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Dancer and educator Leah Bass-Baylis, a family representative, confirmed his death but gave no cause.
Battle was just 18 years old when he debuted on Broadway in January 1975, playing the Scarecrow in the original Broadway production of “The Wiz.” A classically trained dancer, he had auditioned for the musical as a member of the chorus, supporting an all-black cast that included Stephanie Mills as Dorothy, Tiger Haynes as the Tin Man, Ted Ross as the Lion, Dee Dee Bridgewater as the good witch Glinda and André De Shields as the great and powerful wizard of the show’s title.
But during a pre-Broadway tryout in Philadelphia in 1974, the production’s Scarecrow, Stu Gilliam, walked offstage sick. There were no understudies at the time, according to William F. Brown, who wrote the show’s book, although Battle had learned most of the character’s lines while he recovered from a sprained ankle earlier in the year. Between scenes, he was rushed to get dressed and ready for the stage.
“All those people were yelling at me: ‘Raise your head! Let me put this eyelash on here!’” she told The Washington Post in 1981. “One guy was doing my makeup, another guy was drawing lines on me, someone was putting my wig on, and Stephanie (Mills) was trying to say nice things to me. “lucky you.” She made it through the program, she said. another interviewerwith the help of eye cues and Mills, who “pulled my straw.”
Battle took on the role permanently, delivering what New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes called an “elegant, relaxed performance” as a member of the comic trio that accompanies Dorothy on the road to Oz. The show won seven Tony Awards, including best musical, and was adapted into a 1978 film starring Diana Ross, with Michael Jackson replacing Mr. Battle as the Scarecrow.
For Battle, the musical was supposed to mark only a brief departure from her ballet career. “All she wanted to do was go back to ballet class,” she said. said the New York Times about his beginnings as the Scarecrow, a character he ended up playing for two years. “But he relaxed me and introduced me to a world I didn’t know much about. In ballet, taking four classes a day, you don’t know much about everything that’s going on.”
Battle went on to embrace musical theater, appearing in four Broadway shows between 1981 and 1991. She won Tony Awards for three of them: as a dazzling but anonymous performer in Duke Ellington’s revue “Sophisticated Ladies” in 1981; as the main character’s tap dancing uncle, Dipsey Bates, in “The Tap Dance Boy” in 1984; and as John Thomas, a lively Marine stationed in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, in “Miss Saigon” in 1991.
All three awards were for best featured actor in a musical. No artist, living or dead, has won the award more than Mr. Battle.
“His technique was impeccable,” his friend said. Debbie Allen, the actor, dancer and director who met Battle in New York in the early 1970s and worked with him to choreograph two Academy Awards ceremonies. “He studied ballet, but he knew how to tap dance as if he were one of the Nicholas brothers. He was athletic: he had raised legs like mine. He kicked himself in the head every time he raised his leg!
Bass-Baylis, who performed with Mr. Battle in “The Tap Dance Kid,” said in an email that he had “the drive and strength to jump so high you thought you were flying.” He was also surprisingly versatile: “Whatever genre of dance was presented to her, through hard work and perseverance, she seemed to be able to overlay his technique and create something new and better than the original.”
Battle said it took time to expand beyond ballet. Once nicknamed “The Battle of the Clubfoot” by dancers who laughed at his tap attempts, he learned to do a proper tap dance only after being cast in “Sophisticated Ladies,” starring arguably the greatest tap dancer. of the world, Gregory Hines. He had struggled with a soft-shoe routine for his audition, but then forced himself to study, taking intensive classes with tap master Henry LeTang before performing routines for songs like “I’ve Got To Be a Rug Cutter.” .
His dancing led him to work with notable directors, including Bob Fosse, for the musical revue “Dancin’,” and Michael Bennett, as a substitute actor in the original Broadway production of “Dreamgirls.” Beginning in 1983, she appeared in the musical as R&B superstar James “Thunder” Early, succeeding actor Cleavant Derricks in the role of a James Brown-like singer. The role went to Eddie Murphy when “Dreamgirls” was adapted into a 2006 film, although Battle arrived in the film as a car salesman turned record producer, a top assistant to the music executive played by Jamie Foxx.
On screen, Mr. Battle appeared in episodes of “Quantum Leap,” “Touched by an Angel” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” as a tap-dancing demon who makes people sing. He also worked as a choreographer, creating routines for students at the Baltimore School of the Arts before working with artists such as Anita Baker, Joni Mitchell and Sister Sledge.
In 2006, he choreographed the Outkast musical film “Idlewild,” a Depression-era piece that featured more than 100 dancers. The film incorporated acrobatic dance sequences inspired by Lindy Hop, as well as a fusion of swing and hip-hop styles that he called “swop.”
“Choreographing is a completely different feeling,” he once said. said the times. “You create it, you give it to the dancers and they have to bring it to life. And meanwhile, you’re backstage and you’re thinking, ‘My life is in your hands; Please make it work.’”
Hinton Govorn Battle Jr., the third of five children, was born in Neubrücke, West Germany, on November 29, 1956. His father was a U.S. Army sergeant whose postings took the family to Kansas and later Washington. His mother was an accounting clerk. Unable to afford dance lessons as a child, he enrolled his two daughters as soon as they turned 5 and then made sure Mr. Battle did the same.
“I didn’t have to push much,” she told The Post in 1984. “He sang and danced all the time. If he got up from the table to go to another room, he would come in dancing.”
Battle studied at the Jones-Haywood Ballet School in Washington and, at age 13, won a scholarship to George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in Manhattan. She lived there for a few years, eating canned tuna and struggling to live on $200 a month, before returning to Washington, where one of her sisters suggested she audition for “The Wiz.” (Her sister, Lettie, also made it to Broadway and landed a dancing role in the show.)
On stage, Battle later played slick defense attorney Billy Flynn in a Broadway revival of “Chicago” and played Coalhouse Walker Jr. in a touring production of “Ragtime.” In 2006, he co-directed an Off-Broadway production of “Evil Dead: The Musical,” based on Sam Raimi’s film franchise.
Mr. Battle never married. Among the survivors are his two sisters.
Late in his career, Mr. Battle focused on teaching and co-founded the Hinton Battle Dance Academy in Japan, where he had performed and taught master classes. He was able to take advantage of his success and also his occasional setbacks on stage, such as when he broke his hip after falling to the floor during a dance number in “The Wiz.”
That accident occurred shortly after he fell down a 10-foot prop tree, landed on his face and pierced his lip while in the middle of his first song. The show went on, Battle told The Post, although for the rest of the performance she thought, “I can’t get blood on Dorothy’s dress.”