My friend Frank Lazarus, who has died aged 86, was a versatile actor, pianist and, most of all, writer of musicals, with a play that enjoyed a long run on Broadway.
In 1979 he teamed up with the comedy writer Dick Vosburgh in a Marx Brothers-inspired double-header, A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine. Frank composed the music and Vosburgh wrote the book and lyrics. It journeyed from the small New End theatre in Hampstead, London, to the May Fair theatre in the West End, followed by 17 months on Broadway (at the John Golden theatre in New York) and a tour of the US and Canada.
The show won two Tony awards. Frank and Vosburgh seemed set to become rich – until various Marx family members won a large slice of the profits on the grounds of “right to publicity”, leaving them barely enough to pay the lawyers.
Frank was born in South Africa, in Muizenberg on Cape Town’s False Bay coast, the son of Louis, manager of a wine and brandy company, and Doffie (nee Hart), a teacher. After Muizenberg high school, he qualified as a solicitor but the stage was his ambition. Enrolling at the Cape Town University drama school, he played Estragon in Waiting for Godot at its Little Theatre, a rare venue for mixed-race audiences. It also staged Frank’s musical of Beverley Nichols’s children’s book The Tree That Sat Down, which was successful enough for him to turn professional.
With Maggie Soboil, a fellow student, Frank took An Evening with Frank and Maggie – which included a “wild parody” of Macbeth – to Australia, where it did well at festivals in Perth and Adelaide.
When he moved to London in 1970, he found only small parts on offer in even smaller theatres. This meant finding other jobs, including two years teaching English in Paris.
This breakthrough came in 1978 when, playing piano and portraying Erik Satie at the Greenwood theatre, he was spotted by Vosburgh. After their Broadway success, in 1992 he played Maxie Schwartz in June Moon, at the Vaudeville on the Strand. He starred as Horace Vandergelder opposite Prunella Scales’s Mrs Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker at the Chichester festival in 1993. His National Theatre work included an unlikely Gestapo officer in Jacobowsky and the Colonel in 1986.
In 1990, Mark Brisenden adapted Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel, a lost 1930s Marx Brothers radio script rediscovered in the US Library of Congress, into a BBC Radio 4 comedy. It depicted the misadventures of a law firm, originally conceived with Groucho as the attorney Waldorf T Flywheel and Chico his assistant, Emmanuel Ravelli. Aided by Vosburgh’s script improvements, and with Frank as Ravelli and Michael Roberts as Flywheel, it had one reviewer describing it as “the funniest show the Marx Bros never wrote”. It was repeated on BBC 4 Extra this summer.
Frank is survived by his brothers, John and David, and seven nephews and nieces.
