Peter Howard (Broadway conductor and arranger)

Peter Howard (born Howard Weiss; July 29, 1927 in Miami, Florida – April 18, 2008 in Englewood, New Jersey) was an American musical theater arranger, conductor and pianist. Coming to prominence in the 1960s, Howard served as the conductor and dance music arranger for the original Broadway productions of Hello, Dolly!, 1776 and Annie and served as the dance music arranger for the original Broadway productions of Chicago, The Tap Dance Kid and Crazy for You.

The following information was provided from information obtained from the New York Times article, published on May 4, 2008 and written by Dennis Hevisi.

Peter Howard, who arranged the dance music, composed the incidental music or conducted the orchestra for many of Broadway’s biggest hits of the last half-century, and who sometimes did all three of those underappreciated jobs, died on April 18 in Englewood, N.J. He was 80 and had lived in recent years at the Lillian Booth Actors’ Home in Englewood.

The cause was pneumonia, his son, Jason, said.

Mr. Howard made his most significant mark as the dance music arranger for 23 of the 38 Broadway shows he worked on from 1949 to 2000, including productions of “1776,” “Chicago,” “Annie,” “The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd,” “The Tap Dance Kid,” “Carnival” and “Hello, Dolly!”

The dance music arranger is “the unsung hero of a Broadway show, and Peter was the greatest dance arranger,” the Tony Award-winning director and choreographer Susan Stroman said in an interview on Wednesday. “All other arrangers today measure their work against Peter Howard.”

Ms. Stroman worked with Mr. Howard in 1992, when she choreographed “Crazy for You,” a raucous reinterpretation of Gershwin standards, which had a run of 1,622 performances. Citing his work on that show, she explained how the arranger collaborates with the choreographer to transform a musical’s score.

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