The Arts

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Backstage power player 'irreplaceable'

By: Kevin Prokosh

Posted: 11/24/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

WINNIPEG'S theatre and music communities are reeling from the news that Sam Lutfiyya died yesterday afternoon of rectal cancer.

The Winnipeg percussionist was a backstage power through his Lombard Avenue-based company Music Services International -- Canada's largest music contracting company -- which hired musicians for the biggest touring music productions on the road. Few people even knew that he was ill. He left work last Tuesday not feeling well and checked into the Health Sciences Centre Thursday. He was 53.

"It was all very quiet," said actor Richard Hurst, MSI's executive administrator, from the hospital. "He passed the way he lived, quietly and behind the scenes."

Lutfiyya and Hurst, who left Winnipeg last May for Victoria, started the successful business on the kitchen table of the former's Wolseley home in 1989. It grew to be one of the largest in North America. Earlier this fall he was in Atlanta for the première of the Broadway-bound Come Fly With Me, Twyla Tharp's Frank Sinatra-inspired dance piece for which Lutfiyya provided music supervision. His firm hired all the players for scores of big-name musicals including Showboat, Mamma Mia!, Cats, Jersey Boys and numerous concerts. He was also working on the upcoming Manitoba Theatre Centre production of The Drowsy Chaperone, as well as music for the Vancouver Olympics.

"His name was an assurance of musical quality at MTC," said MTC artistic director Steven Schipper, who was shocked at the news. "Every patron who's ever heard beautiful music at MTC knew Sam's work."

Born in Bangor, Maine, Lutiyya was 11 when his father agreed to teach sociology at the University of Manitoba. Much of his early musical training occurred at Richmond Collegiate. He subsequently enrolled in music education at U of M. He graduated in 1981, and sat in at the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and other musical groups before forming MSI.

"He knew every musician in North America and every producer of musical theatre," said Schipper, who last talked to Lutfiyya a month or two ago. "He's irreplaceable."

Lutfiyya was all about the work and not the glory.

"We want to be the leading music co-ordinator in the world in the next five to 10 years," he said to the Free Press in 2004. "I don't need to be the biggest; we want to be the leading music co-ordinator. If that causes us to be the biggest, fine, but I'd rather focus on quality and creating goodness around it."

Lutfiyya is survived by two sisters and a brother.

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca

OBITUARY

Sam Lutfiyya

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 24, 2009 D3

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