Entertainment

‘Secret Garden’ Composer Carly Simon Sister Is 82 Years Old – The Hollywood Reporter


Lucy Simon, composer and sister of pop superstar Carly Simon, who received a Tony nomination in 1991 for her work in the long-running Broadway musical Secret garden, has died. She is 82 years old.

Simon passed away on Thursday at his home in Piedmont, New York, after a long battle with breast cancer, a family spokesman announced.

She and Carly began their careers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as The Simon Sisters, and their folk activism opened up to the likes of The Tarriers in Greenwich Village nightclubs. Their recording of “Wynken, Blynken & Nod” peaked at number 73 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1964.

Lucy Simon became the rare female composer to have a Broadway show when Secret garden premiered in April 1991. Starring Rebecca Luker, Mandy Patinkin, Alison Fraser and Daisy Eagan and based on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved children’s novel, the musical had 709 performances. He has performed on Broadway, won two Tonys and has performed around the world.

Her next musical, Doctor Zhivagodebuted in Australia after nearly 20 years of pregnancy and landed on Broadway in March 2015. She said her inspiration came from poems Boris Pasternak wrote as Zhivago at the end of the epic novel his 1957.

“Those poems are my way into the music, the inspiration for me to tell the story in the song,” she says.

Simon was born in New York on May 5, 1940. Her father was the publishing giant Richard Simon, and her mother, Andrea, was a one-time switchboard operator for Simon & Schuster.

She is the second eldest of four children: she follows Joanna and precedes Carly and Peter. They all grew up in a musical family, where her parents entertained such celebrities as James Thurber, Richard Rodgers, Benny Goodman and Oscar Hammerstein.

Memorizing and reciting a poem prompted Simon, then 14 years old and dyslexic, to write music for Eugene Field’s poem “Wynken, Blynken & Nod.” It was the only way she could remember it.

While Carly enjoyed massive success with hits like “Anticipation,” “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” and “You’re So Vain,” Lucy went to nursing school and married a doctor. psychology David Levine in 1967. However, she returned to record two solo albums for RCA, 1975’s Lucy Simon and 1977 Time is stolen (Carly and James Taylor provided backing vocals later.)

She and her husband subsequently produced a pair of Grammy Award-winning children’s albums, 1981 In harmony and in 1983 In Harmony 2.

Simon gets the rights to adapt the classic children’s book Little House on the Prairie into a musical and worked with lyricist Susan Birkenhead on it, but the project never got underway.

Playwright Marsha Norman, who wrote books and lyrics for Secret gardenand producer Heidi Landesman hired Simon as their composer after hearing the demo tune she had written for “I Heard someone Crying”.

The Central Theater Group in Los Angeles will present a new production of Secret gardendirected by Warren Carlyle, at the Ahmanson Theater from February 19 to March 26. A concert version of Doctor Zhivago starring Ramin Karimloo is set on May 9 at The Palladium in London.

Simon also wrote and produced the songs and soundtrack for the 1993 HBO TV series True Positive Adventures of Texas Cheerleaders Accused of Mother Murderstarring Holly Hunter.

In 2018, she received the Samuel French Award for Sustainable Excellence in the US Stage.

Simon worked with Birkenhead and Emily Mann on the musical On Cedar Streetbased on the 2015 book Our souls at night and with the direction of Victoria Clark. Her battle with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer forced her to withdraw from the project, but some of her music will still live on.

In addition to her sister and husband, survivors include her children, Julie (and her ex-husband, Christopher) and James (and his wife, Alanna), and grandchildren Sophie, Ben, Charlie and Evie.

“I believe that life and art continue into the future,” she once said. “The tune always brings me home. It leads me to where I want to go. That is my religion, as if the ancient gods were speaking to me. “

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