Peter Stone, the Tony Award-winning librettist who wrote the books of the Broadway musicals Titanic, Sugar, My One and Only, The Will Rogers Follies and 1776 (and a few others) passed away April 26 at a hospital in Manhattan.
There's a saying in the theater that there can be no great "book" writers in a musical; that the songs and dances are of such paramount importance that the person who writes the story and the spoken dialogue must continually subordinate his craft to that of the lyrist and composer. The songs carry the peak emotional moments, not the stuff in-between.
With all his shows, but especially with 1776, Stone sure proved that adage wrong. Here's an obit.