WASHINGTON: Tony Award-winning director Frank Galati, best known for helming Broadway’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and nominee for ‘Ragtime’, passed away aged 79 on Monday night.
According to Deadline, a US-based news outlet, the cause of death was not available.
Galati, a co-writer with Lawrence Kasdan on the 1988 screenplay adaptation of Anne Tyler’s novel The Accidental Tourist, was nominated for an Academy Award. From 1986 to 2008, Galati served as an associate director at Chicago’s renowned Goodman Theatre. She has been a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company since 1985.
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The Tony Award for Best Play was given to Galati’s stage production of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in 1990. Galati also took home the Best Direction prize that year. The Tony-nominated performances by Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney, and Lois Smith in the celebrated show, which made its
Steppenwolf debut before moving to Broadway, were featured.
Galati received a second Tony nomination for Best Direction in 1998 for directing the musical adaption of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. Mark Jacoby, Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Marin Mazzie, and Lynn Ahrens all starred in the Terrence McNally-written musical, which also had music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens.
As per a report by Deadline, Galati’s past Broadway performances include Seussical in 2000, The Priate Queen with Stephanie J. Block in 2007, and the 1994 production of The Glass Menagerie with Julie Harris, Calista Flockhart, and eljko Ivanek. In 2022, he was admitted into the Theater Hall of Fame on Broadway.
Galati has a long list of stage productions to his name in Chicago, including his adaptations of Kafka on the Shore by Murakami, She Always Said Pablo, A View from the Bridge, The Winter’s Tale, The Good Person of Setzuan, and Cry the Beloved Country.
Most recently, he worked as an artistic associate at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida, where he directed, among other plays, the musical Knoxville from 2022, which was an adaptation of James Agee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Death in the Family and brought back the director, lyricist, and composer Ahrens and Flaherty. (ANI)
