“Obviously she pioneered the way for a lot of women,” McCann’s longtime friend and associate Kristen Luciana told the Daily News. “But Liz was so much more than a great female Broadway producer. She was a great Broadway producer—full stop.”

McCann rose to prominence as one half of McCann & Nugent Productions, a company she formed with Nelle Nugent in 1976. Together they produced a string of critically acclaimed hits including Amadeus (1981), Dracula (1977), and The Elephant Man (1979).

“The theater is a male-oriented world,” McCann told The New York Times Magazine in 1981. “And, sure, we’re women. I just don’t think of producing as being a problem for a woman. I think, essentially, the theater is desperate for success and product and ideas. Therefore, I don’t think anybody cares as much where those things come from as they think they care.”

Those ideas and what Playbill called McCann’s “taste for serious dramas” undoubtedly gave rise to her relationship with lauded playwright Edward Albee. She produced three of his works: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Three Tall Women, The Play About the Baby, and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, which won the 2002 Tony Award for best play.

“Every once in a while, a playwright will be lucky enough to run into a producer who is crazy—who is willing to take chances, who feels that a producer’s responsibility is to find work you think really should be seen, to whom financial concern is not the main adventure,” Albee said of McCann in 2004. “The main adventure is trying to get plays on.”

Discovering the ‘Magic’ of Broadway

McCann was born in New York City on March 29, 1931, the only child of Patrick and Rebecca McCann, who had immigrated to New York from Scotland. She grew up in Manhattan’s Garment District, not at all far from what would become her second home: the Theater District. Despite this proximity, McCann did not harbor a childhood love of theater. Her father, who worked as a subway motorman, and her mother, a housewife, weren’t “wildly interested in culture,” McCann told the Times.

In fact, she was forced, all but kicking and screaming, to attend a theater production when she was 14 or 15. The show was Cyrano de Bergerac starring José Ferrer. Her cousin had an extra ticket, and McCann’s mother made her go.

“That was it,” McCann shared in a CUNY-TV interview. “It was just magic. From then on, I wanted to see theater. Now, that took some saving up of allowances to … buy a $3 seat, but that just blew me away, that production.”

McCann attended Manhatanville College and, upon graduating in 1952 considered a few options, none of which included a career in the theater. “I could get married, I could become a nun, or I could become a business rep for the telephone company,” she told the Times. “Since neither God nor man seemed determined to take me for his bride, I settled on the telephone company.”

Ultimately though, a chance meeting with a nun at Manhattanville led her to abandon that plan, according to Madeline Felix, FCLC ’08, who worked with McCann as an undergraduate at Fordham. McCann became her mentor, and the two remained close friends until McCann’s passing.

During a series of unpublished oral history interviews, McCann told Felix that “the telephone companies were loaded with Irish Catholic girls from colleges” back then, so, since she didn’t really know what she wanted to do, that “seemed a good bet.”

“Finally, the day came for my interview with the telephone company, and I was rushing to it when a nun on campus stopped me,” McCann told Felix. “I told her I was going to my interview, and she said, ‘Are you actually thinking of working for the telephone company? … That strikes me as a thoroughly boring thing to do.’ … I never went to the interview.”

Instead, thinking of becoming a drama teacher, McCann pursued a master’s degree in English literature at Columbia University.

Fordham Law: A Surprising Theater Level-Up

When McCann graduated from Columbia two years later, she began working as an unpaid intern at Proscenium Productions, based at Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. Unsatisfied with the theater gigs she’d secured thus far, McCann believed that if she got a law degree, she could practice theatrical law.

She enrolled at Fordham Law, graduated in 1966, and passed the New York bar exam. After practicing law for about a year, James Nederlander hired her to be managing director of his newly acquired Palace Theater. McCann later joked that Nederlander’s own unrealized dream of becoming a lawyer and his respect for strong, no-nonsense women who reminded him of his mother were both ticks in her favor.

It turned out to be a fateful hire. Nugent worked for Nederlander as well, and in 1976, the two women struck out on their own, forming their now-legendary production company in the old Paramount Building on Broadway. From 1978 to 1982, their productions earned five back-to-back Tony Awards: Dracula, The Elephant Man, Morning’s at Seven, Amadeus, and The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. And McCann’s partnerships with other producers earned her four more Tony Awards: for The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?; Copenhagen, a play about physicists and the development of the atomic bomb; and revivals of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge and the musical Hair.

Her latest producing effort, Hangmen, never officially opened. Its previews had just wrapped in early 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic forced a Broadway shutdown that’s only recently been lifted.

Offering the Next Generation a Leg Up

McCann was known for her willingness to nurture up-and-coming talent and mentor students interested in theater—including Fordham alumni John Johnson, FCLC ’02, now a multiple Tony Award-winning producer in his own right; and Frank DiLella, FCLC ’06, host of Spectrum News NY1’s On Stage. Her position as managing producer of the Tony Awards show—and her lasting friendship with Larry Sacharow, former director of the Fordham Theatre program who directed two of McCann’s Albee productions: Three Tall Women and Beckett/Albee—afforded her plenty of opportunity to do so.

In a 2014 interview with Fordham Magazine, Johnson, who began working with McCann when he was an undergraduate and collaborated with her on the 2009 revival of Hair, referred to her as a “third grandmother” who gave him “priceless” career advice during the decade or so he worked with her.

“She basically gave me the base of my career in terms of the knowledge that I needed for it, whether it was how to know how to read a box office statement or a wrap report, all the way to how she interacted with artists and creatives … with stagehands and crew members,” Johnson said upon McCann’s passing.

“She essentially shattered the glass ceiling of Broadway,” he added, stressing that McCann and Nugent’s refusal to be “pushed aside” has given every subsequent producer the opportunity “to stand on those shoulders.”

“It’s an incredible, incredible impact,” he said.

A funeral Mass was held for McCann on Monday, September 13, at the Church of Saint Paul the Apostle, across the street from Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus. A recording of the Mass is available online.

Sacharow, known to peers, colleagues and students alike as a humane and daring director, tangled with some of the most challenging works of modern theater, including plays by Edward Albee, Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekhov and Sam Shepard.

For his direction in 1994 of Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Three Tall Women,” Sacharow received the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Direction and was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle award. In 2003, Sacharow directed the highly celebrated off-Broadway production of “Beckett/Albee,” an evening of one-act plays starring Marian Seldes and Brian Murray.

“His talents both as a director and a teacher were always aimed at those things which matter most,” said Edward Albee. “He taught me a great deal, and he is very much alive.”

Lawrence Sacharow, known to his friends as Larry, was born on October 10, 1937. Sacharow’s love of the theater began as an undergraduate at Brooklyn College when he saw his first play by Albee, “Zoo Story.” It convinced him that he wanted to spend his life working in the theater.

“It’s very rare,” said Sacharow in a 2004 interview, “when you go the theater and it actually changes your life.”

The founding artistic director of River Arts Repertory in Woodstock, N.Y., Sacharow directed Joanne Woodward in “The Seagull,” and also directed the only stage production of the film “Casablanca,” among numerous other productions at River Arts. He also served as chairman of the theater panel of the New York State Council on the Arts.

Sacharow is remembered by Marian Seldes, preeminent stage and screen actress, as a remarkable innovator who carried his compassion and commitment to the cause of the human family with him into the theater.

“Larry’s vision of the theatre was of world theatre, beyond Broadway, beyond New York, and he imparted that to his students and into the Fordham curriculum,” she said. That’s very rare.”

Sacharow was deeply committed to dramatizing the challenges of lives touched by war, drug abuse and political oppression, and organized a panel discussion on “Making Theater During War” at Fordham. He was a great fan of Russian and Indian theater, and was considered a pioneer in biographical theater. In 1968 he conceived and directed “The Concept,” a social commentary on drug addiction performed by recovering addicts from Daytop Village, a drug rehabilitation center. “The Concept” ran for three years off-Broadway and was brought back to the stage in 1986, and again in 1994, to tour the Moscow Art Theater and the Gorky Theater in St. Petersburg. In 2005, “The Concept” was still being performed at venues across the country.

During his distinguished 17-year tenure as director of the theatre program at Fordham University, Sacharow was recalled by faculty colleagues as “exceedingly collegial, understanding, sympathetic and very, very funny.” Students remember his insightful and generous mentorship. He was a recognized Chekhov scholar, and worked with numerous leading actors, including Marcia Gay Harden, David Strathairn and Ana Reeder, among others, many of whom he brought to Fordham as adjunct faculty.

“I feel the saddest for the young people at Fordham,” Seldes said. “His career as a teacher was so important to him. He was kind enough to let me teach in the program and I saw how much he meant to the students. They absolutely adore him and they aren’t used to death, to the death of a mentor, a leader.”

Seldes was collaborating with Sacharow on two more projects at the time of his death. “We were going to do another play of Edward’s [Albee] and a marvelous project of Larry’s own about Holocaust survivors. His ideas were so extraordinary you always wanted to be a part of them,” she said.

“He was an extraordinary individual, a man who was intensely spiritual but down to earth,” said Richard Kalina, professor of art and former chair of the Department of Theater and Visual Arts. “We are a remarkably cohesive department, which makes working here so enjoyable. Larry was a very important part of that.”

In spring 2005, Sacharow traveled to the University of Tokyo, where he lectured on Modern Theater/Ancient Sources, the topic of a book he was writing. He also taught a master class on the “Actor’s Work on Psycho-Physical Actions” at the University of Shanghai and at The Actor’s Studio.

“An inspiring teacher and a director of extraordinary range and vision, Larry made our theatre program a magnet for talent and a center of excellence within the University,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham University. “He will be sorely missed by the entire Fordham community, but especially by his colleagues, who cherished him as a friend, and by his students who were enriched by his mentorship.”

Sacharow received his bachelor of arts degree in theater and television production from Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He was a member of the Actors Studio Directors Unit and studied with Lee Strasberg, Alan Schneider and Mira Rostova.

Sacharow is survived by his wife, Michele, his daughters Nina and Anya, and a grandson. Funeral services will be held on Thursday, August 17, 2006 at 2 p.m. at Beth Israel Cemetery, U.S. Highway 1, Woodbridge, N.J., (732) 634-2100.

Directions:
1) Take the New Jersey Turnpike south to exit 11
2) Take the Garden State Parkway north to exit 131A
3) Make a right turn at the 4th traffic light (onto Thornall Street)
4) Continue to the 3rd traffic light and make a right turn on Gill Lane
5) Stay on Gill Lane, crossing over Route 1 (the name of Gill Lane will turn into  Woodbridge Center Drive)
6) The entrance to cemetery is the first right, from Woodbridge Center Drive