Rebecca Luker, the actress and singer who, in a lauded career of three decades on the New York stage, embodied the essence of Broadway music in the successful revitalizations of “Show Boat”, “The Sound of Music” and “The Music Man”. died Wednesday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 59 years old.
The death was confirmed by Sarah Fargo, her agent. Ms. Luker announced in February that she had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Mrs. Luker’s Broadway career, fueled by her clear opera soprano, earned her three Tony Award nominations. The first was for “Show Boat” (1994), in which she played Magnolia, the captain’s teenage daughter, fresh, whose life is destroyed by her marriage to a river boat player. The second was for “The Music Man” (2000), in which it was Marian, the librarian of the city of River who delights a flamboyant traveler who thinks – wrongly – that he is just passing through the city.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Luker has delighted critics by playing against the guy in a 1997 Encores! the production of “The Boys of Syracuse”. While Adriana, the neglected wife recovering her groove (along with her husband’s long-lost twin brother), wore slinky dresses from the 1930s and breathed what Ben Brantley, in his review for The New York Times, called ” a disarming sexuality of confectionery ”.
Adriana’s performance was fun, Ms. Luker admitted. “For the first time in my life, I did something,” she told The Times in 1998. “Learning to appeal to the public, learning to laugh – I ate it with a spoon.”
But by the end of that year, she was deep in her territory again, playing Mary, the undisciplined novice nun who had been a governess for seven years in “The Sound of Music.”
When she won her third Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Musical, she played Winifred Banks, a married Englishwoman with two children and a talented nanny in “Mary Poppins” (2006). ).
Despite her success in musicals, Ms. Luker did not identify as a type of show-tunes. “I’m not a person with musical theater,” she told Playbill in 2003. “I like rock music and jazz. I like the things from the ’70s I grew up with. “
Rebecca Joan Luker was born on April 17, 1961, in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up in Helena, a nearby town. She was one of four children of Norwegian Doak Luker Jr., a construction worker, and Martha (Baggett) Luker, the treasurer of the local high school. Rebecca sang in the choir of her church (First Baptist of Alabaster) and was a member of the Thompson High Marching Band.
In high school, she entered a beauty contest. Singing “Much More,” the ballad of dreams and girl judgment in “The Fantasticks,” she won a college scholarship as a first-round finalist at the Junior Miss in Alabama.
She took her to the University of Montevallo, just 14 miles from her parents’ home, where she majored in music and graduated in 1984. She graduated a year later than planned because she took a break to working with the Michigan Opera Theater, where he met his future agent New York. Just five years out of college, she was on the Broadway stage, taking on the lead female role in “The Phantom of the Opera” – Christine, the girl in the choir who is the subject of the ghost’s ailments.
“Phantom” was her Broadway debut; she started as a student for the original star, Sarah Brightman; he became an alternate; and took on the role of Christine in 1989. She remained with the show until 1991.
Mrs. Luker immediately switched to another Broadway show: she played a ghost, the orphaned little girl’s Aunt Lily, in “The Secret Garden.” Mrs. Luker’s obsession with Mandy Patinkin and Daisy Egan, for special praise.
In some of her later Broadway roles, Mrs. Luker replaced the original actress in a long-running success. She took on the role of Claudia, the muse of the director-protagonist, in “Nine” (2003); Marie, the godmother of temperamental fairy, in “Cinderella” (2013); and Helen, the frustrated wife and mother who misses the actress – as Mrs. Banks had in “Mary Poppins” – in “Fun Home” (2016).
He has aged gracefully in a number of subsequent Off Broadway roles. Twenty years after starring in a 1996 rebirth of the film “Brigadoon” as Fiona, a Scottish woman so rare that she really only comes once a century, she played a funny Buffalo matron in the comic drama “Indian Blood ”(2006) by AR Gurney. In 2011, she was an Italian duchess grieving the death of her son in Maury Yeston’s musical “Death Takes a Holiday.”
Mrs. Luker also had a thriving cabaret career, appearing in intimate venues such as Café Carlyle and Feinstein’s / 54 Below, but she confessed a special love for the “live experience in front of an orchestra.”
The stage was always her first home, but she finally made her stage debut in the late 1930s, when she appeared in “Cupid and Cate” (2000), a Hallmark Hall of Fame television film in which she played the role. perfect and perfect of the heroine. sensitive sister. Between 2010 and 2020, she starred in series, including “Boardwalk Empire” and “NCIS New Orleans” and appeared in three feature films, including “Not Fade Away” (2012), a drama about a teenage rock band. .
Her final stage role was as the wife of a minister in a small town in a 2019 production of the Kennedy Center in “Footloose”. She sang at a Sheldon Harnick lyric concert in March 2020.
Mrs. Luker married actor Gregory Jbara in 1993; they divorced in 1996. In 2000, she married actor Danny Burstein, whom she met when they played together in “Time and Again” in San Diego.
Mr. Burstein survives it. Information on other survivors was not immediately available.
Looking back on her career in a 2016 People Theater podcast, Ms. Luker expressed her gratitude for the roles she played, but acknowledged that she should probably have left the mainstream – she studied acting more and more seriously, it appeared in more plays, more comedy.
“I wish I could branch out a little,” she said cheerfully. “Maybe I played a bitch or something.”
Alex Traub contributed to the reporting.