Ken Page, the beloved baritone who starred in Broadway’s “Cats” and “The Wiz” and who voiced Oogie Boogie within the movie “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” died Monday. He was 70 years outdated.
Talent agent Todd M. Eskin and Page’s shut buddy and producer, Dorian Hannaway, confirmed his demise to the Times on Tuesday. No particulars in regards to the trigger had been instantly accessible.
Hannaway first introduced Page’s demise Monday, persevering with to write down Facebook that the Broadway veteran “moved on to the subsequent present.” Another of Page’s brokers, Lance Kirkland, stated this TMZ that Page died “very peacefully” Monday at his residence in St. Louis. Kirkland didn’t instantly reply to The Times’ requests for remark Tuesday.
The actor loved a decades-long profession on stage, enjoying the famed Cowardly Lion in “The Wiz” within the Nineteen Seventies and the feline chief Old Deuteronomy within the unique Broadway manufacturing of “Cats.” But his deep voice may be extra recognizable as that of the amorphous Boogeyman in Henry Selick and Tim Burton’s 1993 stop-motion basic “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” He ceaselessly revisited the position of Oogie Boogie in particular person and in voice at Disneyland and Walt Disney World for Halloween and associated vacation occasions.
Born in St. Louis on January 20, 1954, Page started his stage profession within the choir on the Muny, often known as the St. Louis Municipal Opera Theatre, earlier than heading to New York. He made his Broadway debut because the Lion within the unique manufacturing of “The Wiz” in 1975. In 1976, he starred within the first Broadway revival of “Guys and Dolls” with an all-black forged, during which he performed Nicely-Nicely . . Two years later, he carried out on the Great White Way in “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” the Tony Award-winning musical that paid homage to Nineteen Twenties and ’30s Harlem, and returned to the position in a manufacturing of 1989. Page additionally directed an anniversary manufacturing of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” regionally on the Cabrillo Music Theater in Thousand Oaks.
He returned to Broadway for “Cats” in 1982 and in 1999 for “It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues.”
On display screen, Page performed nightclub proprietor Max Washington within the Oscar-winning movie “Dreamgirls” and had a number of visitor components on TV collection similar to “Sable,” “Family Matters,” “Charmed” and “Touched by an Angel.” similar to youngsters’s applications on which he labored as a voice actor. He additionally voiced the Alligator King in Disney’s 1989 animated movie “All Dogs Go to Heaven.”
Over the subsequent few years, Page developed and carried out his personal cabaret singing present, Page by Page, and wrote, directed and starred in numerous regional and touring productions.
