Barry Dennen

The character of Pilate in Jesus Christ Superstar doesn’t entirely sing. He’s speaking as much as anything. That’s more or less true of the Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret as well. Now, Barry Dennen wasn’t the first person to play both roles; obviously the Master of Ceremonies was first Joel Grey. But Dennen was the first West End Master of Ceremonies and was Pilate on the original Superstar concept album. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Fiddler on the Roof and I don’t remember if he really sings in that, but it’s clear that a Dennen performance in a musical does not purely rely on a great singing voice.

Dennen was born in Chicago but moved to LA as a child. He graduated from UCLA, then went to New York to try to work on the stage. He helped develop his girlfriend’s nightclub act, and we’ll be getting back to her in a minute, then moved to London. From Cabaret he was signed first for the album and then the Broadway production of Superstar, and from there the movie production of Fiddler. He suggested to Norman Jewison that Superstar would make a good next movie. He was also in Shock Treatment, the not-sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Honestly you’ve heard his voice a ton of places. The Dark Crystal, for example, where he played the Chamberlain. He was in Batman: The Animated Series and Batman Beyond (as well as the old Adam West show). He did video games and Avatar: The Last Airbender. He did a lot of terrible ‘80s cartoons, including a lot of the ones where it’s hard to believe the titles aren’t some kind of joke. He also had live-action appearances, including the requisite Murder, She Wrote.

He’s one of the people who ended up appearing in Superstar many times. Not as many as Ted Neeley, because no one has been in Superstar as much as Ted Neeley, but he kept doing it. The symbol of the show even appears on his grave marker. It seems to me that there is a connection to the show. I don’t know if it’s true of people in later productions, but everyone from the first few versions seems to have bonded over it, and Neeley and Carl Anderson were friends to the day Anderson died.

His Wikipedia page says he had a platonic relationship with Barbra Streisand, in the days before she dropped the second “a.” Everyone else says she was his girlfriend. I don’t know; I haven’t read his autobiography. It seems, from what I can tell, that the time he spent with her was time learning about himself, including coming to the realization that he was gay. He married actress Pamela Strong, with whom he adopted two children, before divorcing her in 1981. He was, however, able to accept himself in the end and lived for many years with a partner named James McGachy, and I can only believe they were happier than he would’ve been with Streisand regardless of his sexuality.