Philip Rose, a groundbreaking theatrical producer who expanded the artistic and social horizons of the Broadway stage with his 1959 production of “A Raisin in the Sun,” died May 31 at a retirement home in Englewood, N.J. He was 89 and died after a stroke.
“Raisin” drew rave reviews as it toured outside New York, but Mr. Rose had a hard time finding a Broadway theater that would present the play.
“No one was doing black plays then,” he told The Washington Post in 2004. “And what few were being done were done in the basement of black churches.”
When it opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959, “Raisin” became the first play on Broadway by a black female playwright and the first with a black director, Lloyd Richards. Besides Poitier, the cast included Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeil and Diana Sands. The play received four Tony Award nominations.
“Raisin” ran for 530 performances and was a critical success, and in a larger sense, it represented a significant social advance by introducing black family life to the American cultural mainstream. Mr. Rose also co-produced the 1961 film version of the play, with the original cast.
“It’s been accepted that [the play] changed American theater,” Mr. Rose told The Post. “It’s the most amazing thing to me when I travel to different colleges and see how many young black actors come to me and say that ‘Raisin’ was their seed. It also did the same thing for young black playwrights.”
After the final curtain on opening night, Mr. Rose said, he accompanied Hansberry to Sardi’s, the New York theater hangout.
“The entire restaurant got up and applauded her in a way that was so meaningful,” he told the Courier News of Bridgewater, N.J., in 2004. “It came to me right there maybe this is something more than just a play.”
Mr. Rose attributed his affinity for Hansberry’s play, and to African American culture in general, to several years he spent in Washington in the 1930s and 1940s. He was a bill collector for a department store and spent much of his time in the city’s black neighborhoods.
“At the beginning, I was certainly not a welcome guest in my clients’ homes,” he wrote in “You Can’t Do That on Broadway!,” his 2001 memoir, but before long, “some strange and wonderful things were happening.”
Mr. Rose, who was Jewish and grew up poor, shared personal stories with his customers. He soon began attending jazz programs at the Howard Theater and fell in love with a black woman, but the social and legal prohibitions of the early 1940s kept them from getting married.
“In later years, looking back,” Mr. Rose wrote in his memoir, “I realized how profoundly the years and the people I met in Washington changed my life.”
After moving back to his native New York in 1945, Mr. Rose took part in the civil rights movement and became friends with Poitier and the husband-wife acting team of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.
Mr. Rose’s later Broadway productions included Davis’s “Purlie Victorious” (1961), about a black preacher who attempts to challenge white authority in Georgia; and a 1970 musical version of the play, “Purlie,” which earned Tony Awards for Cleavon Little and Melba Moore in the lead roles. Mr. Rose was nominated for a Tony for direction.
Between 1959 and 1990, he mounted 25 Broadway productions, including “The Owl and the Pussycat” (1964), in which he daringly cast an interracial couple — Sands and Alan Alda — as the romantic leads.
Mr. Rose had his biggest commercial success with “Shenandoah,” a musical about a Virginia family torn apart by the Civil War, which he produced and directed on Broadway in 1975. The play had more than 1,000 performances and won two Tonys, one for actor John Cullum and a second for Mr. Rose and two other writers of the musical’s book, or spoken text.
His 1969 production of “Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?,” a play about drug addiction, helped launch the acting career of Al Pacino, who won a Tony. In his memoir, Mr. Rose wrote that Pacino “almost frightened us out of the theater with his intensity.”
Philip Rosenberg was born on New York’s Lower East Side on July 4, 1921. After completing high school in New York, he settled with his family in Washington.
While pursuing a career as a singer in the 1940s, he shortened his name to Rose. He was with a Gilbert and Sullivan opera company when he met actress Doris Belack, whom he married in 1946.
In addition to his wife, of Englewood, survivors include a brother, Jack Rosenberg of Silver Spring; and three sisters, Sylvia Smolkin of Silver Spring, Pearl Yabroff of Bethesda and Rose Diamond of Boynton Beach, Fla.
Mr. Rose worked as a record distributor and later founded a small recording label, Glory Records. One of his groups, a folk trio called the Tarriers, recorded early versions of "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)" and "Yellow Bird," which became hits for other performers. The group's lead singer was actor Alan Arkin.
In the early 1950s, Mr. Rose met Hansberry at an integrated resort in upstate New York, where she was a waitress aspiring to be a writer. When she read parts of “A Raisin in the Sun” to him several years later, Mr. Rose was determined to take the play to Broadway. (David Cogan was credited as a co-producer, but, by all accounts, Mr. Rose was the principal force in guiding “Raisin” to the stage. Hansberry died in 1965 at 34.)
“People don’t realize how groundbreaking it was and what a huge risk it was,” Caleen Jennings, an American University theater professor who was collaborating with Mr. Rose on a book, said this week. She said her African American parents attended the opening night of “Raisin in the Sun” in 1959.
“My mother came home,” she recalled, “and said, ‘That was the first time I ever saw myself on stage.’ ”
