Mark O’Donnell, the Tony Award-winning writer behind such quirky and clever Broadway shows as Hairspray and Cry-Baby, has died aged 58.
Jack Tantleff, Mr O’Donnell’s agent, said the theatre writer collapsed in the lobby of his apartment complex on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York.
Mr O’Donnell won the 2003 Tony for best book of a musical for co-writing Hairspray with Thomas Meehan and the pair earned nominations in 2008 for doing the same for another John Waters work, Cry-Baby. His other plays include That’s It, Folks!, Fables For Friends, The Nice and the Nasty, Strangers on Earth, Vertigo Park and the musical Tots In Tinseltown.
He wrote two novels, Getting Over Homer and Let Nothing You Dismay, and published two collections of comic stories, Elementary Education and Vertigo Park and Other Tales.
He received a Guggenheim fellowship and the George S. Kaufman Award.