Craig Zadan, 69, Dies; Produced Musicals for Stage, Screen and TV

Craig Zadan, an ebullient showman who helped engineer a revival of Broadway musicals on television with live NBC broadcasts of “The Sound of Music,” “Peter Pan,” “Hairspray” and “The Wiz,” died on Tuesday at his home Los Angeles. He was 69.

Robert Greenblatt, the chairman of NBC Entertainment, said the cause was complications after shoulder replacement surgery last week.

“He had a vision,” Mr. Zadan’s producing partner, Neil Meron, said in a telephone interview. “He could look at a property and knew what it would look like in the end.”

Mr. Zadan (pronounced ZAY-dun) and Mr. Meron were a remarkably busy team, working in television and movies and on Broadway.

They were the executive producers of the film version of “Chicago,” which won the Academy Award for best picture in 2003. They staged Broadway revivals of the musicals “Promises, Promises” (2010) and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” (2011).

They produced “Smash,” a TV series about the making of a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe seen in the 2012-13 season on NBC. They also produced the Academy Awards telecast in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

In all, their productions won six Oscars, 17 Emmys, five Golden Globes and two Peabody Awards.

Their last major show together was a live version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice musical “Jesus Chris Superstar,” which was broadcast this year on Easter Sunday. Starring John Legend and Sara Bareilles, it was staged as a concert — as the composers originally conceived it — before an audience at the Marcy Armory in Brooklyn

Mr. Lloyd Webber was mixing the music in the production truck when, during a commercial break, he burst into the part of the truck where Mr. Zadan was. In an interview with the entertainment website IndieWire in June, Mr. Zadan recalled Mr. Lloyd Webber excitedly asking: “What do you think of the audience response? It’s so overwhelming. Do you think it’s too much?”

Mr. Zadan told him that there was not much he could — or would — do.

“We can’t go out there and tell them to cool it,” he said of the audience. “We want them to be as enthusiastic as they are.”

Mr. Zadan and Mr. Meron had been planning their next live musical for NBC, a production of “Hair,” and were working on a live TV version of “A Few Good Men” in collaboration with Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the original stage drama and the screenplay for the film, which starred Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson.

Both projects will proceed without Mr. Zadan.

He is survived by his partner, Elwood Hopkins.

Although they did not have a conscious division of labor as producing partners, Mr. Meron said that Mr. Zadan was more the deal maker and promoter. And, the actor Sean Hayes said, Mr. Zadan was also a comforting presence who persuaded people to believe in themselves.

“I had no idea what made him think I could be in ‘Promises, Promises,’ ” Mr. Hayes, who starred in the revival with Kristin Chenoweth, said in a phone interview. “I had this tremendous bout of stage fright when I started ‘Promises,’ and he never left my side, not for a minute. I never could have gotten through it without him.”

Mr. Zadan was born in Miami on April 15, 1949, to Murray and Naomi Zadan. Growing up in Brooklyn, and later in Far Rockaway, Queens, he became interested in Broadway and attended Saturday matinees. At Hofstra University, on Long Island, he ended a brief stint in the drama department to focus more on being the arts editor of the student newspaper.

“It was very, very difficult to be a student in the drama department and also review my professors’ school shows,” he told The New York Times in 1989. “I got a lot of pressure from them to quit the paper and concentrate on studying dramatic literature.”

He stayed on at the paper and, after college, started writing freelance articles about the theater for New York and After Dark magazines. But he was moving toward a career in the theater.

He organized a musical tribute to Stephen Sondheim at the Shubert Theater in 1973; wrote “Sondheim & Co.”(1974), a book about the making of Mr. Sondheim’s musicals; and found a job as producer of a series of cabaret shows at the Ballroom in Manhattan, in which Broadway composers like Charles Strouse, Sheldon Harnick and Stephen Schwartz sang their songs.

At one of those shows Mr. Lloyd Webber sang “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” well before “Evita,” the musical of which the song is a part, opened in London. “Andrew jokes that it was the first time anyone ever directed him — and it was Craig,” said Mr. Meron, who had begun working with Mr. Zadan by then.

The success of the “Broadway at the Ballroom” series led to positions for both men with Joseph Papp at the Public Theater, producing cabaret shows at the theater’s Martinson Hall. After two years, they began working in Hollywood, but their pitches to make musicals in the 1990s fell almost completely on deaf ears.

“We’d go to studios with ideas to do movie musicals and they’d literally kick us out,” Mr. Zadan told “Theater Talk,” a CUNY-TV program, in 2012. “They said audiences aren’t interested in movie musicals. You’re wasting our time.”

Taking their pitch to television networks, they found at taker at CBS for “Gypsy,” but not before they had secured Bette Midler as the domineering Mama Rose.

“Craig got her on the phone after she’d gotten out of the sauna, so she was very relaxed,” Mr. Meron said. “He said, ‘Is this not the greatest role written for a woman?’ And she said yes. And Craig said, ‘Is this not the opportunity of a lifetime?’ She said yes, and she said she’d do it.”

The success of “Gypsy,” broadcast in 1993, led them to ABC, where they produced “Annie” (1997), with Kathy Bates and Alan Cumming, and “Cinderella (1999), with Brandy Norwood in the title role and Whitney Houston as the fairy godmother. All those shows were choreographed by Rob Marshall, who a few years later would win an Oscar for directing “Chicago.”

Mr. Zadan and Mr. Meron produced several TV movies (including “The Reagans” and “A Raisin in the Sun”) and series (including “Veritas: The Quest”) before getting a surprise telephone call from Steven Spielberg asking them if they would meet him in his Los Angeles office to consider his idea of a television series about the making of a Broadway musical.

“He outlined the whole thing in three minutes, got up and said, ‘You’ll do this with me, right?’ ” Mr. Zadan said on “Theater Talk.” That turned out to be “Smash,” starring Debra Messing, Megan Hilty and Anjelica Huston.

The series made its debut in 2012 but was canceled after only 15 episodes.

“Craig was trying to be positive, as we figured out what to do next,” Mr. Greenblatt said in a telephone interview. “Out of those talks came ‘The Sound of Music.’

“But he’d been thinking about doing that prior to ‘Smash,’ so I think their doing all the live musicals since then might have happened regardless of the fate of ‘Smash.’ ”