Tony Award-winning producer and entertainment industry leader Jack W. Batman died of pancreatic cancer on Friday, August 1, in hospice care at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey. He was 81.
His family confirmed his death today.
Over the course of his multi-decade career, including a partnership with Bruce Robert Harris spanning more than twenty-two years, Batman presented over sixty plays and musicals for Broadway, London, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Sydney, Melbourne, Berlin, Off Broadway, regional theaters, national and international tours and festivals, and more.
Batman received Tony Awards for the Broadway productions of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Clybourne Park and the revival of the musical Pippin. His recent projects together with Harris included Good Night, and Good Luck with George Clooney, John Proctor is the Villain with Sadie Sink, The Roommate starring Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone, New York, New York (which brought them their thirteenth Tony Award nomination), The Who’s Tommy, Magic Mike Live, Criss Angel Mindfreak, and Titanic the Musical.
With Harris, Batman produced five Original Broadway Cast albums and served as Executive Producer of Gerald McCullouch’s award-winning film Daddy. His productions have received hundreds of accolades including Tony, Olivier, London Critics Circle, London Evening Standard, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Drama League, Theatre World, Los Angeles Circle, Ovation, plus Grammy and Chita Rivera Awards and Nominations.
Born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1944, Batman was the oldest of two siblings. Batman’s father, Ralph Batman, worked for Standard Press Steel, and his mother, Kathryn Wallace Batman, was vice president and the manager of the Philadelphia Employees Credit Union.
Drawn to Broadway, Batman moved to New York City in 1969, landed a job in the mail room at the William Morris Agency and quickly rose through the ranks to become an agent. From there, he built a career in theater as a manager, casting director, actor, writer, and two-time Tony Award-winning producer.
Along the way, he met the love of his life, his husband Sidney J. Burgoyne. They both attended La Salle College in Philadelphia and participated in the Masque there and La Salle Music Theatre — albeit ten years apart. They fully connected in January, 1976 over a game of Scrabble at a friend’s house and remained together for the next nearly 50 years. On August 13, 2013, they were legally wed at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau.
Burgoyne and Batman once shared their love story with The New York Daily News, where they spoke about how their lives in theater had intertwined. That included a production of Ragtime, which Sidney directed at the White Plains Performing Arts Center, where Jack was the Executive Producer. “I decided to give him the hardest show,” Batman said at the time, “because I trust him implicitly to do it well.”
Batman was still working on upcoming projects until a few days before he died.
Burgoyne said Batman accepted his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer early this year as he did all things: with singular grace, saying, “all of my life, in business and in my personal life, if a door opened, I walked through. This is just one more door I’m walking through.”
In addition to his husband, Batman is survived by his cousins Sue Ellen Langhorne and Kathie Langhorne Campbell as well as his brothers-in-law, Paul Burgoyne and David Burgoyne, his sister-in-law, Catherine Ronan Burgoyne, his godson Jackson Walti, and many beloved nieces, nephews and grandnieces and grandnephews and, among countless good and dear friends, the indispensable Paula Cohen. He is predeceased by his parents and his brother, Ralph.
Donations may be made in honor of Jack W. Batman to The Entertainment Community Fund and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.
