Ken Wydro, Who Helped Create an Off Broadway Phenomenon, Dies at 81

Ken Wydro, a playwright, director and producer who with his wife, Vy Higginsen, poured their life savings into the Off Broadway gospel musical “Mama, I Want to Sing,” an enduring work of Black theater that ran for more than 2,800 performances, died on Jan. 21 at his home in Harlem. He was 81.

The cause was heart failure, his daughter, Ahmaya Knoelle Higginson, said.

“Mama, I Want to Sing” tells the tale of a minister’s daughter who rises to international fame as a soul singer. The show is loosely based on the life of Ms. Higginsen’s older sister, Doris Troy, who honed her singing chops at her father’s Pentecostal church in Harlem and later tasted the big time by co-writing and recording “Just One Look,” which was a Top 10 single for her in 1963 and later became a hit for both the Hollies and Linda Ronstadt.

Ms. Troy also made her mark as a backup singer on rock anthems like the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and in 1970 she released a solo album on the Beatles’ label, Apple Records, with a supporting cast that included George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Billy Preston.

“Mama, I Want to Sing” is “a Black Cinderella story,” Mr. Wydro said in a 2013 interview with Call Me Adam, an entertainment website. “Coming from behind, finding oneself through loss, pain and family love.”

Although “Mama” ultimately had a marathon run, success was anything but guaranteed. Nearly every major theatrical producer in New York rejected the show, fearing that a gospel-heavy musical would attract a limited audience.

The show was a family affair. Mr. Wydro was the director; he and Ms. Higginsen produced it as well as writing the book and the lyrics for its many original numbers (Wesley Naylor and Grenoldo Frazier wrote the music). Ms. Troy herself was cast in the role of her mother, while Ms. Higginsen — a prominent disc jockey and television host in New York — provided onstage narration from inside a booth, in the manner of a radio announcer. (Their daughter eventually took over the lead role).

With a budget of only $20,000, Mr. Wydro and Ms. Higginsen opened far from the lights of Manhattan’s theater district, instead raising the curtain in 1983 in the long-dormant August Heckscher Theater in East Harlem. Without the money to advertise in major newspapers, they largely depended on word of mouth.

“We did grass-root marketing, went around to Black churches and then touched base with the schools, sororities and professional business groups in the Black community,” Mr. Wydro said in a 1990 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Word did indeed get out. In a 1984 review in The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote that “a recent performance culminated in an audience singalong of the gospel standard ‘This Little Light of Mine,’ and the mood in the theater was jubilation.”

An article in The Times the next year noted that “Mama” was drawing audiences “literally by the busload, from as far away as Boston and Decatur, Ga.” Another article, in 1987, described the theater’s “whooping, cheering, whistling” crowds while noting that the musical had already logged 1,500 performances, making it the longest-running Black show in Off Broadway history.

Kenneth Wayne Wydro was born on Feb. 11, 1943, in Queens, the elder of two sons of Kashmir Wydro, an insurance salesman, and Olga (Savitch) Wydro, a real estate broker. His father was the son of Polish immigrants; his mother’s parents were from Ukraine.

After graduating from the Choate Rosemary Hall boarding school in Wallingford Conn., in 1960, he attended the University of Rochester in Rochester N.Y. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physiology there in 1964 before heading to the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a master’s in theater in 1966.

Mr. Wydro spent the early part of his career running seminars in public speaking and communications for companies like IBM and General Foods. He wrote four books, including “Think on Your Feet: The Art of Thinking and Speaking Under Pressure” (1981).

He and Ms. Higginsen, who changed the “o” in her last name to an “e” when she entered show business, married in 1978 and began outlining “Mama” while strolling on a beach in Jamaica a few months later. They spun off a sequel, “Mama, I Want to Sing: Part II,” in 1990, and a third installment, “Born to Sing,” in 1996.

In February 1994, thousands turned out to see the original show performed at the Paramount Theater in Madison Square Garden. In its various forms, “Mama” toured extensively in the United States, as well as in Europe and Japan. A film adaptation with Ciara, Lynn Whitfield, Patti LaBelle and others was released in 2011. In 2023, their daughter directed a 40th-anniversary revival of “Mama,” which ran for three weeks in its former home, now El Teatro in El Museo del Barrio.

In 1998, the couple and their daughter started the Mama Foundation for the Arts to support musical artists working in traditionally Black genres.

The couple continued to work as producers over the years. Mr. Wydro also wrote plays, including the 2006 drama “Secrets: The Untold Story of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.”

In addition to his wife and their daughter, Mr. Wydro is survived by a brother, Laurence.

In later years, Mr. Wydro often expressed pride in the impact “Mama” had on Black theater. “What we were able to do,” he told The Inquirer, “was to appeal to an audience that had not traditionally been invited to theater before.”