Original DAMES AT SEA Director, CURLEY McDIMPLE Author/Director Robert Dahdah, Dead at 89

UPDATE: Click here for Bernadette Peters' remembrance of Robert Dahdah.

Off-Off Broadway pioneer Robert Dahdah, best known for directing the 1966 Caffe Cino premiere of DAMES AT SEA, which starred a teenage Bernadette Peters in her first major New York role, died on Saturday, February 6th at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, where he was under hospice care. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1926, he was 89.

Regarded as the birthplace of Off-Off Broadway and American gay theatre, Joe Cino's Caffe Cino provided a small stage for early works of writers like Lanford Wilson, Tom Eyen, Doric Wilson, Sam Shepard, William Hoffman, John Guare, and Robert Patrick. Dahdah was a frequent director at the Greenwich Village hot spot, and discovered the original one-act version of Jim Wise, George Haimsohn and Robin Miller's 1930s spoof among Cino's clutter.

"It was in the garbage can at Caffe Cino," Dahdah said. "Joe had been cleaning out his files and it was on the top, yellow around the edges. It had been submitted a year before and I picked it up and said 'What's this?' and he said 'Probably nothing.'"

When original star Judy Gallagher bowed out of the show during rehearsals, choreographer Don Price brought in young Bernadette Peters, with whom he had previously worked in Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania.

DAMES AT SEA was a smash at the Cino, but when he was not invited to direct the musical's Off-Broadway transfer, Dahdah reacted by writing the score and co-authoring, with Mary Boylan, the book for CURLEY McDIMPLE, a spoof of 1930s Shirley Temple movies. Bernadette Peters starred in the 1967 Off-Broadway production that ran for over 900 performances.

Aside from his theatre work, Dahdah appeared in over thirty films, such as THE PRODUCERS, THE GODFATHER and THE WAY WE WERE, mostly in small uncredited roles and crowd scenes.