Obie-winning director Robert Allan Ackerman died January 10 at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Born June 30, 1944, in Brooklyn, he grew up in Kew Gardens, Queens, and spent his summers at the resort his grandfather owned in Mount Freedom, N.J. There, Ackerman played leading roles in a number of plays. After graduating from Adelphi College, he taught in Harlem for seven years, during which time he also made his Off-Broadway debut as an actor in the 1968 play An Ordinary Man.
In the 1970s, Ackerman left teaching and devoted himself to theater. With composer Mildred Kayden, he created the musical vaudeville Ionescopade, which premiered Off-Broadway in 1974 at Theater Four and received an Off-Broadway revival in 2012 at York Theatre. (Below is a preview of the 2013 Odyssey Theatre production in Los Angeles.) Then in 1977, he directed Thomas Babe’s A Prayer for My Daughter at the O’Neill Center. Joseph Papp saw the production and brought the play to the Public Theater, which earned Ackerman an Obie Award.
Ackerman followed with four more Public productions of Babe’s work, establishing himself as a leading stage director. He made his Broadway debut with Martin Sherman’s Bent in 1979, then directed the Off-Broadway premiere of William Mastrosimone’s Extremities (1982) and John Byrne’s Slab Boys (1983), before making his Broadway musical debut as director of the ill-fated Legs Diamond (1988). Below is press footage of Peter Allen and the original cast.
Ackerman’s final Broadway credit is the short-lived revival of Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1992), after which he began his TV career with Nancy Barr’s “Mrs. Cage” for American Playhouse. Over the next two decades, he earned Emmy nominations for Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (2001), My House in Umbria (2003), The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (2003), and The Reagans (2003).
In addition to his work in the U.S., Ackerman directed several productions on the West End, including Martin Sherman’s A Madhouse in Goa (1989) and Lanford Wilson’s Burn This (1990), as well as in Japan, including Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1994, 2004), which earned him a Yomiuri Theater Award.