Barnard Hughes, Tony-Winning Actor of Da and Prelude to a Kiss, Dead at 90

By Kenneth Jones
11 Jul 2006

Barnard Hughes, the Tony Award-winning actor who starred in Da on Broadway, and began his professional career in 1934, died July 11 at New York Presbyterian Hospital after a brief illness, his family announced.

Mr. Hughes, a Bedford Hills, NY, native, was 90. He was born July 16, 1915, the son of Owen and Madge Hughes.

The kind-eyed actor, who seemed to slide inside the skin of any of the various characters he played, might be best remembered for his humane performance as an Irish father in Hugh Leonard's Da (1978).

For his turn as the curmudgeonly father — "da," for short — haunting the memory of his playwright son, he won the Best Actor Tony Award and Outstanding Actor Drama Desk Award. He later played the role in the film version.

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"Da", a play by the Irish playwright Hugh Leonard, was my first Broadway show as a stage manager, and I suspect that I owe that in large part to Barney and the director, Melvin Bernhardt.

We had done the show originally at a very small off-off-Broadway theatre, the Hudson Guild Theatre, where it received wonderful reviews, as well it should have, since the play, the cast and the production were all very good (and what's more it was an easy cast to work with). I was the resident Production Stage Manager there, and when the show was picked up for transfer to Broadway, I began to get worried because no one had told me if I was going to go with it or not. (If they hadn't taken me, they would have been obligated to pay me three or four weeks salary, if I remember correctly.)

When I finally got up the nerve to ask the producer of HGT whether I was going or not, he told me that they were taking me, but not as the head stage manager, the PSM, but as the assistant stage manager. Being rather hot-headed at that time, and a callow youth of 23 who didn't know enough to understand that this offer was reasonable and a pretty good thing overall, I protested that I only wanted to go as PSM.

I don't know precisely what happened from there on out. They wanted to move the show pretty quickly, with a minimal amount of rehearsal, to capitalize on the publicity we'd gotten and be eligible for that year's Tony Awards, so I suppose they were a bit over a barrel and in a bind about whether to hire such an inexperienced stage manager for a Broadway production or to pay me off and go with someone who didn't know the production inside and out, as I did. My assumption is that the Broadway producer (Lester Osterman) asked Barney and Melvin and Brian Murray, who was the other star of the show, if they thought I could do the job and I guess they thought it would be OK. (I was inexperienced, but I think still a pretty fair stage manager.) So, I was hired, and the producers brought on a veteran Broadway production supervisor to oversee the mounting of the show.

(Not too long afterwards, my union, Actors' Equity, changed the rules so that Broadway stage managers were required to have a certain number of years of experience, and I've always thought that was in some respect a reaction to the hiring of a 23 year-old novice -- I was in only my second year in New York and my first as a member of Equity -- as the PSM of a Broadway show.)

My time on "Da" with Barney was wonderful, he was a caring man and really marvelous to work with, both personally and professionally. I stayed with the show after he left it, to be replaced by Brian Keith, and then went out with Barney to tour the country with it for 10 months. His wife Helen Stenborg, a very good actress in her own right, played alongside him on that tour, and his daughter Laura played the female juvenile role. My wife at the time, who had worked as a seamstress and draper in costume shops, and who I met when she did props for an earlier show at the Hudson Guild, went out with us as wardrobe supervisor, which started her on a new phase of her career -- so that tour was definitely a family affair.

(Not only that but I made several long-term friendships while touring with "Da", including the tremendously talented John Didrichsen, with whom I worked on various music projects, including a partnership in a recording studio, for decades afterwards.)

I owe an awful lot to Barney's belief in me 28 years ago, and I'm sorry to see him go.