Mike Ockrent; Helped Revive Musical Theater

Stage director Mike Ockrent, known for giving a new shine to old-fashioned musical theater, died in New York on Thursday of acute leukemia. He was 53.

Ockrent directed and helped adapt such hits as “Me and My Girl” and “Crazy for You.” The sixth annual rendition of a version of “A Christmas Carol” that he co-wrote and staged opened in New York on Tuesday, and he was scheduled to direct a new musical adaptation of “The Night They Raided Minsky’s” at the Ahmanson Theatre next summer. He had been working on “Minsky’s” since 1994.

“Mike was the heart and soul of ‘The Night They Raided Minsky’s,’ and it’s hard to imagine doing it without him,” said the show’s producer, Timothy Childs. “But he was too much a man of the theater for us to even think about not continuing with the show.”

In a novel Ockrent wrote about his line of work, “Running Down Broadway,” a fictional director says, “People go to hear musicals to hear music and cry. For philosophy, they go to college.”

Born in London, Ockrent went to college at Edinburgh University to study physics. But he switched to theater shortly after graduating. He was the artistic director of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh from 1973 to 1976.

Returning to London in the late 1970s, he became known as a director of comedies such as “Once a Catholic,” “Educating Rita” and “Passion Play.”

“Me and My Girl” put him on the international theatrical map. Ockrent and British actor/director Stephen Fry revised the obscure 1937 musical about a commoner who becomes an earl, and it turned into a hit that ran eight years in London and three years on Broadway, where it received 13 Tony Award nominations. It played at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles on its way to Broadway in 1986 and later toured through the Southland.

Its success was repeated in 1992 with “Crazy for You,” a new musical based on old Gershwin songs and the plot from the Gershwin musical “Girl Crazy.” Ockrent worked with writer Ken Ludwig and choreographer Susan Stroman on the romantic comedy; he and Stroman married in 1996. “Crazy for You” won the Tony Award for best musical and played the Shubert Theatre in Century City.

More recently, Ockrent directed the unsuccessful Broadway musical adaptation of the movie “Big.” In Barbara Isenberg’s book about the making of the musical, set designer Robin Wagner testified to Ockrent’s skills in a crunch: “If I was on a B-17 . . . and we had lost three engines and the compass, and there was a hole in the fuel tank, the one person I’d want to be the pilot would be Mike Ockrent.”

Ockrent’s other London stage credits include an award-winning staging of Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies,” and “Xenobia” for the Royal Shakespeare Company. He directed two films for the BBC.

Last spring he staged a non-musical off-Broadway production, “La Terrasse.” He also was a partner in a new production company, the Play Group.

Besides Stroman, Ockrent is survived by two children, Natasha and Ben, from a previous marriage.