Felisa Vanoff

Mrs. Vanoff died May 29, 2015, at her private residence in Beverly Hills, Calif., after an extended battle with cancer. She was at the age of 89. The cancer fight was characteristic to all who knew her. She was a dancer, choreographer, producer and force to be reckoned with. The first woman to choreograph the acclaimed Harvard Hasty Pudding Review and one of the first women to go to Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped at the end of World War II, Mrs. Vanoff was often groundbreaking. She couldn't have cared less about fame, though. Her son Nick Vanoff Jr. of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, said "She was a military-minded dancer. She only looked forward and wasn't at all concerned with gender, to her, it was simple. She was the best in her field." She was buried in Sun Valley, Idaho, her favorite winter skiing resort. Survivors include her son Nick Jr., daughter-in-law Kate, granddaughters Marina and Kathrine in Florida, son Flavio Angelo in California and sister Paula Caputo.

After the war, living in New York City, Felisa (b:06/11/1924) joined the opera ballet as a performer and choreographer. Felisa had caught the attention of a 16-year-old boy. Seeing her in the ballet, Nick Vanoff (b: 10/25/1929) joined the opera to help move sets. Eventually wedging himself into the opera company's dance troupe as an extra, Mr. Nick Vanoff - five years her junior - worked for a year and a half to have a conversation with the prima ballerina.

She is known for her work on Christmas at the Hollywood Palace (2004), The Best of 'The Hollywood Palace' (1992) and Your Show of Shows (1950).

During their courtship and after they wed, Mrs. Felisa Vanoff taught English to her husband Nick (born 10/25/1929) who was a native of Greece, and found him a job holding cue cards for Perry Como. In the early 1950s, in only four months, Vanoff rose from cue-card holder to associate producer of "The Perry Como Show." At the age of 24, Nick Vanoff produced NBC's enduring "Tonight Show" when Steve Allen was its host. Her husband went on to win a Tony Award for the couple's co-produced "City of Angels." Nick and Felisa Vanoff were board members of Los Angeles' Center Theatre Group. As a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Joffrey Ballet, the Vanoff's are credited as a driving force in Joffrey Ballet move to Los Angeles. Felisa also helped organize fund-raising events for the Joffrey Ballet, known as "Patron Nights," with interior designer Patti Skouras. Additionally, she served on the Board of Directors of Colleagues, the Heinz Awards, and the Blue Ribbon of the Los Angeles Music Center. Felisa took part in the Great Wagon Days Duck Race, an annual fund-raising event organized by the Ketchum & Sun Valley Rotary Club in Rotary Park, a public park in Ketchum, Idaho. Felisa also donated to the St Luke's Wood River Medical Center in Ketchum, Idaho. Felisa was a donor to the Sun Valley Summer Symphony, a summer festival in Sun Valley, Idaho. She was also a "Bronze Sponsor" of the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce. With her husband, she co-founded the Vanoff Family Foundation in 1984, a philanthropic foundation headquartered in Hollywood, California. After the death of her husband Nick of a massive heart attack on a Wednesday night at UCLA Medical Center, of cardiac arrest on March 20, 1991 at the age of 61, Felisa and Gordon Davidson, then artistic director of the Los Angeles' Center Theatre Group, created an annual benefit hosted by Michael Feinstein that honored a lyricist each year, called "Salon at the Taper." The charity funds reduced-price tickets, or "Nix's Tix," for students, seniors and the disabled to attend all Los Angeles Music Center performances. Nick and Felisa on the Board of Directors of the Joffrey Ballet and were influential in bringing the dance company to Los Angeles. Felisa was a long-time member of The Blue Ribbon Board of Directors of the L.A. Music Center. In 1987, Felisa and Nick Vanoff underwrote the Joffrey Ballet's re-creation of the original 1913 Paris Theatre des Champs-elysees premier Diaghilev Ballet Russes performance of the Stravinsky score-ballet "Sacre du Printemps" (The Rite of Spring) choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky. The "Vanoff Black Box Theater" at the Brooks School, a private boarding school in North Andover, Massachusetts from which their son Nicholas Jr. graduated in 1980, is named after Felisa and husband Nick Vanoff. Felisa was a producer of the London West End production of the Broadway musical "City of Angels," which received an Olivier Award in 1994.

Every Saturday night, ABC's "The Hollywood Palace" television variety show was a special media entertainment event. The program's opening format established an unusual unprecedented fifteen minute segment unbroken by any commercial advertising interruption for a prime-time network program. The show immediately introduced the show's host in a unique vaudeville proscenium stage frame with an elaborate electrical chase-light picture-frame-work designed by production designer Jim Trittipo. After this theatrical introduction, the opening principle stage set was like a book, opening to turn into another "theme-stage-set look" with a choreographed musical production number featuring the show's host or another musical performer; then followed by a comedian's stand-up routine, or an animal act performed in front of the show's electric framed stage proscenium, in front of a translucent silk stage curtain before the show would break for a commercial advertising time spot-break. Making each transition became a novelty because of the design team's stage setting. After the opening host musical production introduction, the stage set would then open up, like a children's pop-up centerfold book, turning the setting into a completely different stage "look" for the show's opening musical production feature headline act, either a female or male singer with a choreographed dance line choreographed back-up. Jim Trittipo, the production designer, in his own personal approach of a "white on white" design style "look" always painted his stage settings a "tech off-white pigment based monochrome non-color white." Jack Denton, the show's terrific lighting designer, would "paint" the stage-sets through his lighting technique with color. Because the program was broadcast live or in video-tape, viewed only in black and white, Denton's subtle color gel stage-lighting enhanced the value scale of the B&W viewing transmission but the viewing audience never saw the program's subtle color palette. Several of Trittipo's stage set designs employed construction techniques that made the setting appear as an enhanced giant paper sculpture visual valentine or a Christmas pop-up card. The show's producers Nick Vanoff, Bill Harbach and Director Grey Lockwood instructed their stage-center and rear ramp electronic camera operators to maintain wide shots which gave the performance a feature film production quality. This full frame long shot was always established, maintained, in every choreographed production number performance, especially with dancing-hosts Gene Kelly, Ginger Rogers, Donald O'Connor and Fred Astaire. In 1966, when the ABC network switched to a broadcasting color network, the West Coast "The Hollywood Palace" studio-stage became the first ABC West Coast television facility converted from B&W to color. Nick Vanoff "ordered" Trittipo to cease "white on white" scenery and only use painted "colorful" stage scenery. With Jack Denton's lighting techniques, his lighting further enhanced the show's variations in the color palette. "The Hollywood Palace" design team received a 1966 EMMY in the Series Art Direction award category: Individual Achievements in Art Direction and Allied Crafts - Art Direction - The Hollywood Palace.

Back in New York City after 18 months in Mexico City, from dance training and to immerse herself in Flamenco dance performance art with Jose Fernandez, Felisa was in the middle of a war after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The U.S. Army recruited Felisa at the beginning of 1944 to stage-manage and perform in United Service Organizations Camp Shows in the Pacific entertaining military troops in the Philippines, Korea and Japan throughout the Pacific region. Recruited by the USO Army Division, quickly attaining the rank of Captain, the young woman "island-hopped" her way to Hiroshima. It was there that she found an unbroken Japanese doll in the rubble of a flattened department store. She carried it through the Pacific for six months until she could get home. Known professionally as Felisa Caputo, she became assistant choreographer and lead dancer, in 1949, with the New York City Opera company, where she performed in "Carmen," "La Traviata" and "Don Giovanni." She joined Charles Weidman's Theatre Dance Company as lead dancer, gave concerts with Peter Hamilton and appeared on TV variety shows hosted by Fred Waring and Billy Rose. From 1953-55, she served as principal dancer with the John Butler Dance Theatre and partnered with Glen Tetley in many significant roles. Other choreographic roles included the musical "Carousel," which starred Bambi Linn and Rod Alexander. She went on to choreograph and perform for Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows"; "Julie Andrews: The Sound of Christmas in Salzburg." With her producer-director husband, Nick Vanoff, she also choreographed numerous Kennedy Center Honors shows.

Around 1931, in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, sisters Paula at age 5 and Phyllis at age 7 stood on the sidewalk outside the family business and watched their grandmother's life - be - auctioned off. The Bankrupt woman was losing her general store. In the midst of the Great Depression, her grandmother had refused to charge people who couldn't afford food. That image had a profound and motivating impact on the young grand-daughter, Phyllis Caputo, who would grow up to be anything but ordinary. Thirteen years later, the Pennsylvania Beaver County 20 year old native drove her friends home to Ambridge from New York City, where they all lived. Among them was a young artistic and creative man named Andy Warhol. Phyllis had decided to take the budding artist under her wing, so in her car along the route home, she gave him some of her own adventurous spirited career advice.

Felisa Vanoff was born in 1924 in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, USA.