Katy Clancy, actor and singer who embodied five decades of Buffalo theater

Katy Clancy in one of her many Alleyway Theatre appearances

By Anthony Chase

The current wave of theater folk in Buffalo might not know her name, but for more than forty years, if there was a Buffalo theater company inventing itself or a venue being reborn, there was a good chance Katy Clancy was on the stage. From the heyday of 1970s dinner theater through the early rise of Lancaster Opera House, Alleyway Theater, Buffalo United Artists, O'Connell & Company, and countless cabaret and concert projects, Clancy's career traces an almost continuous line through Western New York's live theater history.

Mary "Katy" Kathryn Clancy, of Kenmore, died suddenly on August 2, 2026, at the age of 70. She leaves behind an unusually rich record of work that charts Buffalo's evolution from dinner theater town to a city of small professional ensembles. Colleagues will remember not only the sharpness of her comic timing and the clarity of her voice, but a wit that could turn devilish and playfully biting without warning. She was, by every account, enormous fun to be around, on stage and off.

The dinner-theater years: a golden incubator

Clancy's rise coincided with what many now regard as the golden age of Buffalo dinner theater, a commercial-community hybrid that trained performers and producers before the later wave of nonprofit companies took shape.

In 1977, while Celeste Holm and Betty Buckley were playing mother and daughter in Neal DuBrock's A Very Private Life at the old Studio Arena Theater, Clancy was appearing in Neil Simon's Come Blow Your Horn with Brian LaTulip at the Great Gatsby dinner theater. It was one of a half dozen dinner theater shows then competing for audiences at a network of restaurants and hotels around the region: Butterflies Are Free at East Aurora's Roycroft Inn, the audience-participation entertainment 1520 A.D. at the Holiday Inn at Dingens and Roessler, My Fair Lady at Mister Anthony's, P.S. Your Cat Is Dead at Ricardo's, Tom Dudzick's So's Your Old Man at the Packet Inn, and the nostalgic revue Those Wonderful Years at the Niagara Falls Parkway Ramada.

Katy Clancy (2nd from left) and Tom Dudzick (right) in You Must Pay the Rent (1978)

Clancy quickly became a familiar presence on that circuit. At the Packet Inn alone she appeared in Dudzick and John Cimasi's melodrama You Must Pay the Rent (1978) and The Burley-Que Boys (1978), the latter earning a withering review from the Buffalo News. It didn't stop the stalwart troupe, which included Tom Dudzick (later the author of the nationally produced Over the Tavern), from transferring the show to St. Louis, an opening heralded there with a small parade. Clancy followed that with The Monkey's Choice in 1979 with Michael Galante, Joe Catalano, Thomas Mailey, Mary McMahon, and Thomas Gormandy, dinner at 6:30, curtain to follow. In 1980 she returned as one of the Pigeon Sisters in a production of The Odd Couple featuring the legendary pairing of Brian LaTulip's Oscar and John Buscaglia's Felix, with Galante and Mary Kate O'Connell as the poker players, and that same year joined Galante's holiday revue A Holiday of Music with O'Connell, Judith Pelton, and Mark Burgasser.

Michael Galante, Tom Dudzick, and Katy Clancy hit the road, literally, taking The Burley-Que Boys to St. Louis in 1978.

These commercial ventures were not peripheral to Buffalo theater; in a real sense, they were its second founding. Studio Theatre had begun decades earlier as a community-oriented theater school, then grew into a community theater, then a small professional company, and finally into Studio Arena Theatre, a full member of the League of Resident Theatres employing only Equity actors. In that final transformation, many of the local artists who had built the institution found themselves closed out of the theater they had helped create. They did not lie down and die. Instead, they built the non-Equity dinner theater circuit that Clancy came up through, a scrappy, unglamorous world that in time evolved into the robust landscape of small professional companies Buffalo enjoys today. Studio Arena itself closed its doors for good in 2008. What it started, in spite of itself, did not.

Building new spaces: Way Off Broadway, Lancaster, and Queen's Players

As Buffalo's theater energy shifted toward more organized companies and venues, Clancy moved with it. In the early 1980s she worked frequently with Michael J. Galante, her husband at the time, and his Way Off Broadway Company, performing in such shows as Murray Schisgal's Luv and Alan Ayckbourn's Relatively Speaking at the Clarence Junior High School auditorium.

In 1981 she took on Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes for the Committee for Youth and Arts at McKinley High School, a show that featured Corrine Melancon, destined for a Broadway career, as Bonnie, and choreography by Mary Lou Wlltberger, who would marry Melancon's cousin, radio legend Jim Santella, many years later. The production, mounted for Buffalo's sesquicentennial, coincided with the company's announcement of a long-term lease with the City of Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency for exclusive use of the old Greyhound Bus Terminal at 672 Main Street as a theatrical performance space. That particular lease never took hold; the building instead became a police substation before Neal Radice's young Alleyway Theatre moved in a few years later, opening there in 1985. But the coincidence is hard to resist: Clancy was in the room, in 1981, when someone first floated the old bus terminal as a theater. Within a decade it would be the stage where she'd do some of her most memorable work, from Someone's Knocking to the Sherlock Holmes mysteries to her late-career return in Ghost of Fort Niagara.

Her work with the Queen's Players and the Meeting House in Williamsville put her at the leading edge of other new or revived venues. In 1981 she played Alys, mistress to Henry II, in The Lion in Winter, opposite Brian LaTulip's Henry and Barbara Link LaRou's Eleanor of Aquitaine. In 1982 she appeared in Broadway Babies (and Other Show Biz Kids) at Lancaster Opera House, conceived by Galante, O'Connell, and LaRou and produced by the Queen's Players, an early sign of the Opera House's staying power as a producing venue. She returned there in 1983 for I Do, I Do with Galante, and again decades later, a symmetry that traces both the venue's growth and her own longevity within it.

Buffalo State and Warren Enters

Clancy's collegiate work at Buffalo State also foreshadowed later institutional developments. In 1974, still an undergraduate, she appeared in Warren Enters's production of Lanford Wilson's Hot l Baltimore alongside Philip Knoezer and others, long before the campus would name a theater after Enters, though the production already showed the ambitious, ensemble-driven work that became his hallmark. In 1978, she appeared as Olivia in Terry McDonald’s production of Twelfth Night at Buffalo State.

She returned to the Buff State orbit in 1982 with Show Me Where the Good Times Are, a musical adaptation of Moliere’s "Imaginary Invalid" staged outdoors under Enters's direction, with a cast that included Bruce Moore. Its inclusion in the Summer in the City Festival, with excerpts performed behind Shea's, put her at the center of the period's experiments in outdoor and site-specific work.

Voice and versatility: from "Jazz Wagg'in'" to Reno Sweeney

Clancy's reputation as a belter and comic actress rested on roles that took full advantage of her vocal strength and flair for heightened characters. In 1984's It's a Dog's Life by Peter Sham and Randall Kramer at the Katharine Cornell Theater, she played an Irish Setter and drew special praise from Jim Bisco of the Buffalo News, who wrote that "Katy Clancy's voice soars throughout the theater as the Irish Setter. She gets the liveliest, most adventurous song, 'Jazz Wagg'in,' which she belts with much finger-waving verve." That line captures what colleagues recall: musical power, physical expressiveness, and a gift for making even an improbable role both funny and grounded.

That range carried from Reno Sweeney to Gloria Thorpe in Damn Yankees, to Domina in Lancaster Opera House's 2016 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, to Gladys Bumps in Pal Joey for Buffalo United Artists, and through countless revue and cabaret turns. In 1997 she appeared in A Grand Night for Singing, directed and choreographed by Lynne Kurdziel-Formato, produced by Javier Bustillos for Upstage New York with music direction by Donald Jenczka, alongside Eric Alsford, Sabatino Cimato, Tim McGann, Mary McMahon, Tom Owen, Michele Sprada, and Syndi Starr.

Katy choking Jeanmarie Lally in Edna Pelonero's Babies on Ice at Alleyway. One reviewer called it "farcical." Imagine that.

New work and local playwrights

Even as she excelled in classic titles, Clancy frequently lent her talents to new plays by local and contemporary writers. In 1993 she appeared in Edna Pelonero's Babie's on Ice, a then-futuristic drama about a couple fighting over frozen embryos, with Kirkland Gilmer, Jeanmarie Lally, Scott Lyle, Tom Owen, Joyce Stilson, and Irene Tassiopulos. As Catherine Pelonero, the playwright would go on to become a New York Times bestselling true crime author. That same year Clancy joined Six Women with Brain Death at the Tralf, directed by Randall Kramer with music direction by Theresa Quinn and choreography by Lynne Kurdziel-Formato, alongside Erika Insana, Mary Kate O'Connell, Sheila McCarthy, Carolyn Saxon, and Tammy Hayes McGovern.

She also took part in Gordon Farrell's western tragedy A Tin Star Over Tombstone at Alleyway (1993), with Kirkland Gilmer, Chrissy McDonald, Scott Lyle, Michael Mirand, Irene Tassiopolus, Patrick Jaromin, Jesse Swartz, and Neal Radice, and in Larry Gray's Upstream Downstream, part of his Louisiana Trilogy, with Rosalind Cramer, Keith Elkins, Joseph Natale, Jim Santella, Bobby de la Plante, Louise Reger, Jeanna Stanley, Sharon Strait, and Lisa Vitrano (1994).

Slide show from the Alleyway years

Alleyway Theatre and Neal Radice

Clancy's relationship with Alleyway Theatre and its founder Neal Radice became one of the defining threads of her career. She starred in Someone's Knocking (1991), about an agoraphobic woman, directed by Kevi Stevens with Pamela Rose Mangus, Dennis Keefe, Don Kruszka, Mark Wolff, and Devon Wyman. She later played Solveig in Radice's Peer, his musical adaptation of Peer Gynt, with Tom Sartori, Syndi Starr, and Mary Stahl in 1996.

Her work in Radice's Sherlock Holmes sequels, Sherlock in Love (1996) and Sherlock Alone (1998), alongside Tom Owen, William Lavern, Robert Insana, David Poole, Michael Starzynski, and Michael Mirand, tied her closely to Alleyway's signature blend of new works, mystery, comedy, and holiday storytelling. She was a recurring performer in the theater's long-running A Christmas Carol from the 1990s through the early 2000s. In 1994 she took part in the Alleyway Festival of Short Works with Tim White's Tinseltown Torture, alongside Kathy Weese and Jack Hunter, a reminder that her presence extended beyond mainstage work into the city's laboratory for shorter, riskier pieces. Her 2011 return in Ghost of Fort Niagara, again under Radice, came after a long hiatus and reaffirmed how closely her name was tied to Alleyway's identity.

One of the many incarnations of Neal Radice's A Christmas Carol. Clancy is third from the right. Radice on the right. Joyce Stilson is back row, second from the left. Syndi Starr is center.

Cabaret, concerts, and O'Connell & Company

If dinner theater and Alleyway anchored one side of Clancy's career, cabaret and concert work defined the other, and the same handful of names carried her through it. In 1989 she joined Tom Doyle, Mary Kate O'Connell, and Tom Owen for Let's Misbehave, a Cole Porter revue conceived and arranged by Anthony Kalinowski and staged by Lynne Kurdziel-Formato. In 1990 In Concert Productions presented I'll Be Home for Christmas, a revue featuring Clancy with Tom Doyle, Randall Kramer, and O'Connell, and that same year she appeared in a dinner concert benefiting Upstage New York at The Reservoir on Chippewa, with O'Connell, Pamela Rose Mangus, Kerrykate Abel, Robert Insana, and others. In 1991, Ladies Night, an evening of Broadway music at the Meeting House in Williamsville, brought Clancy, O'Connell, and Ellie Seib together, with a dinner package available through the Eagle House, another echo of the dining-and-performance fusion that marked her start.

Her collaboration with O'Connell & Company grew especially important. In 1998 she appeared in Side by Side by Sondheim, the inaugural Cabaret in the Square production for the company, with Anne Gayley narrating and Mary Kate O'Connell, Jeff Venuti, and Peter Palmisano singing alongside her. She sang "Losing My Mind" and "Not Getting Married Today," and joined O'Connell for "Can That Boy… Foxtrot," a pairing that showed her moving from brittle Sondheim satire to bruised romantic yearning inside a single evening.

In 2003 she returned to O'Connell & Co. for Lisa Hayes's cabaret-style Lysistrata, playing a lusty Athenian woman in a rotating cast that at various points included Buffalo mayor's wife Kate Masiello, Erie County Clerk Dave Swarts, Saul Elkin, Dan Walker, Terry McDonald, Joyce Carolyn, Mary Moebius, Toni Smith Wilson, and Susan Drozd. It was a particular kind of Buffalo event, politics, community, and art colliding playfully, and Clancy was in the middle of it.

Poster for the 1994 BUA production of Girl Talk starring Katy Clancy and Syndi Starr

In the mid-1990s Clancy also worked with Buffalo United Artists, cast by Javier Bustillos in two fairly straight shows early in the company's history, at a time when BUA was still establishing itself around queer narratives and emerging playwrights. In 1994 Anne Hartley Pfohl directed her and Syndi Starr in Girl Talk by Dori Appel and Carolyn Myers. The following year she played Gladys Bumps in BUA's Pal Joey, opposite Chris Kelly's Joey and Pfohl's Vera.

Certain names recur across all of these decades and stages: Michael J. Galante, Mary Kate O'Connell, Barbara Link LaRou and the Queen's Players, John Buscaglia, Bob and Joyce Stilson, and directors including Randall Kramer, Lynne Kurdziel-Formato, Anne Hartley Pfohl, Neal Radice, and Warren Enters. Clancy's career is, among other things, a record of how small this world was and how loyally its people worked together inside it.

Later years and final appearances

After periods of relative quiet, when Clancy raised a family, lived in California for a while, and pursued another career, she had occasional later appearances that reminded audiences of her staying power. In 2011 she returned in Ghost of Fort Niagara at Alleyway. In 2013 she played Aunt Eller in Oklahoma! at Lancaster Opera House, with Michael Niederer as Curly, Emily Yancey making her professional debut as Laurie, and Jeffrey Coyle as Jud, a role that let Clancy's matriarchal authority and comic timing anchor a company that included performers just starting out alongside her. In 2016 she played Domina in Lancaster Opera House's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, opposite David Bondrow's Pseudolus.

Legacy

It would be easy to measure Clancy's career by listing credits and venues, and there are many. But the truer measure is how her name threads through nearly every kind of Buffalo theatrical experiment: the half-forgotten dinner houses and hotel lounges; the upstart companies staging Ayckbourn and Schisgal in school auditoriums; the committees turning bus terminals and meeting houses into stages; downtown new-work festivals; the early plays at BUA; the Sondheim and Porter revues; the civic-minded Lysistrata; and a historical ghost story.

Those who worked with her remember the acerbic wit as much as the belt. She could be devilish in a rehearsal room and generous on a stage, often in the same afternoon. Katy Clancy stands at the center of Buffalo theater's story not because she was always the star, though she often was, but because she showed up, decade after decade, whenever the city's theater community tried something new.

The Coffee Klatch at Rockwell Hall: Lisa Ludwig, Robyn Starr-Mendez, Tammy Hayes McGovern, Syndi Starr-Buscaglia and Katy Clancy.

Mary McMahon Jakiel, Katy Clancy, Tammy Hayes McGovern, Syndi Starr-Buscaglia, Lisa Ludwig, and  Robyn Starr-Mendez.

Robyn Starr-Mendez, Tammy Hayes McGovern, Linda Reitberger Mixon, Katy Clancy, Lynne Kurdziel-Formato, Syndi Starr-Buscaglia , and Mary McMahon Jakiel.

A circle of forty years

Beyond the stage, Clancy was part of a tight circle of theater friends who stayed close for more than four decades, who worked together, navigated relationships together, and raised children together. The Coffee Klatch: Lisa Ludwig, Mary McMahon Jakiel, Syndi Starr-Buscaglia and her sister Robyn Starr-Mendez, Tammy Hayes McGovern, Linda Reitberger Mixon, and Lynne Kurdziel-Formato. These were friendships built the way so much of her career was, in rehearsal rooms and green rooms across the city, and it outlasted every company, venue, and role that came and went around it. Within that group, Clancy was always the first to organize something special, whether for someone's moment of need or a moment of celebration.

Survivors and services

Clancy is survived by her husband, Robert Smith; her children, Kaitlyn (Corey) DeVille, Patrick Galante, Hilary (John) Maier, and Courtney (Matthew) Allunario; her grandchildren, Molly, Noah, and Wren; and her siblings, William, Mark (Kathleen), John (Kay Pinto), Margaret (Carl), and Peter, along with many nieces and nephews.

Family and friends may call Friday, August 7, from 3 to 7 p.m. at Dengler, Roberts, Perna Funeral Home, 3070 Delaware Ave., Kenmore. A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated Saturday, August 8, at 9:30 a.m. at St. John the Baptist R.C. Church, 1085 Englewood Ave., Kenmore; mourners are asked to assemble at the church.