Roger Horchow

Samuel Roger Horchow was born on July 3, 1928, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Beatrice (Schwartz) and Reuben Horchow, an attorney. He died on May 2, 2020. A graduate of The Hill School, class of 1945, Horchow later attended Yale University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1999. He is among the subjects profiled in Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point (Little, Brown, 2000), published by a Canadian writer originally in The New Yorker.

Before his career in theater, Horchow established himself as a pioneer in retail. In 1971, he founded The Horchow Collection, the first luxury mail-order catalog to launch without a preceding brick-and-mortar store. The early catalogs were photographed by The Photographers Incorporated in Dallas, Texas. He sold The Horchow Collection to Neiman Marcus in 1988.

Horchow made his Broadway producing debut in 1992 with Crazy for You, a musical built around the songs of George Gershwin. Directed by Mike Ockrent and choreographed by Susan Stroman, the production earned the Tony Award for Best Musical. Although the show drew on the earlier Gershwin musical Girl Crazy, which opened in 1930, theater critics and the American Theatre Wing classified Crazy for You as a new musical rather than a revival. The London production of the show received the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Musical.

In 2000, Horchow and co-producer Roger Berlind brought a revival of Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate to Broadway. The production earned Horchow his second Tony Award, this time for Best Revival of a Musical, as well as a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical. Seven years later, in 2007, Horchow was among the producers of Curtains, a comedic murder mystery that received eight Tony Award nominations and ten Drama Desk Award nominations. In 2008, he served as a minor producer on the Broadway revival of Gypsy, which starred Patti LuPone.

Beyond the theater, Horchow authored three books: Elephants in Your Mailbox: How I Learned the Secrets of Mail-Order Marketing Despite Having Made 25 Horrendous Mistakes (Times Books, 1980), Living in Style: In A Time When Taste Means More Than Money (Rawson Associates, 1981), and The Art of Friendship: 70 Simple Rules for Making Meaningful Connections (St. Martin's Press, 2006). He served on the boards of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery, and acted as Vice-Chairman of KERA Public Radio in Dallas. He also served on the boards of the Dallas Theater Center, the Foundation for Arts and Preservation in Embassies, and the advisory board of Direct Relief International, and was a member of the Board of Selectors of the Jefferson Awards for Public Service. In 2002, The Hill School presented him with its highest alumni honor, the Sixth Form Leadership Award. Horchow resided in Dallas and was survived by three daughters and five granddaughters. His wife, Carolyn Pfeifer, died in 2009.