Jo Sullivan

Jo Sullivan, born Elizabeth Josephine Sullivan on August 28, 1927, in Mounds, Illinois, was an American actress and high lyric soprano whose Broadway career spanned from 1948 to 2009. She died on April 28, 2019, at her home in New York City at the age of 91, of heart failure.

Sullivan was the daughter of Hessie Boone Sullivan, who worked for a lumber-distributing company, and Eileen Celeste Woods Sullivan, who sold cosmetics. She attended Cleveland High School and pursued vocal training in St. Louis before relocating to New York, where she studied music at Columbia University after being rejected by the Juilliard School. To support herself during that period, she worked at the Lord & Taylor department store. Early in her career she competed on the Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts radio program, where she lost to a pair of harmonica players.

Her Broadway career began with Sleepy Hollow, which ran briefly in June 1948, followed later that year by As the Girls Go, which ran from November 1948 through January 1950. In December 1950 she appeared in Let's Make an Opera on Broadway, a production featuring music by Benjamin Britten, a libretto by Eric Crozier, musical direction by Norman Del Mar, and direction by Marc Blitzstein. In the summer of 1951, Sullivan played Dorothy Gale in The Muny's production of The Wizard of Oz, opposite Margaret Hamilton, who reprised her film role as the Wicked Witch of the West. Sullivan returned to the role in the summer of 1953 at the Kansas City Starlight Theatre. In 1992, her daughter Emily played Dorothy Gale at The Muny, the first time in that organization's history that a mother and daughter had each performed the same role.

In 1954, Sullivan played Polly Peachum in Marc Blitzstein's English-language adaptation of The Threepenny Opera, the Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht work, in an off-Broadway run from March through May of that year. She also appeared in Carousel with the New York City Center Light Opera Company from June through August 1954. Sullivan returned to The Threepenny Opera when it reopened on September 30, 1955, in a run that continued through December 1961.

The defining role of Sullivan's stage career came with the original Broadway production of The Most Happy Fella, which opened on May 3, 1956, and ran through December 1957. Her performance earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical in 1957. She reprised the role in a 1992 Broadway revival that ran from February through August of that year.

On April 29, 1959, Sullivan married composer Frank Loesser, one day before the May 1 deadline she had given him to propose or she would resume her career independently. They had two children: Hannah, born in 1962, who died of cancer in 2007, and Emily, born in 1965, who became a singer and actress. Sullivan had previously been married to Don Jacobs around 1952; that marriage ended in divorce in 1958. In 1973 she married Jack Osborn, who headed an industrial design firm. Beginning in 1983, she was in a relationship with stockbroker Jacquin Fink, who remained her companion until her death.

Following Frank Loesser's death in 1969, Sullivan managed his estate for the remaining fifty years of her life, overseeing Frank Music Company and guiding productions of his musicals, including Guys and Dolls, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and The Most Happy Fella. The publishing portion of Frank Music Company was sold to CBS Records in 1976.

In the early 1980s, Sullivan returned to performing after officials at The Ballroom, a New York City nightclub, invited her to sing her late husband's songs. She subsequently performed at other nightclubs and in theatrical productions, including a summer stock production of Guys and Dolls at E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall in 1974 and the Broadway revue Perfectly Frank in November and December 1980. In 1984 she developed a revue titled Jo Sullivan Sings Frank Loesser and Friends, which was presented in multiple cities. Sullivan also appeared on several recordings, including Loesser by Loesser, recorded alongside her daughter Emily, and multiple albums in Ben Bagley's Revisited series on Painted Smiles Records, among them Kurt Weill Revisited, Leonard Bernstein Revisited, and Frank Loesser Revisited.