Miles Kreuger

George D. Wallace, a versatile actor whose career ranged from starring as Commando Cody in the film serial "Radar Men from the Moon" to playing leading roles in Broadway musicals, has died. He was 88. Wallace died Friday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of complications following injuries when he fell during a vacation in Pisa, Italy, said his wife, actress Jane A. Johnston.

"First, I must blow the fairy dust on you," Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, tells the Darling children the first time he guides them aloft. Flying is so easy that there is only one other thing they must do: "Think lovely thoughts." Peter Foy understood the lovely thoughts. You could read them on his gleaming face when he operated the ropes, wires and pulleys that sent Mary Martin soaring over a Broadway stage in the 1954 musical version of "Peter Pan," the J.M. Barrie classic.

When Marvin Hamlisch auditioned for the Juilliard School of Music, he played not Chopin or Mozart but the American folk standard "Goodnight, Irene," a choice that could have had lamentable results for any other prospective student. But Hamlisch quickly established there was little about his talent that was ordinary: He could perform the song in any key the admissions committee requested - and he was but 6 years old. By the time he was 30, the former prodigy - the youngest student the prestigious New York school had ever admitted - was a wunderkind composer for Broadway and Hollywood, whose contribution to American popular music would bring comparisons to Richard Rodgers and George Gershwin.

Robert Goulet, the strikingly handsome singer with the rich baritone who soared to stardom on the Broadway stage in 1960 playing Lancelot in the original production of the hit musical "Camelot," died Tuesday morning. He was 73. Goulet, who had recently been diagnosed with interstitial pulmonary fibrosis, was awaiting a lung transplant when he died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said Norm Johnson, a spokesman for the singer.

Some call them jukebox musicals. Others call them catalog musicals. Whatever you call them, they're proliferating. They're musicals that start with the catalog of a beloved pop group or soloist from the first quarter-century of the rock age -- the mid-'50s through the '70s.

John Raitt, the ruggedly handsome musical theater leading man who launched his Broadway career in Rodgers & Hammerstein's 1945 hit "Carousel" and later co-starred in "The Pajama Game" on Broadway and in the film version, died Sunday. He was 88. Raitt, the father of Grammy-winning singer Bonnie Raitt, died at his Pacific Palisades home of complications from pneumonia, his manager, James Fitzgerald, told The Times. Raitt played Curly in the national tour of Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Oklahoma!"