Alfred Drake

With his resonant baritone voice, Alfred Drake, who entered the world as Alfred Capurro, dominated Broadway throughout the 1940s and 1950s. His defining performance came as Curly in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 production of Oklahoma, where he introduced the enduring numbers “Oh, What A Beautiful Morning,” “Surrey With A Fringe On Top,” “People Will Say We’re In Love,” and the show’s title song.

He took part in several landmark shows of the period. After his first stage appearance in Mikado in 1935, Drake performed alongside Mitzi Green and Ray Heatherton in Babes In Arms two years later; the production, scored by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart and staged with choreography by George Balanchine, stood out as one of the rare musicals to thrive amid the Depression.

The 1930s merely hinted at his range. During the following decade he shared the stage with Burl Ives in the 1944 folk musical Sing Out, Sweet Land, played a union organizer in the 1947 revival of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, and joined an updated staging of The Beggar’s Opera that featured new music by Duke Ellington. He closed out the 1940s in the starring role of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate.

Drake maintained a steady stream of compelling parts into the 1950s and early 1960s. Although he declined the central role in The King And I when it opened in 1951, he later filled in for Yul Brynner for several weeks. In 1953 he earned a Tony Award for his portrayal of Hadji, the street poet who rises to become Wazir of Baghdad, in the folktale musical Kismet. His television debut arrived in 1957 with a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Yeomen of the Guard. Four years later he appeared with Richard Burton in John Gielgud’s 1964 production of Hamlet.

Drake’s last Broadway turn came in the 1973 revival of Gigi, after which he made sporadic film appearances, among them Trading Places in 1983, and continued working in television until his death on July 25, 1992, at which point Broadway mourned the loss of one of its foremost leading men.