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Northern Calloway

Northern Calloway (January 22, 1948 - January 9, 1990) played David on Sesame Street from 1971 through 1989, and also voiced Muppet characters such as Same Sound Brown and the Anything Muppet hipster in the Sesame Street version of the Visual Thinking sketch.

Calloway began his career in 1966 with the Lincoln Center Repertory Company just two days after graduating from the High School of Performing Arts in New York City. During the next season he appeared at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Three Musketeers. On Broadway he was in The Me Nobody Knows and the Off-Broadway rock musical Salvation. He understudied, and subsequently replaced, Ben Vereen as the Leading Player in the Broadway hit Pippin, a role he also played in London and at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J.^[1] Calloway was also seen on Broadway in 1980 as the orderly in Whose Life Is It Anyway? with Mary Tyler Moore, and as Louis Armstrong in the New Federal Theater's production of Louis in 1981. On television, Calloway appeared in the 1972 CBS special The Funny Papers, playing Lt. Flap from the Beetle Bailey comic strip.

Calloway was heard on many Sesame Street albums, including his solo record, David, Daydreamin' on a Rainy Day, and appeared in the specials Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, Don't Eat the Pictures, The Sesame Street Special, and Sesame Street: 20 and Still Counting. His non-Sesame recordings include the cast album from The Me Nobody Knows, as well as a rare single on United Artists Records in 1973.

He had a nervous breakdown in 1980, leading to an incident that saw him jailed.^[2] Calloway left the show in 1989; according to a spokeswoman for the Children's Television Workshop, he had retired for medical reasons, and his character was written out.^[3]

However, there was also speculation that, in addition to his health, behavior problems on and off the set led to his being fired. In one incident, Calloway reportedly bit music coordinator Danny Epstein during an on-set fight, and later showed up unannounced at actress Alison Bartlett's high school and proposed to her (Calloway was 23 years Bartlett's senior).^[4]^[5] In "Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street," several of Calloway's fellow cast members observed subtle clues about Calloway's sometimes erratic behavior and kept their distance.

Calloway died in 1990, two weeks before his 42nd birthday.^[6]