Obituary: Bob Avian, Choreographer of Broadway Smashes

In his memoir, Avian wrote about what made his creative partnership with Mr. Bennett work.

“I wasn’t cautious with Michael,” he wrote. “I knew him so well that I could tell him exactly what I thought. In effect I seemed to instinctively assume the role of his editor. Michael was a more mercurial personality than I, and ambitious though I was, I did not possess Michael’s burning intensity. I didn’t want to be Michael, and he didn’t want to be me.”

Robert Avedisian (he shortened the name when he became a professional dancer) was born on Dec. 26, 1937, in Manhattan to John and Esther (Keleshian) Avedisian, immigrants from Armenia. His father was a chef, and his mother was a seamstress. By the time he was 11, he knew he loved to dance and was pretty good at it.

“When my parents went out, I would push back the furniture, clear an open space, turn on the record player and leap around the apartment,” he wrote in his memoir. “Boys weren’t supposed to dance, especially not in Armenian culture, but I loved music, and I especially loved the freedom I found in dancing.”

He didn’t have any formal training, though, until he enrolled at Boston University, where he graduated from the College of Fine Arts in 1958. He also studied at the Boston Ballet School.

After the “West Side Story” tour — which was playing Berlin when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961 — he booked a national tour of “Carnival!,” working under the director and choreographer Gower Champion. Not long after, he got his first chance to see a show choreographed by his friend Mr. Bennett, a summer stock production of the Richard Rodgers musical “No Strings.”

“I knew right away that he had it — and he knew he had it,” Mr. Avian wrote.

Bennett’s career took off, and with it. Avian’s soon did too.

Some of their projects were more challenging than others. There was, for instance, “Coco,” a 1969 André Previn-Alan Jay Lerner musical that garnered a lot of attention, both for its enormous budget and for its star, Katharine Hepburn, who played the fashion designer Coco Chanel. Mr. Bennett was the choreographer, Mr. Avian his assistant, and from the beginning they realized that they had their work cut out for them. Avian recounted the first rehearsal in “Dancing Man”:

“We’re excited and even in awe of the great Kate — for precisely 10 minutes. And then Michael and I look at each other and realize there’s an elephant in the room: The legendary Katharine Hepburn doesn’t have a musical bone in her body.”

Still, though critics were unkind, “Coco” ran for 329 performances on the basis of star power alone.

Avian wasn’t limited to the choreographic side of things in his work with Mr. Bennett. On “Ballroom,” in addition to his Tony-winning choreography, he was a producer. And on their next collaboration, “Dreamgirls” (1981), which Mr. Bennett directed and choreographed, he was a lead producer. That show ran on Broadway for more than three and a half years.

When Bennett became ill, Avian wasn’t sure about his own future, and particularly about whether to accept an offer from the producer Cameron Mackintosh to stage a revival of “Follies” in 1987. In an interview with The New York Post last year, he said it had been Mr. Bennett, near death at the time, who spurred him on, telling him: “You should do this. You know what we did with the original, and you know the characters.”

Avian went on to do the “musical staging” (as the credit reads) for Mackintosh’s production of “Miss Saigon,” for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard” and, in 1999, for the Stephen Sondheim revue “Putting It Together.”

Avian and Pileski, who had been together for 36 years and had homes in Fort Lauderdale, New York and Connecticut, married in 2011. He is also survived by a sister, Laura Nabedian.