Terry Allen Kramer, Tony-Winning Producer, Is Dead at 85

Her death was confirmed by her New York office, which said Kramer had contracted pneumonia while visiting Lyford Cay in the Bahamas last month.

Kramer’s first Tony was for Edward Albee’s “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” (2002), the unexpected story of a married architect who falls in love with a female of another species. It was named best play. Her last was for “Hello, Dolly” (2017), the widely praised Bette Midler production about Thornton Wilder’s 19th-century larger-than-life widowed matchmaker. It was named best musical revival. (She and Midler had worked together before, on the 2013 solo show “I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers.”)

In between, Kramer won Tonys for two shows that featured drag performers as major characters: “La Cage aux Folles” (2004), best musical revival; and “Kinky Boots” (2013), best musical. She also produced the family drama “The Humans” (2016), which won four Tonys, including best play.

Although she kept her awards in her Manhattan home, she was better known for her Florida residence. When La Follia, her Palm Beach estate, was put on the market last fall for $135 million, it was said to be the most expensive American property ever listed. The Italianate villa, facing both the Atlantic Ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway, covers more than 37,000 square feet, with 13 bedrooms, a movie theater and its own fitness center.

“I’ve been to it,” Cindy Adams, the New York Post’s gossip columnist, wrote at the time. “It’s larger than Utica.”

Invitations to Kramer’s annual Thanksgiving dinner at La Follia were prized, and even other celebrity hosts praised her — particularly for standing at the buffet, alongside her staff, serving the guests herself. Photographs taken there and around the world showed Kramer, instantly recognizable by her signature long blond hair, deep tan and (often) diamond earrings, with famous friends like Joan Collins, Jerry Hall, Denise Rich and Ivana Trump. La Follia is not far from the Trump family’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

Friends joked that Kramer and actor George Hamilton had become close friends because they so admired each other’s suntans.

Terry Allen was born in Manhattan on June 20, 1933, the daughter of Charles Allen Jr., founder of his family Wall Street investment firm, and Rita (Friedman) Allen.

Terry’s brothers were raised to take over Allen & Co. Marriage and children were the future her father wanted for her, Kramer told The New York Times in 1984. She attended Vassar, and she married young, but by the time her children were in high school, she said, her father agreed that a job might not be the worst idea. “He told my husband, ‘Find Terry something to do,’” she recalled.

Kramer was 41 when she produced her first Broadway show, “Good News,” a 1974 revival of a 1927 musical, with a cast including Alice Faye and Stubby Kaye. It was teasingly described by critic Clive Barnes in The Times as “entirely recycled, up-to-the-minute nostalgia.” The show opened two days before Christmas and closed on Jan. 4.

In 1977, things went considerably more smoothly with “I Love My Wife,” a relatively low-budget comedy that ran two years and won two Tonys and six Drama Desk Awards.

“You might say it’s another Allen deal,” she told The Times cheerfully that year, referring to the family company. “Invest a dollar to make 10. That’s what my father always did.” (When she signed up investors, a reporter noted, they tended to have surnames like Bronfman, Salomon and Lasker, not to mention Allen.)

Like most successful Broadway producers, she dealt with flops as well as hits. “Sugar Babies” (1979), an old-timey revue starring Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller, was reported to have doubled investors’ money, thanks to productions as far afield as London and Sydney. “I really didn’t know it would go,” Kramer said, looking back. “What do I know about burlesque?”

While “Sugar Babies” was still running, “Frankenstein” (1981), a nonmusical with a major budget for special effects, opened — and closed the same day. But then “Me and My Girl (1986),” based on a 1937 London musical romantic comedy, was hailed by The Times as “sheer happiness” and ran three years.

“Nick & Nora,” a highly anticipated musical based on the sophisticated 1930s “Thin Man” characters, flopped in 1991 despite major buzz, big stars (Joanna Gleason and Barry Bostwick) and a book by Arthur Laurents. But “Movin’ Out (2002),” the Billy Joel and Twyla Tharp musical, ran three years.

Kramer apparently knew how to roll with the punches. At a 1976 opening-night party for another play, Jules Feiffer’s comedy “Knock Knock,” she talked to a reporter about the disasters surrounding her first show. “The scenery burned down on its way to New York,” she recalled philosophically. “Then the animals in the show died.”

Over the decades she showed a taste for revivals, producing Broadway returns of acclaimed hits like “Fiddler on the Roof” (2004), “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (2005), “Grease” (2007), “West Side Story” (2009) and “The Elephant Man” (2014). Fantasy was a favorite subject, too. Her projects also included the tempest-tossed “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” (2011), “The Addams Family” (2010), “Finding Neverland” (2015) and “Gorey Stories” (1978).

“Escape to Margaritaville” (2018), a musical based on the songs of Jimmy Buffett, was her last Broadway production.

At 18, Terry Allen married James Philips, a Wall Street trader. In 1958, after their divorce, she married Irwin Hamilton Kramer, who became a partner in Allen & Co. He died in 1999.

Nick Simunek, the British-born producer who died in 2014, is often mentioned as her third husband, but family members said they were never legally married.

Kramer is survived by a daughter, Toni Goutal; a son, Nathaniel Kramer; a brother, Bruce Allen; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Angela Kramer, died in 2002.

Kramer said she never regretted the years spent raising a family before beginning her entertainment-industry career.

“All producers should be mothers,” she suggested, presumably with a smile, in a 1984 interview with The Times. “A lot of people in the theater are children.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.