Zev Buffman brought Broadway to South Florida— and the Miami Heat, too. He died at 89.
The line on Zev Buffman was that he’d never quit. He’d work in show business until the day he couldn’t.
When he stepped down as Ruth Eckerd Hall’s president and CEO in 2018, he said: “It’s not retiring from life like people at 88 do, totally sanely and unexpectedly. Not me. I’m ready for more.”
Coming from the seemingly ageless Buffman, you believed it,
This week, the curtain on Buffman’s outsized life finally closed. The veteran producer and venue leader, who brought superstars to Broadway and Broadway to Tampa Bay and South Florida — and who helped raise $35 million in 30 days to win the Miami Heat its basketball franchise — died Wednesday at 89 at his home near Seattle.
According to Clearwater Mayor Frank Hibbard, Buffman had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. A statement from Ruth Eckerd Hall said Buffman died of natural causes.
Known for his irrepressible vigor and Old Hollywood charm, Buffman led the Clearwater venue from 2011 to 2018. It was a transformative stretch, encompassing the $10 million restoration of the Bilheimer Capitol Theatre; the years-long, $34 million renovation of Ruth Eckerd Hall; and an expansion of the hall’s educational offerings, including the Grammy Museum’s Music Revolution Project, a summer program that produced several professional musicians.
“He was a throwback, a character, and yet also had youthful energy,” said Hibbard, a member of Ruth Eckerd Hall’s Board of Directors during Buffman’s tenure. “He was a visionary type of guy. He was always probably 10 steps ahead of most people, and could see what needed to be done to make a venue or something really successful. And I think he could sell that vision to other people.”
Buffman’s impact on South Florida
For decades, Buffman worked out of South Florida, where he purchased Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse in 1962 and later ran Fort Lauderdale’s Parker Playhouse and Miami Beach’s Jackie Gleason Performing Arts Center, where he brought actor Yul Brynner in to star in a production of “The King and I” in 1976.
The demanding star drove Buffman and his press agent, the late Charlie Cinnamon, to distraction, as Brynner peppered them with orders to make improvements to his dressing room for the show’s run.
Occasionally, Buffman would start shows in Florida and take them to Broadway.
During his 21 years as the Parker Playhouse’s producer, he gave Elizabeth Taylor her stage debut in “The Little Foxes” in 1981. Taylor would earn a Tony nomination that year when she played the part on Broadway.
Buffman, who left South Florida in the early 1990s, fell in love with the Coconut Grove Playhouse in the fall of 1962 after booking it for a run of the sex farce “Pajama Tops.”
“The flamboyant showman with a streak of P.T. Barnum,” as the Miami Herald’s former theater critic Christine Dolen once called him, originally leased the Playhouse, then bought it in 1965 and added a 300-seat balcony.
“Zev Buffman as a commercial producer brought ongoing national attention to the Coconut Grove Playhouse,” said Arnold Mittelman, the theater’s former producing artistic director and now president of the National Jewish Theater Foundation.
“His use of celebrities made the Playhouse known throughout the industry. He recognized the regional potential of South Florida by creating shows for Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale and Royal Poinciana in Palm Beach. He once told me his regret was not having access to all three theaters at the same time,” Mittelman said.
Buffman certainly wasn’t shy about tapping the power of his Rolodex.
When the former Miami Arena, the Heat’s original home, opened in September 1988, Buffman persuaded Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli and Sammy Davis Jr. to perform.
Founding Miami Heat partner
In 1988, Buffman partnered with Carnival Cruise Lines founder Ted Arison to found the Miami Heat. The way he told it, then-commissioner David Stern had told him Florida was a “DOA market” for the NBA.
“David said, ‘Zev, you’re in the theater. You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ ” Buffman told Florida Trend in 2017. “He said, ‘Zev, you’re Jewish, I’m Jewish. So I’m not going to offend you, but Florida is a place where old Jews go to die and Cubans come to look for a new life, and they are crazy about two things: Baseball and boxing. Not basketball.’
“I went back to Miami and told everyone that we have to prove him wrong.”
Buffman’s bow in entertainment
Buffman got his start in entertainment as an extra in “The Ten Commandments,” where he worked under Cecil B. DeMille, and could regale you with stories about legends he worked with — Sinatra, Charlton Heston, Muhammad Ali, Paul McCartney, Julie Andrews, Andrew Lloyd Weber and many more. He was close to Taylor and reunited her with ex Richard Burton in Noel Coward’s “Private Lives.”
“From the moment I persuaded Elizabeth to do a Broadway show, I became her shepherd, her keeper, her doctor, her shrink, her best friend,” Buffman once told the The Tampa Bay Times.
But even before he worked with Hollywood royalty, his life could have been a movie.
Buffman’s roots
Buffman’s parents fled Ukraine during the Russian Revolution, settling in Tel Aviv, in what was then called Palestine, where he was born on Oct. 11, 1930. He changed the spelling of his surname, Bufman, to Buffman when he left South Florida in the early 1990s.
His father owned several movie theaters and Buffman, after serving in the Israeli Army, felt the call of Hollywood. He eventually realized his true talent was pulling strings behind the scenes — forging connections, restoring theaters, building empires and producing shows. Throughout his career, his plays and musicals were nominated for nearly 30 Tony Awards.
Buffman had an impact on the Tampa Bay arts scene long before taking over Ruth Eckerd Hall. A pioneer in the world of touring Broadway shows, he ran a subscription series for musicals at the Mahaffey Theater, Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center (now the Straz Center) and other Florida theaters.
Buffman had a hand in several entities that went on to become much larger and more lucrative. The theatrical business he sold in 1988 morphed over time into Broadway Across America, which sells millions of tickets to touring musicals and plays each year.
Between 1990 and 1994, he partnered with billionaire entrepreneur Wayne Huizenga to build giant amphitheaters in Charlotte, Phoenix, West Palm Beach and Southern California. Those venues, through a series of sales and mergers, eventually ended up in the hands of Live Nation, which now operates dozens of such amphitheaters — including Tampa’s MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre — across the country.
Legacy in Clearwater
Part of Buffman’s legacy in Clearwater remains unwritten. He was a fierce advocate for plans to build a covered amphitheater in Coachman Park, calling it an essential part of the city’s Imagine Clearwater redevelopment plan, and once saying anything smaller than a 5,000- to 10,000-seater would be “a death warrant on what it could be.”
The city settled on a plan for an amphitheater with 4,500 fixed seats and room for thousands more on the lawn. Whatever conflict existed between Buffman’s vision and the city’s was not a factor in his departure, he and civic leaders said at the time.
“I’d love to be back and finish it, but we’ll see,” Buffman said then. “I’m very independent, I’m very creative, and I live by that. Always, the first door open is right here in Clearwater.”
Buffman’s energy
He seemed to mean it. Buffman’s tirelessness was legendary. He was an avid skier and tennis player, married to his wife and travel partner, Vilma, for nearly 60 years. Each day he commuted to Ruth Eckerd Hall, he would try to get there as fast as possible. Driving normally, he once said, would take 24 minutes. His record was 17.
But for Buffman, racing to work wasn’t really about beating the speedometer.
“I am afraid of nothing,” Buffman said in 2016. “But if there is anything I’m afraid of, it’s not to get up and go to the office in the morning.”
Buffman’s survivors include his wife Velma, several children and grandchildren.
This story was originally published April 4, 2020 at 5:56 PM.
