“A glorious voice and an even better human being…” “Beautiful, brave and inspiring,” wrote Harvey Fierstein.

She released the live album Marin Mazzie: Make Your Own Kind of Music in 2015.Broadway's Resurrected 'Beetlejuice' Sets January Closing Her off-Broadway credits include Carrie and White Rabbit Red Rabbit. Mazzie was also a frequently booked singer at concerts across the country, playing Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl and with the Boston Pops, New York Pops and the New York Philharmonic. When Kiss Me, Kate opened on Broadway in 1999, Variety said “her pure and versatile soprano is Mazzie’s most marvelous attribute.” When the show went to London, a reviewer there said Mazzie was “blessed with a mouth that looks as if it could devour the Victoria Palace whole.” (They would also work off-Broadway in a concert version of Kismet.) One of her proudest accomplishments was originating a Stephen Sondheim role, that of Clara in 1994’s Passion. She would work three times on Broadway with Brian Stokes Mitchell - Ragtime, Kiss Me, Kate and Man of La Mancha. La Jolla artistic director Des McAnuff later put her into Big River on Broadway, marking her debut on the Great White Way. Mazzie made her New York stage debut in the 1983 revival of Frank Loesser’s musical, Where’s Charley? Her big break came playing Beth in Merrily We Roll Along at the La Jolla Playhouse in California in 1985, the first production outside New York. “I will never forget that moment,” Mazzie recounted in Making It on Broadway, a book of Broadway stories. In the second act, Rockford was plunged into a blackout and the actors needed flashlights to finish the show.Īfter it ended, Raitt came out and sang for the audience until it was deemed safe for everyone to go home.

She attended Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo to study theater, and her first job was in a musical at a dinner theater in her hometown.Ī key moment in her life happened when she was 8 years old and saw a touring company of Carousel starring John Raitt. Mazzie was born and raised in Rockford, Illinois, in a home often filled with show tunes and original cast recordings. It praised her for a “husky quietness, and you hear the fragile heart beating beneath the stalwartly corseted form.” The New York Times said Mazzie brought “a touch of brass” to the role of English schoolteacher Anna Leonowens. “I’m so anxious and excited and thrilled to be able to bring, in essence, a new me back to the stage with what’s gone on in my life.” “It’s very emotional for me,” she told the Associated Press in 2016. She returned to Broadway a year later, replacing Kelli O’Hara in The King and I. Mazzie later underwent a hysterectomy, a bowel resection because the cancer had spread and weeks of chemotherapy. In one song, she sang: “Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die.” She found out about her cancer diagnosis on the opening day of a concert production of Zorba! in May 2015 and refused to pull out. Other Broadway credits included Man of La Mancha, Bullets Over Broadway, Enron and Into the Woods. Mazzie’s broad career went from screwball comedy - in Kiss Me, Kate and Monty Python’s Spamalot on Broadway and the West End - to riveting, dysfunctional moms in Next to Normal and Carrie.

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