White: impresario whofavored the outrageous

Published 12:00 am Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Michael White, a Scottish-born theater and movie producer whose catholic but often risque taste and devil-may-care attitude helped bring to life “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” “Oh! Calcutta!” and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” died March 7. He was 80.

The Society of London Theater announced the death on its website. A report by Reuters, citing a former girlfriend of White’s as a source, said he died of heart failure in Ojai, California.

A gifted talent scout with a gambler’s nerve and occasional recklessness — he played the horses — White was a colorful gadabout for whom the famous were catnip and the after-party was as important as the show. He was a showbiz insider who knew everybody, a regular at the Cannes Film Festival — “the most famous person you’ve never heard of,” as actress Greta Scacchi said in a 2013 documentary about him, “The Last Impresario.”

The film also featured testimony to White’s accomplishments, affinities and charms from an eclectic range of other celebrities. They included actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, outlandish director John Waters, artist and singer Yoko Ono, television producer Lorne Michaels, actress Naomi Watts, fashion editor Anna Wintour — who said White alerted her to a young model, Kate Moss, before anyone else — and Monty Python stalwart John Cleese.

Cleese recalled that it was White who spotted him in 1963 as a participant in an unheralded comedy revue called “Cambridge Circus” (which also featured another future Python, Graham Chapman) and put the act on a big commercial stage.

“We were suddenly told that someone called Michael White wanted to put us on in the West End,” Cleese said, referring to London’s commercial theater district. “And we thought, ‘What?’”

Pushing the envelope

White was comfortable swimming in the mainstream. Among the many shows he produced in London were the musicals “A Chorus Line” and “Annie,” the Gershwin compilation “Crazy for You” and the popular suspense drama “Deathtrap.” On Broadway he was part of the producing team that put on Anthony Shaffer’s long-running mystery thriller “Sleuth.”

He also had a high-culture side and an appreciation of the avant-garde. He brought dancer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage to London. He was a producer on Broadway of Athol Fugard’s twin apartheid-era plays, “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” and “The Island,” with the black South African actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona.

But White’s reputation was largely built on his willingness to get behind the nutty, the sexy, the outrageous — challenging shows that pushed the envelope of popular taste in one way or another. His first West End production, in the early 1960s, was “The Connection,” Jack Gelber’s grim depiction of drug addicts anticipating a fix.

It was one of several shows that White put on in seeming defiance of England’s official censor and that by 1968 helped loose the requirement that a show had to be licensed by the office of the censor, known as the Lord Chamberlain.

In 1969, White and others produced “Oh! Calcutta!,” a revue of sex-related skits based on a concept by Kenneth Tynan and performed largely in the nude, which ran three years in New York.

Reviewers treated it harshly, finding it puerile or vulgar or both, but its open bawdiness, though pretty tame by today’s lights, made it notorious in its time. In London it opened in 1970 and ran for seven years, and a Broadway revival in 1976 lasted nearly 13 years.

In the 1970s, White produced “Housewife! Superstar!,” an early full-length performance by Australian comic actor and female impersonator Barry Humphries as his alter ego, Dame Edna Everage.

Perhaps most notably, White produced an obscure musical parody of horror movies, written by Richard O’Brien, involving a honeymooning couple and a transvestite mad scientist. “The Rocky Horror Show” opened in a tiny space upstairs at the Royal Court Theater in London but moved to other sites around London, notably the Kings Road Theater, where it became a smash, running for seven years and nearly 3,000 performances.

By the time it closed, in 1980, the show had appeared in Los Angeles and (not very successfully) on Broadway and had begun to engender the myriad companies that continue to tour.

In 1975 White produced a film version, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” starring Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick. It became a cult hit through several generations of moviegoers who attend midnight showings around the world. Through a misbegotten business deal, White failed to profit from the movie.

Starting out

Michael Simon White was born in Glasgow on Jan. 16, 1936. The Guardian reported that his parents belonged to Jewish immigrant families from Eastern Europe; his father was a glovemaker, his mother a property developer.

At a young age, White was sent to boarding school in Switzerland, an experience he recalled as lonely and miserable, though worthwhile in the sense that he learned languages other than English and developed an international perspective early on. He went to the Sorbonne in Paris and in the 1950s worked for a time on Wall Street. His early experience in the theater came as an assistant to Peter Daubeny, a producer who specialized in bringing foreign productions — by the likes of Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble and the Moscow Art Theater — to England.

White put together “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the Python troupe’s farcical rendition of Arthurian legend, on a very low budget.

“Somebody rang me up saying would I mind sharing a hotel room?” Cleese remembered in the documentary. “And I remember saying, ‘I thought I was a film star.’ It was a pretty sparse production.”

White’s other film credits include a pair of cult favorites of decidedly different cults: “My Dinner With André” (1981), directed by Louis Malle, which consisted of an extended conversation about life and art between two intellectual friends, Shawn and experimental theater director André Gregory; and “Polyester” (1981), John Waters’ cheerfully tawdry tale of a housewife, played by drag performer Divine, with an unfaithful husband and an overdeveloped sense of smell. (The film introduced what Waters called “Odorama”: Audience members were supplied with scratch-and-sniff cards to augment the viewing experience.)

In 2014, White received an award for lifetime achievement at the Olivier Awards.

White was married and divorced twice. The Guardian reported his survivors include four children, a brother and a sister.

A confessed playboy and a well-known sybarite whose indulgences probably contributed to a long decline in his health, he was asked by a clearly fascinated Gracie Otto, director of “The Last Impresario,” “What if I follow you around for five years?”

“No,” he said. “I won’t be here in five years.”