NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Bob Avian, a choreographer, director and producer who was deeply involved in some of the biggest Broadway shows of the last 60 years, including with his frequent collaborator, Michael Bennett A Chorus Line, one of the longest-running musicals in history, died Thursday in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was 83.
His husband, Peter Pileski, said through a spokesperson that the cause was cardiac arrest.
Avian also choreographed the Broadway hits Miss Saigon (1991) and Sunset Boulevard (1994), among others, and directed a 2006 revival of A Chorus Line that ran on Broadway for almost two years, as well as productions of that show in London in 2013 and at New York City Center in 2018. He shared Tony Awards for choreography with Bennett for A Chorus Line (1975) and Ballroom (1978).
It all started with a happenstance of casting. Avian began his career as a dancer, and early on, about 1960, he was cast in an international tour of West Side Story.
I loved the adventure of traveling around the world, he wrote in Dancing Man: A Broadway Choreographers Journey, a memoir written with Tom Santopietro and published last year, but the tour would prove even more momentous for one all-encompassing reason: During rehearsals in New York, I met a fellow castmate, Michael Bennett, a 17-year-old high school dropout marked for greatness.
The two became friends, and within a few years Bennett had graduated from dancer to choreographer. In 1968, when he choreographed the Neil Simon/Burt Bacharach/Hal David musical Promises, Promises for Broadway, he brought Avian aboard as assistant choreographer, and they worked together for the next two decades, until Bennetts death from AIDS in 1987.
He was assistant or associate choreographer for Bennett on Coco (1969), Company (1970), Follies (1971) and Seesaw (1973). Then, in 1975, came their biggest hit of all, A Chorus Line, on which they were co-choreographers.
A Chorus Line is a musical about dancers creating a musical, and with Bennetts and Avians snazzy footwork and Marvin Hamlischs catchy music, it caused a sensation.
The conservative word for A Chorus Line might be tremendous, or perhaps terrific, Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times, reviewing the original production at the Public Theater in May 1975. It quickly moved uptown and ran for 15 years and 6,137 performances on Broadway, a record at the time (although it has since been surpassed by several shows).
Revisiting the show in 2013 in England, Avian reflected on its appeal.
The show is about the anonymous kid in the chorus, the guy who works on the assembly line, the clerk in the store, he told The Telegraph of London. They are everyone. Its not bigger than life; it is life.
In his memoir, Avian wrote about what made his creative partnership with Bennett work.
I wasnt cautious with Michael, he wrote. I knew him so well that I could tell him exactly what I thought. In effect I seemed to instinctively assume the role of his editor. Michael was a more mercurial personality than I, and ambitious though I was, I did not possess Michaels burning intensity. I didnt want to be Michael, and he didnt want to be me.
Robert Avedisian (he shortened the name when he became a professional dancer) was born Dec. 26, 1937, in Manhattan to John and Esther (Keleshian) Avedisian, immigrants from Armenia. His father was a chef, and his mother was a seamstress. By the time he was 11, he knew he loved to dance and was pretty good at it.
When my parents went out, I would push back the furniture, clear an open space, turn on the record player and leap around the apartment, he wrote in his memoir. Boys werent supposed to dance, especially not in Armenian culture, but I loved music, and I especially loved the freedom I found in dancing.
He didnt have any formal training, though, until he enrolled at Boston University, where he graduated from the College of Fine Arts in 1958. He also studied at the Boston Ballet School.
After the West Side Story tour which was playing Berlin when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961 he booked a national tour of Carnival!, working under director and choreographer Gower Champion. Not long after, he got his first chance to see a show choreographed by his friend Bennett, a summer stock production of the Richard Rodgers musical No Strings.
I knew right away that he had it and he knew he had it, Avian wrote.
Bennetts career took off, and with it Avians soon did too.
Some of their projects were more challenging than others. There was, for instance, Coco, a 1969 André Previn-Alan Jay Lerner musical that garnered a lot of attention, both for its enormous budget and for its star, Katharine Hepburn, who played fashion designer Coco Chanel. Bennett was the choreographer, Avian his assistant, and from the beginning they realized they had their work cut out for them. Avian recounted the first rehearsal in Dancing Man:
Were excited and even in awe of the great Kate for precisely 10 minutes. And then Michael and I look at each other and realize theres an elephant in the room: The legendary Katharine Hepburn doesnt have a musical bone in her body.
Critics were unkind, Coco ran for 329 performances on the basis of star power alone.
Avian wasnt limited to the choreographic side of things in his work with Bennett. On Ballroom, in addition to his Tony-winning choreography, he was a producer. And on their next collaboration, Dreamgirls (1981), which Bennett directed and choreographed, he was a lead producer. That show ran on Broadway for more than 3 1/2 years.
When Bennett became ill, Avian wasn't sure about his own future, and particularly about whether to accept an offer from producer Cameron Mackintosh to stage a revival of Follies in 1987. In an interview with the New York Post last year, he said it had been Bennett, near death at the time, who spurred him on, telling him: You should do this. You know what we did with the original, and you know the characters.
Avian went on to do the musical staging (as the credit reads) for Mackintoshs production of Miss Saigon, for Andrew Lloyd Webbers Sunset Boulevard" and, in 1999, for the Stephen Sondheim revue Putting It Together.
Avian and Pileski, who had been together for 36 years and had homes in Fort Lauderdale, New York and Connecticut, married in 2011. He is also survived by a sister, Laura Nabedian.
© 2021 The New York Times Company