Jack Elton; Multitalented Musician

Jack Elton, a classically trained pianist who conducted and scored some of the top musicals of the stage and television while also becoming a decade-long fixture at the piano bar at Dino’s Lodge on the Sunset Strip, has died.

A spokesman said he had died May 19 in a Hollywood hospital of lung cancer at age 73.

At his death, Elton was choral director, vocal coach and accompanist for the American Center for Musical Theater, a Los Angeles organization that trains musicians and singers in musical theater, publicist Dale Olson said.

For seven years Elton arranged and composed material for “The Carol Burnett Show” on CBS while also coaching Burnett and Rock Hudson in their hit stage musical “I Do, I Do.”

He worked on the West Coast premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” and for Jane Powell in “Irene,” “My Fair Lady” and “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”

At the Mark Taper Forum he was pianist-conductor for “The Tempest” and “Perfectly Frank” and for “March of the Falsettos” at the Huntington Hartford.

Elton’s last major production was “Tintypes.” He was music director of the show when it traveled to Poland and Czechoslovakia about two years ago, Olson said.

Elton studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and Robert Casadesus at the University of Geneva in Switzerland where he was awarded first prize in piano and chamber music performance.

He and bassist Steve La Fever came to Dino’s when the nightclub opened in the 1950s and stayed well into the 1960s.