Lifestyle
Stephen Mo Hanan, Who Played Three Roles in ‘Cats,’ Dies at 78
Stephen Mo Hanan, a vibrant performer who sang arias and other music as a busker in San Francisco before playing Kevin Kline’s lieutenant in the acclaimed 1981 Broadway production of “The Pirates of Penzance” and three felines in the original Broadway cast of “Cats,” died on April 3 at his home in Manhattan. He was 78.
Gary Widlund, his husband and only immediate survivor, said the cause was a heart attack.
At his audition for “Cats,” Mr. Hanan (pronounced HAN-un) told Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer, and Trevor Nunn, the director, that he had spent several years singing and accompanying himself on a concertina at a ferry terminal at the foot of Market Street in San Francisco.
“As a matter of fact, I’ve brought my concertina,” he recalled telling Mr. Nunn in an interview with The Washington Post in 1982. “He said, ‘Give me something in Italian.’ Well, I’ve never had a problem with shyness. I sang ‘Funiculi, Funicula.’”
Mr. Hanan was ultimately cast in three parts: Bustopher Jones, a portly cat, and the dual role of Asparagus, an aging theater cat, who, while reminiscing, transforms (with help from an inflatable costume) into a former role, Growltiger, a tough pirate, and performs a parody of Puccini’s “Turandot.”
In an entry about the second day of rehearsal, he described an assignment from Mr. Nunn: to “pick a cartoon cat we know of, withdraw to ourselves and prepare a vignette of that cat, then return to the circle and each in turn will present.”
He continued: “I choose Fritz the Cat,” the Robert Crumb character, “making a pass at some kitty. Watching the others is a gas — people’s individualities are beginning to emerge.”
He and another cast member, Harry Groener, were both nominated for the Tony Award for best featured actor in a musical. They both lost; the tap dancer Charles (Honi) Coles won for “My One and Only.”
In the years following “Cats,” Mr. Hanan’s many roles included Moonface Martin in “Anything Goes,” at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis; the double role of Voltaire and Dr. Pangloss in “Candide,” at the Huntington Theater in Boston; and another dual role, Mr. Darling and Captain Hook, in “Peter Pan,” on Broadway and on tour. He also portrayed the villainous innkeeper Thenardier in “Les Miserables” in London.
In 1999, Mr. Hanan created a stage role of his own: Al Jolson, the popular vaudevillian who performed in blackface, sang on Broadway and starred in “The Jazz Singer,” the pioneering sound motion picture. “Jolson & Co.,” which Mr. Hanan wrote with Jay Berkow, was staged Off Broadway, at the York Theater Company.
Al Jolson “was pure id,” Mr. Hanan, who bore a physical resemblance to him, told Harvard magazine in 2002, when the show was revived at the Century Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan. “He didn’t censor himself, neither his joy nor his rage. With Jolson you can be completely over the top; you have to be. His personality demands that kind of size.”
“Jolson & Co.” recreates a 1946 radio interview with Barry Gray as a way of looking back on his remarkable life. Mr. Hanan sang many of the songs Mr. Jolson was known for, including “Swanee” and “California, Here I Come.”
Reviewing the show in New York magazine, John Simon praised Mr. Hanan’s performance as “mostly impersonation but, as such, unbeatable.” He added, “On top of the Jolson looks, the incarnator has absorbed all the vocal, facial, and kinetic mannerisms as if he had stolen the man’s very soul.”
Mr. Hanan was born Stephen Hanan Kaplan on Jan. 7, 1947, in Washington. His mother, Lottie (Klein) Kaplan, was a high school English teacher; his father, Jonah Kaplan, was a pharmacist.
While attending Harvard College, Stephen performed in theatrical productions at the Loeb Drama Center and with the Hasty Pudding Club. He acquired the nickname Mo on a trip to Bermuda during college, after a friend, the future Broadway librettist John Weidman, observed that his outfit made him look like “some guy named Mo who cleans cabanas in the Catskills,” Mr. Hanan told the website TheaterMania in 2002.
After graduating in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature, he studied for a year at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art on a Fulbright fellowship.
Back in New York, he had difficulty landing roles, so in 1971 he moved to San Francisco, where he lived on a commune and spent six years singing for money, mostly at the ferry terminal, which earned him enough to spend winters in Mexico and Guatemala.
Once, outside the stage door at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, he encountered Luciano Pavarotti, who had just performed in Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera,” and summoned the nerve to sing for the great tenor.
“I raced to the money note and he, exclaiming ‘Che voce d’oro’ — or ‘What a golden voice’ — beckoned me over amid applause,” Mr. Hanan wrote in an unpublished essay.
After returning to New York again, he landed small parts in New York Shakespeare Festival productions of “All’s Well That Ends Well” and “The Taming of the Shrew” in Central Park in 1978. (Around that time, he dropped his surname and began using his middle name instead, because there was another actor with a similar name.)
In 1980, the director Wilford Leach cast him as Samuel, the second in command to Mr. Kline’s Pirate King, in the Shakespeare in the Park production of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operetta “The Pirates of Penzance,” which also starred Linda Ronstadt. Mr. Hanan stayed with the show when it moved to Broadway in 1981.
Rex Smith, who played Frederic, the male romantic lead, said in an interview that Mr. Hanan “embodied all that was required to be the Pirate King’s lieutenant, and for that you had to stand and deliver every night — if you’re not going to be keelhauled.”
In 2006, Mr. Hanan moved up in rank to play the Major-General in a Yiddish-language version of “Pirates” (called “Di Yam Gazlonim!”), put on by the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan (now the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan).
Allen Lewis Rickman, the director, of that show recalled that Mr. Hanan did not know Yiddish and had to learn his lines phonetically.
“He was quite a character and very entertaining, one of those people who you know is a real pro,” Mr. Rickman said in an interview. “He had a clownish streak — that was his first instinct — but not in a scene-stealing way.”
Phil Pritchard of the Hockey Hall of Fame works the 2019 NHL Awards at the Mandalay Bay Events Center on June 19, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)
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Paul W. Downs can’t help it that even on the weekends, his life intersects with “Hacks,” the HBO comedy he co-created and co-showruns with his wife, Lucia Aniello, and their friend Jen Statsky. (He also appears on the show as Jimmy LuSaque Jr., the besieged manager of its two stars, played by Emmy winners Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder.) The fifth and final season of “Hacks” premiered last week, but on Downs’ days off, he often finds himself at its previous filming locations or hanging out with cast members who have become like family.
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
Downs moved to Los Angeles in 2011, but soon after, he and Aniello were hired to write (and for him to act) on the über-New York show “Broad City,” keeping them away from the West Coast for years. Now the couple live in Los Feliz, which they enjoy with their young son.
“I love Los Feliz because it’s a real neighborhood with restaurants and bars, but also feels close to nature with Griffith Park,” Downs says. “Also it’s very central to my Eastside friends and Westside agents.”
And if he had to live at a local mall, like the character Ava Daniels did in the third season of “Hacks,” which would he choose?
“It would be the Americana, obviously.”
Here’s how he’d spend a perfect day in L.A.
10 a.m.: A late rise and a li’l barista
I’m sleeping in if I can, which I can’t because I have a toddler, but let’s say I can sleep ’til 10. That would be insane.
Then I’m making coffee at home. I’m making it with my 4-year-old because he likes to make my coffee now. He always wanted to help, now he really wants to do it on his own. I’m still there to supervise, but he does do a lot of it.
I do batch brew. I’m doing Verve Coffee that I’m grinding there, and then I’m brewing four cups because I need my coffee. I had a Moccamaster for a long time, but I recently got a Simply Good Coffee. There’s no plastic — it’s all glass and metal.
11 a.m.: Chocolate croissants for everyone
We’re driving to Pasadena and we’re going to [Artisanal Goods by] CAR, which is the place to get the best chocolate croissant, I think, in the world. I don’t just think in L.A., I think they’re better than Paris. I’m going there with my wife and my kid and I’m having another coffee and some pastry. We’re ordering three [chocolate croissants]. We’re not doubling up.
11:45 a.m.: The family business
We’re driving to Fair Oaks in Pasadena. There’s a place called T.L. Gurley. We shot “Hacks” there, actually. Not only in Season 1, but also full circle in Season 5. We’re going to shmay around and look at antiques. My kid is going to want to play a vintage pinball machine. We’re going to find a little piece of art for the house or what have you. It’s not necessarily that I’m on the hunt. It’s to pass the time and to have some fun. If I could do anything and have a leisurely day and take my mind off work, that’s what I’m doing.
People love to interact with my kid when he’s there. We’re really training him to appraise things at a young age. My parents are part-time dealers of antiques. My grandmother bought and sold antiques. It’s kind of a family business.
1:30 pm.: Baguettes and books
We’re driving to Larchmont and we’re getting a sandwich at Larchmont Village Wine, Spirits & Cheese. I’m doing prosciutto-mozzarella-basil on a baguette.
Then we’re going to Chevalier’s Books. What’s sad is that I’m often not looking for leisure material. I’m looking for something that I’m interested in learning more about or writing about, or that they’re turning into a show I want to audition for. But we’re also doing Little Golden Books for my son. He’s obsessed. We’re not huge on screen time, so we really encourage the book-buying.
2:30 p.m.: Cast pool party
We’re having some family fun in the pool and we’re doing that until evening. We invite people over all the time. My sister-in-law is a New Yorker, but she actually wrote last season on “The Rooster” and she’s often writing on shows in L.A., so she’s often here and she’ll have a couple friends come over. I know this sounds like a piece of PR or something, but we’ll really literally have Hannah [Einbinder] and maybe Mark Indelicato from “Hacks” come over to swim. Jen, our co-creator of “Hacks,” will come over.
6:00 p.m.: Family dinner
Sometimes we’ll order Grá to the house, which is a pizza place in Echo Park — excellent sourdough crust pizza. But if we don’t do that, an ideal evening is an early dinner at All Time on Hillhurst in Los Feliz. We’re ordering the ceviche and my son is having all of it and not sharing with anybody at the table.
8:45 p.m.: A thrilling ending to the day
After putting my kid to bed, my wife and I, in an ideal world (full disclosure: we haven’t done this in two years), we’ll watch something together that we’ve been meaning to watch. We have a long list of movies and we either want to revisit or that we haven’t seen that we need to watch.
We don’t watch a lot of comedies. It’s a dream to watch a “Black Bag” or a little espionage thriller. We really like that because it’s so different than the stuff that we’re working on in the day.
Often the things we watch are things that we admire. We like deconstructing it as fans of film and television. We do like talking about the making of it, but it’s less of a critique and more of a listing of the things we appreciated about it.
10:30 p.m.: No work tomorrow
And then it’s lovemaking ’til morning on a perfect Sunday. If it’s a perfect Sunday, there’s also a Monday that’s off.
Jay (not pictured) found himself alone and hopeless in a jail cell when a fellow inmate’s unexpected words of comfort changed his life.
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When Jay was 22 years old, he was a self-described loner. In this story, he is being identified by his nickname to allow himself to speak candidly about the following experience and his mental health. He says the few people he did hang out with at the time had questionable morals.
”I chose my friends poorly, and your friends have a tendency to rub off on you. And so I started making poor decisions,” Jay said.
One evening, when he and his friends were out drinking, someone suggested they should try to break into the chemistry building on his college campus. Most of the group shrugged the suggestion off, deeming it impossible, but Jay was convinced he could pull it off.
“The next night I made a plan of how to do it, and I did it,” Jay remembered. “And I didn’t get caught doing it, [but] I got caught afterwards.”
At around 1 that morning, Jay was placed in the county detention center. Sitting alone in his cell, reality began to sink in.
“I pretty much thought that my life as I knew it was going to be over, and I had decided that the world would be better off without me in it.”
Jay made a plan to end his life. As he prepared himself, he began to cry.
“But just in that moment when I was ready to do it, I heard a voice coming from the top left corner of my cell, from a little vent. And someone called out to me and said, ‘Hey, is this your first time?’”
The man who called out was an inmate in the cell next door.
“I collected myself a little bit, and I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Can I pray for you?’”
Jay had grown up religious, but had stopped going to church years before. In that moment, though, he knew he needed support. He said yes, and listened as the man began to pray.
“I wish I could tell you that I remember the [exact] words that he said to me, but what I remember is that his words landed with me, and instead of wanting my life to be over, suddenly I saw hope,” Jay said.
The interaction happened nearly ten years ago, but it was a pivotal moment in Jay’s life, and one he thinks about all the time.
“[Now], I have a good job. I have a girlfriend who loves me. I have a life. But I have a life because somebody who was in the same situation I was in had the courage to talk to a fellow inmate and be kind.”
Jay says that he wishes he could meet that man again and express his appreciation.
“[I would] shake that guy’s hand, give him a hug, and tell him what his small gesture meant for me, how he changed the course of my life.”
My Unsung Hero is also a podcast — new episodes are released every Tuesday. To share the story of your unsung hero with the Hidden Brain team, record a voice memo on your phone and send it to myunsunghero@hiddenbrain.org.
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