Tony Winner and 'Dean of American Lighting' Tharon Musser Dead at 84

Tony Award winner Tharon Musser, known as the “Dean of American Lighting Designers,” has died after a long illness. The designer was 84.

Tharon Myrene Musser was born on January 8, 1925, in Roanoke, Virginia. A graduate of Berea College, she received her MFA from Yale University in 1950. After moving to New York City, the artist made her Broadway lighting debut in 1956 with Jose Quintero’s mounting of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Jounrey into Night. Musser added literally dozens of credits during the course of her over four decade long career, including Lil’ Abner, The Entertainer, Once Upon a Mattress, Mother Courage and Her Children, Alfie!, Mame, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Peer Gynt, Applause, The Boy Friend, They’re Playing Our Song, 42nd Street, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Private Lives, The Wiz, Broadway Bound, Rumors and many, many more. She was also credited with work on countless regional productions and roughly two dozen national tours.

In 1972, Musser won her first Tony Award for Michael Bennett’s groundbreaking Follies, following with additional awards for the director/choreographer’s A Chorus Line in 1976 and Dreamgirls in 1982. The lighting for A Chorus Line was particularly remarkable, introducing the first completely computerized lighting console and replacing the industry standard “piano boards,” which were operated manually.

Diagnosed with “early-onset Alzheimer’s” in the mid-1990s, Musser worked through the illness for several years, presenting her last new design in 1999 for Broadway’s The Lonesome West. In 2006, her award-winning Chorus Line design was restaged by Natasha Katz for the show’s revival at the Schoenfeld Theatre.

She is survived by her long-time partner and assistant, Marilyn Rennagel.