BroadwayWorld is saddened to report that actress and singer Shannon Bolin Kaye passed away Friday, March 25, in New York City. She was 99.
Ms. Bolin could not walk down the street without being recognized by musical theater fans as the middle-aged, mid-Western wife in the original Broadway production and the film DAMN YANKEES, to whom the young baseball player Joe Hardy longs to return.
Television viewers stopped her for autographs as one of the two bickering Corlick sisters in the long-running Denny's commercials that ran from the late 1980s to 1990s.
A mezzo-soprano on the concert stage with her own radio programs in Washington, D.C. during the 1940s and later a contralto in television operas and on the concert stage, she also made her mark on the Broadway stage and in highly acclaimed regional productions.
She excelled in playing warm, maternal women except in the Puccini opera "Suor Angelica" in which she brilliantly played the mean princess.
When George Abbott cast her as Meg in the stage production of DAMN YANKEES, she rejected the role because the character was underwritten. Mr. Abbott told her that it was up to her to create the character and she did. Though she was in her mid-30s and a sophisticated nightclub singer, she was costumed with layers of padding around her waist and dowdy dresses to look the part.
When Warner Bros. bought the rights to DAMN YANKEES as a vehicle for Tab Hunter, George Abbott was critical of Mr. Hunter and called him "light in the loafers" and the cast (all from the Broadway production) was cold and unfriendly to him, with the exception of Shannon Bolin and Gwen Verdon. Shannon and Tab Hunter realized that they were left to their own devices to make the relationship and the emotional pull between the handsome young Joe Hardy and the middle-aged housewife convincing, and the two went off by themselves to rehearse their scenes and make the warmth between the characters palpable. They remained great friends; Bolin is featured in an interview in the 2015 documentary "Tab Hunter Confidential."
Pictured: Shannon Bolin Kaye with Tab Hunter in 2008.
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