Cy Feuer


Cy Feuer was an American theatre producer, director, composer, musician, and half of the celebrated producing duo Feuer and Martin. He won three competitive Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Theatre, and a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award. He was also nominated for Academy Awards as the producer of Storm Over Bengal and Cabaret.

Career

Born Seymour Arnold Feuerman in Brooklyn, New York, he became a professional trumpeter at the age of fifteen, working at clubs on weekends to help support his family while attending New Utrecht High School. It was there he first met Abe Burrows, who in later years he would hire to write the book for Guys and Dolls.
Having no interest in mathematics, science, or sports, he dropped out of school and found work as a trumpeter on a political campaign truck. He later studied at the Juilliard School before joining the orchestras at the Roxy Theater and later Radio City Music Hall.
In 1938, he toured the country with Leon Belasco and His Society Orchestra, eventually ending up in Burbank, California. Following a ten-week stint there, the orchestra departed for Minneapolis, but he opted to remain in California.
Feuer found employment at Republic Pictures, serving as musical director, arranger, and/or composer of more than 125 mostly B-movies, many of them serials and westerns, for the next decade, save for a three-year interruption to serve in the military during World War II.
During his Hollywood sojourn, he enjoyed a tumultuous one-year affair with actress Susan Hayward, worked with Jule Styne, Frank Loesser, and Victor Young, among others, received five Academy Award nominations for his film scores, and married a divorcée, Posy Greenberg, a mother of a three-year-old son. The couple later had a son of their own named Jed.
In 1947, having decided he had no real talent for film scoring, Feuer returned to New York City, where he teamed up with Ernest H. Martin, who had been the head of comedy programming at CBS Radio. After an aborted attempt to stage a production based on George Gershwin's An American in Paris, they produced Where's Charley?, the 1949 Frank Loesser adaption of Charley's Aunt. Although it was panned by six of the seven major New York critics, positive word-of-mouth about the show, particularly Ray Bolger's star turn in it, kept it running for three years.
Over the next several decades, Feuer & Martin mounted some of the most notable titles in the Broadway musical canon, including Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, both of which won the Tony Award for Best Musical. As of 2007, How to Succeed... is one of only seven musicals to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Feuer and Martin owned the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre from 1960 to 1965.
Feuer was also a stage director. Among his Broadway directing credits were Little Me and the ill-fated I Remember Mama.
Feuer's greatest career success was the 1972 film version of Cabaret, which won eight Academy Awards, winning him a Best Picture Oscar nomination as the film's credited producer. With Martin, he was responsible for the 1985 screen adaptation of A Chorus Line, which proved to be one of their biggest flops.
Feuer's memoir, I Got The Show Right Here: The Amazing, True Story of How an Obscure Brooklyn Horn Player Became the Last Great Broadway Showman, written with Ken Gross, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2003.

Death

Feuer served as president, and later chairman, of the League of American Theatres and Producers from 1989 to 2003. He died on May 17, 2006 of bladder cancer in New York City, aged 95.

Additional Broadway credits

YearAwardCategoryWorkResult
1939Academy AwardBest Music, ScoringStorm Over Bengal
1940Academy AwardBest Music, ScoringShe Married a Cop
1941Academy AwardBest Music, ScoreHit Parade of 1941
1942Academy AwardBest Music, Scoring of a Motion PictureIce-Capades
1942Academy AwardBest Music, Scoring of a Dramatic PictureMercy Island
1951Tony AwardBest Producer of a MusicalGuys and Dolls
1962Tony AwardBest Producer of a MusicalHow to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
1963Tony AwardBest Producer of a MusicalLittle Me
1963Tony AwardBest Direction of MusicalLittle Me
1966Tony AwardBest Direction of MusicalSkyscraper
1973Academy AwardBest PictureCabaret
2003Tony AwardLifetime Achievement Award

Selected filmography