R.I.P. Philip Rose

[Reza]

Wednesday, June 01, 08:02:25pm

Philip Rose, who as the producer of Broadway
shows like A Raisin in the Sun and Purlie
Victorious advanced the cause of black
playwrights and actors and helped widen the scope
of American theater to include stories of blacks
and other minorities, died on Tuesday in Englewood, N.J. He was 89.

His death, at the Lillian Booth Actors Home of
the Actors Fund, came after a stroke, his wife, Doris Belack Rose, said.

A former singer and a record company executive,
Mr. Rose was a producing novice when he and David
J. Cogan, an accountant, brought Raisin to the
stage, first to New Haven in 1958 and then to
Broadway in March of the next year. Mr. Rose had
known the playwright, Lorraine Hansberry, since
they had both worked in a summer camp in the
Catskills, he as a singer on the entertainment
staff, she in the dining room. She confessed to
him that she had literary dreams.

And he said to her, I hope you do become a
writer, because you're a lousy waitress,his
wife recounted in an interview on Wednesday. That cemented the friendship.

Ms. Hansberry showed him early versions of a play
that told the story of a black Chicago family's
aspirations to middle-class respectability and
the eventual dashing of their dreams. He later offered to produce it.

And she said, What does that mean? Mrs. Rose
said. And he said, I haven't a clue, but we'll find out together.

The first play by a black woman to open on
Broadway, and the first Broadway play with a
black director (Lloyd Richards), Raisin had a
cast that included the future stars Sidney
Poitier and Ruby Dee. It received terrific
reviews, ran for well over a year, spurred
interest in black theater and, as The New York
Times drama critic Frank Rich wrote on its 25th
anniversary, changed American theater forever.

Mr. Poitier, who also starred in a 1961 film
version of the play, said in an interview on
Wednesday that Mr. Rose was a fine judge of acting talent.

He would give actors a page or two to read, Mr.
Poitier said, and in watching that actor, he
could see what rested behind the words, which
gave him a good measurement of the power that actor had.

In 1961 Mr. Rose produced Purlie Victorious, a
farcical sendup of race relations set in a
Southern town, written by Ms. Dee's husband,
Ossie Davis. Directed by Howard Da Silva and
starring Mr. Davis, Ms. Dee, Alan Alda and
Godfrey Cambridge, the play ran more than seven
months and inspired a musical, Purlie, which
itself became a hit in 1970. Mr. Rose again
produced, and he collaborated on the book with Mr. Davis and Peter Udell.

I'm so grateful he was on the scene, Ms. Dee
said on Wednesday. He was responsible for a
major shift in the theater, for the inclusion of
so many African-Americans on Broadway.

Mr. Rose was also a pioneer in untraditional
casting. In 1964 he produced Bill Manhoff's
two-handed comedy, The Owl and the Pussycat, a
romance about a pseudo-intellectual who works in
a bookstore and a model/actress who is also a
prostitute. Mr. Rose hired a white actor, Mr.
Alda, and a black actress, Diana Sands, who had
appeared in Raisin. Controversy ensued.

I asked myself, Is Diana's color going to keep
her from getting the role? Mr. Rose said in an
interview with The Times. No, I said to
myself, and I managed to persuade the playwright
and others to make the break. I happen to think
that Sidney Poitier would make a great Hamlet.
Should he be denied the part because the others
in the company might be white?

Philip Rosenberg he changed his name when he
entered show business was born on July 4, 1921
on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. When he was
a teenager his father, Max, moved to Washington
and opened a haberdashery. Philip abandoned his
studies at Brooklyn College to rejoin his family.
After briefly pursuing a singing career he was
a baritone he worked as a record executive and
founded a label, Glory Records, which released pop and R&B music in the 1950s.

In addition to his wife, an actress whom he
married in 1946, Mr. Rose is survived by a
brother, Jack Rosenberg, and his sisters Sylvia
Smolkin, Pearl Yabroff and Rose Diamond, all of the Washington area.

Among his other Broadway credits, Mr. Rose
directed and helped produce the 1975 musical
Shenandoah, for which he shared a Tony Award as
a writer of the book; and he directed and wrote
the book for Comin Uptown (1979), a musical
adaptation of Dickens's A Christmas Carol, starring Gregory Hines.

In his 2001 memoir, You Can't Do That on
Broadway!, Mr. Rose wrote that working as a bill
collector in Washington's black neighborhoods
introduced him to black culture and the plight of black Americans.

Why I was so open to becoming this person, I
have no idea, he wrote. I also don't know why
any of those people, given the circumstances
under which they met me, cared enough to reach
out, to enlighten me, and to point me in a new
direction. What I do know is how grateful I am
for what was done for me by a group of generous,
remarkable people who happened to be black. And
while I don't know where or who they now are, I
know that for anything important I may have done
or will do with my life, I am trying to say thank you to them.