Jan mcart biography

By Bill Hirschman

Larger-than-life, effusive, generous and driven Jan McArt, a show business legend who helped push South Florida theater out of its infancy and through its adolescence with flair and verve, died Sunday morning at her Boca Raton home, her daughter confirmed.

“As per her wishes, there will be no funeral or viewing, just cremation.

She wanted a party and will get one down the road after this pandemic is finally brought under control,” wrote her close friend Jay Stuart.

A New York actress who had appeared on stage, nightclubs and operas, McArt founded the classy Royal Palm Dinner Theatre in Boca Raton in 1977 when she moved to Florida to be with her mother.

There, and at five other venues across three counties, she served as producer and sometime star of scores of classic Broadway musicals and plays with turns as Mame and Mama Rose.

She was among the handful of pioneers who brought locally-produced pr

By Bill Hirschman

“The best of times is now…”

You could be forgiven in cynical 2015 for erroneously writing off the incredulous vision of Jan McArt as some vain diva still living in the heyday of musical theater circa 1959 or 1962.

You’d be incredibly wrong on every count, but it would be understandable.

Even her daughter, Deborah Lahr Lawlor, quipped, “Exclamation points come with her…. Her persona is just bigger than life. She does things in a way that we mortals…,” she paused mid-sentence in wonder.

The First Lady of South Florida Theater could easily rest on a resume spanning Broadway, opera, New York nightclubs, records, singing on national talk shows, stretching back to being hired by Richard Rodgers as a replacement Laurie for a Los Angeles production of Oklahoma.

But most significantly, McArt founded the atypically classy Royal Palm Dinner Theatre in Boca Raton and five other venues across three counties – among the handful of pioneers who brought locally-produced profes

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