t like it, or if he did, he would say, ‘Can’t we do the middle section faster …?’ or something.”
However, Adams didn’t work with Strouse on Annie. Charnin, an old friend of Strouse’s, had the idea for a musical based on the comic strip character Little Orphan Annie, but Strouse was skeptical.
“I hated the idea. I hated it because I had done a show called It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman, and it closed in four months,” Strouse said. “Hal Prince, its producer and director, always said to me that if you ever write something for children, you better make sure it’s marketed as an adult show that a parent can bring a child to. If it’s a children’s show, it won’t be as successful. And sure enough, he hit on something.”
The musical would go on to play for 2,377 performances on Broadway and spurn productions all around the world and little girls everywhere singing “Tomorrow.” The show won the Tony for best musical and has twice been revived on Broadway.
“When I was a 6-year-old girl, I only based my opinion on people from how they made me feel and how they treated me. When I first met Charles Strouse, I was 100 percent enamored with him,” Danielle Brisebois, who played Molly in the original production, said. “His warm smile and his soulful eyes … He was always encouraging, thoughtful and kind. I had no idea I was in the presence of a legend!”
He also won Emmys for his work on the TV adaptations of Annie and Bye Bye Birdie and a pair of Grammys for Annie.
But Strouse’s careers wasn’t all hits. All-American, his follow-up to Bye Bye Birdie that he wrote with Adams and Mel Brooks, closed after three months in 1962. Dance a Little Closer, with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, shuttered after one performance in 1983, and Nick & Nora closed after nine performances in ’93.
“Everybody has flops,” he said. “When I teach, the students say, ‘How can you work three or four years on a show … and it flops? How do you recover from that?’ The only answer is, you’ve done your best, it didn’t work, what’s next?”
He published his memoir, Put on a Happy Face, in 2008.
He married Barbara Siman, a director and choreographer, in 1962 — she died in February 2023 — and they had children Benjamin (an author), Nicholas, Victoria (a screenwriter on Finding Dory) and William (also a screenwriter).
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