Edward Kleban

Biography

Edward "Ed" Kleban (April 30, 1939 – December 28, 1987) was an American musical theatre composer and lyricist. Kleban was born in the Bronx, New York City, in 1939 and graduated from New York's High School of Music & Art and Columbia University, where he attended with future playwright Terrence McNally.

Kleban is best known as lyricist of the Broadway hit A Chorus Line. He and composer Marvin Hamlisch won the 1976 Tony Award for Best Original Score, and he shared the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1976 with Hamlisch and three other contributors to the musical. The one-woman Phyllis Newman show, The Madwoman of Central Park West (1979), featured a few tunes with his lyrics.

For several years, he worked at Columbia Records, where he produced albums by performers as diverse as Igor Stravinsky and Percy Faith, and the albums for the Off-Broadway musicals Now Is The Time For All Good Men and Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.

He was a teacher for many years at the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.

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