Stephen Mo Hanan, who played three roles in ‘Cats,' dies at 78

Boston Globe

06-05-2025

'As a matter of fact, I've brought my concertina,' he recalled telling Nunn in an interview with The Washington Post in 1982. 'He said, 'Give me something in Italian.' Well, I've never had a problem with shyness. I sang 'Funiculi, Funicula.''
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Mr. Hanan was ultimately cast in three parts: Bustopher Jones, a portly cat, and the dual role of Asparagus, an aging theater cat, who, while reminiscing, transforms (with help from an inflatable costume) into a former role, Growltiger, a tough pirate, and performs a parody of Giacomo Puccini's 'Turandot.'
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During rehearsals, Hanan kept a detailed journal, which he published in 2002 as 'A Cat's Diary.'
In an entry about the second day of rehearsal, he described an assignment from Nunn: to 'pick a cartoon cat we know of, withdraw to ourselves and prepare a vignette of that cat, then return to the circle and each in turn will present.'
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He continued: 'I choose Fritz the Cat,' the Robert Crumb character, 'making a pass at some kitty. Watching the others is a gas -- people's individualities are beginning to emerge.'
Mr. Hanan and another cast member, Harry Groener, were nominated for the Tony Award for best featured actor in a musical. They both lost; tap dancer Charles (Honi) Coles won for 'My One and Only.'
In the years following 'Cats,' Mr. Hanan's many roles included Moonface Martin in 'Anything Goes,' at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis; the double role of Voltaire and Dr. Pangloss in 'Candide,' at the Huntington Theater in Boston; and another dual role, Mr. Darling and Captain Hook, in 'Peter Pan,' on Broadway and on tour. He also portrayed villainous innkeeper Thenardier in 'Les Miserables' in London.
In 1999, Mr. Hanan created a stage role of his own: Al Jolson, the popular vaudevillian who performed in blackface, sang on Broadway, and starred in 'The Jazz Singer,' the pioneering sound motion picture. 'Jolson & Co.,' which Mr. Hanan wrote with Jay Berkow, was staged off-Broadway, at the York Theater Company.
Jolson 'was pure id,' Mr. Hanan, who bore a physical resemblance to him, told Harvard magazine in 2002, when the show was revived at the Century Center for the Performing Arts in New York. 'He didn't censor himself, neither his joy nor his rage. With Jolson you can be completely over the top; you
have
to be. His personality demands that kind of size."
'Jolson & Co.' re-creates a 1946 radio interview with Barry Gray as a way of looking back on his remarkable life. Mr. Hanan sang many of the songs Jolson was known for, including 'Swanee' and 'California, Here I Come.'
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Reviewing the show in New York magazine, John Simon praised Mr. Hanan's performance as 'mostly impersonation but, as such, unbeatable.' He added, 'On top of the Jolson looks, the incarnator has absorbed all the vocal, facial, and kinetic mannerisms as if he had stolen the man's very soul.'
Stephen Hanan Kaplan was born on Jan. 7, 1947, in Washington. His mother, Lottie (Klein) Kaplan, was a high school English teacher; his father, Jonah Kaplan, was a pharmacist.
While attending Harvard College, Stephen performed in theatrical productions at the Loeb Drama Center and with the Hasty Pudding Club. He acquired the nickname Mo on a trip to Bermuda during college, after a friend, future Broadway librettist John Weidman, observed that his outfit made him look like 'some guy named Mo who cleans cabanas in the Catskills,' Mr. Hanan told the website TheaterMania in 2002.
After graduating in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in English literature, he studied for a year at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art on a Fulbright fellowship.
Back in New York, he had difficulty landing roles, so in 1971 he moved to San Francisco, where he lived on a commune and spent six years singing for money, mostly at the ferry terminal, which earned him enough to spend winters in Mexico and Guatemala.
Once, outside the stage door at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, he encountered Luciano Pavarotti, who had just performed in Giuseppe Verdi's 'Un Ballo in Maschera,' and summoned the nerve to sing for the great tenor.
'I raced to the money note and he, exclaiming 'Che voce d'oro' -- or 'What a golden voice' -- beckoned me over amid applause,' Mr. Hanan wrote in an unpublished essay.
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After returning to New York, he landed small parts in New York Shakespeare Festival productions of 'All's Well That Ends Well' and 'The Taming of the Shrew' in Central Park in 1978. (Around that time, he dropped his surname and began using his middle name instead, because there was another actor with a similar name.)
In 1980, director Wilford Leach cast him as Samuel, the second in command to Kline's Pirate King, in the Shakespeare in the Park production of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operetta 'The Pirates of Penzance,' which also starred Linda Ronstadt. Mr. Hanan stayed with the show when it moved to Broadway in 1981.
In 2006, Mr. Hanan moved up in rank to play the Major-General in a Yiddish-language version of 'Pirates' (called 'Di Yam Gazlonim!'), put on by the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene at the Jewish Community Center in New York (now the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan).
Allen Lewis Rickman, the director, recalled that Mr. Hanan did not know Yiddish and had to learn his lines phonetically.
'He was quite a character and very entertaining, one of those people who you know is a real pro,' Rickman said in an interview. 'He had a clownish streak -- that was his first instinct -- but not in a scene-stealing way.'
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