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Gary Beach, Tony Winner for ‘The Producers,’ Dies at 70

From left, Roger Bart, Brad Oscar, Matthew Broderick and Gary Beach in “The Producers.” Mr. Beach won a Tony Award for his performance as the cross-dressing director Roger De Bris.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Gary Beach, a Tony Award-winning actor who could enliven a stage whether wearing a lavish gown, dressed as King Arthur or decked out as a candelabra, died on Tuesday night at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 70.

His agent, Steven Unger, announced the death. The cause was not given.

Mr. Beach won the 2001 Tony for best featured actor in a musical for “The Producers,” the Mel Brooks megahit that riffed about a Hitler musical, in which he originated the role of the cross-dressing director Roger De Bris. He began his acceptance speech at the Tonys memorably. “Heil Mel!” he shouted.

Gary Beach wins 2001 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a MusicalCredit...CreditVideo by awardscrazy

Mr. Beach was also Lumière, the genial candelabra featured in the song “Be Our Guest,” in the original Broadway cast of “Beauty and the Beast” in 1994, earning a Tony nomination for the performance. He was nominated for another Tony for his turn as Albin in the 2004 revival of “La Cage aux Folles.”

Mr. Beach brought a fine singing voice and an actor’s arsenal to whatever role he was playing. In 2003, when Ben Brantley, chief theater critic of The New York Times, checked in on “The Producers” to write about some of the replacement players in what was by then a long-running show, he felt compelled to single out Mr. Beach, who was still in the role.

“Actually, the freshest performance in ‘The Producers’ at the moment comes from Gary Beach, who after nearly two years remains an unqualified treat,” Mr. Brantley wrote.

He added, “In the show’s high point, the ‘Springtime for Hitler’ sequence of the musical-within-the-musical, Mr. Beach proves himself fluent in every idiom of vintage musical comedy, variously bringing to mind Al Jolson, Judy Garland, Robert Preston, Van Johnson and Eddie Cantor.”

Mr. Beach was born on Oct. 10, 1947, in Alexandria, Va. He said that though his parents were not really theatergoers — “The first Broadway show my folks saw, I was in,” he once noted — he was interested in theater from a young age.

He was a freshman at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., when he read an article in Parade magazine, the Sunday supplement.

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Mr. Beach, center, as Albin in the 2004 revival of “La Cage aux Folles.”Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“I can remember the name of the article,” he said in a 2010 interview for “On Stage With Iris Acker,” a Florida arts program. “It was ‘Show Business Goes to School.’”

The article mentioned a new program at the North Carolina School of the Arts. He auditioned and was accepted into its drama program, earning a degree.

One of his first roles was as Edward Rutledge in “1776,” a part he played in a road company and as a replacement player on Broadway, where the musical ran from 1969 to 1972. He was in the short-lived “Something’s Afoot” in 1976 and was a replacement player in “Annie” after it opened in 1977, taking the role of Rooster Hannigan.

His breakout Broadway role, in “Beauty and the Beast,” was not without its painful moments, in a very real sense.

“I was Lumière, standing on the top of the dishes,” he recalled, “and all of a sudden the next thing I knew I was on the stage floor and out of the show for six weeks with an avulsion fracture, whatever that is.”

Perhaps it was a weird foreshadowing of his role in “The Producers,” in which his character had to step into the role of Hitler in the musical-within-the-musical.

“Mr. Beach’s Roger,” Mr. Brantley wrote in his 2001 review of the original cast, “who winds up filling in for the original Adolf (he breaks a leg, natch) on the opening night of ‘Springtime,’ becomes every aging crooner who played the Palace rolled into one brilliantly mismatched package.”

Mr. Beach was also in the 2005 film version of the stage musical (which was itself based on a 1967 movie directed by Mr. Brooks). He appeared extensively in Broadway tours and regional productions. In 2008 he took on the role of King Arthur in a tour of “Monty Python’s ‘Spamalot.’”

He is survived by his husband, Jeffrey Barnett.

Mr. Beach’s last Broadway role was as Thénardier, the crooked innkeeper, in the 2006 revival of “Les Misérables,” which in its first incarnation had run for 6,680 performances over 16 years. In his interview with Ms. Acker, he joked about how he got that part.

“My agent called and said, ‘Tara Rubin’ — who’s a big casting director in New York City — ‘wants to know if you’d like to be part of the most popular musical in the world,’” Mr. Beach recalled. “And I said, ‘Is there something for me in “Mamma Mia!”?’”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: Gary Beach Dies at 70; Won Tony for ‘Producers’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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