Vinnette Carroll, Broadway’s first black female director, died Tuesday in Lauderhill, Fla. Ms. Carroll, who brought black-oriented musical theater to a wider public in the 1970s, had suffered a stroke last year and had symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, though the exact cause of death was not announced. She was 80.
Ms. Carroll, who also was an actress, was best-known for directing Micki Grant’s musical revue “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope” in the early 1970s and for adapting the Gospel According to St. Matthew into the 1976 musical “Your Arms Too Short to Box With God,” which Ms. Carroll also staged.
” Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope” was developed from Ms. Carroll’s off-Broadway Urban Arts Corps and eventually became a hit on Broadway, where Ms. Carroll received a Tony Award nomination.
Ms. Carroll developed “Your Arms” for the Spoleto, Italy, Festival of Two Worlds in 1975, premiered it at Ford’s Theatre in Washington and then took it to Broadway, where she received Tony nominations for her script and staging.
The show returned to Broadway twice and also toured.
The daughter of a dentist, Ms. Carroll spent much of her childhood with her grandparents in Jamaica. But she was brought to New York at the age of 10. She and her sisters became the only black students at their New York public school.
Prodded by her father to become a doctor, Ms. Carroll graduated from Long Island University and received a master’s degree in psychology from New York University. She was on the brink of obtaining a doctorate from Columbia University, when she decided that her true passion was in the theater.
After studying acting with director Erwin Piscator, she began acting and directing in the ’50s, staging a production of “Dark of the Moon” at the Harlem YMCA with a cast that included James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne and Cicely Tyson. She received a 1961 Obie Award for “Moon on a Rainbow Shawl” and a 1964 Emmy Award for co-conceiving and supervising the TV program “Beyond the Blues.”
Among her film credits as an actress were “One Potato, Two Potato,” “Up the Down Staircase” and “Alice’s Restaurant.”
She had lived in Florida since 1980 and operated the Vinnette Carroll Repertory Company in Ft. Lauderdale.
