Myra Cochnar

Myra Cochnar

Myra Cochnar, 80,

Founder of

Landmark Musicals

Myra Cochnar, a native New Yorker who called Albuquerque home for more than 30 years and was an engaged magazine publisher, founder and artistic director of Landmark Musicals, founder of and performer with the singing group Broadway and a real estate sales executive, died at her home on Thursday, October 9, 2025. She was 80. The cause of death was lymphoma.

Her career in New York, San Francisco, Anderson, S.C, and Albuquerque was, to say the least, eclectic but never traveling too far away from show business and publishing. After attending Pace College, now university, in New York City she joined a theatrical casting firm where she was involved in casting Broadway hits like Lionel Bart's Oliver. She later joined Atlantic Recording Company as marketing director and, later, marketing director at RCA Records in New York where she developed sales support materials and designed advertising and publicity campaigns for the labels' recording artists.

Moving to the West Coast with her husband, a newspaper executive, she wrote a novel, Platinum, about the record business, and spent some time as hostess in a popular San Francisco restaurant researching a second novel, one about the restaurant business. "It never got published," she used to say, "but I ate well." While in San Francisco, she was also a producer for KPIX-TV and was involved in "Pacific Currents," a magazine format television series.

Before moving to New Mexico in 1994, where Ms. Cochnar and her husband owned and published the New Mexico Business Journal, she was development and membership director of the Alameda County (Calif.) Economic Development Advisory Board (EDAB), a public-private partnership in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Living briefly in South Carolina between California and New Mexico, she was marketing director for the Clemson University Alumni Association.

She and her husband created the Sierra Publishing Group, Inc., in Albuquerque, which owned and operated the Business Journal, and founded Stage, a magazine of the performing arts that also served as a program for various cultural organizations that included the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, Albuquerque Little Theater and Musical Theater Southwest. Sierra also created Su Casa, a quarterly magazine spotlighting the homes of the Southwest. Ms. Cochnar was responsible for financial, circulation, advertising and marketing operations.

She was promotion and special events director for the short-lived Traditions, a Festival Marketplace, a center for shops and galleries made or traditionally sold in New Mexico. She also was a successful real estate broker at Coldwell Banker.

Eager to return to her roots, Ms. Cochnar decided that what New Mexico needed was a singing group that presented Broadway show tunes staged as concerts. So she rounded up some of the most accomplished singers in town and launched Broadway with the late John Clark, a retired music professor at the University of New Mexico, as accompanist. The group not only performed in Albuquerque but also in Santa Fe, Las Cruces and other New Mexico cities.

Her final achievement was the creation of Landmark Musicals. The founding documents made plain that Landmark would live up to its name by mounting only the best, time-tested Broadway musicals by giants like Rogers and Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Kander and Ebb, George and Ira Gershwin, Lerner and Lowe and Stephen Sondheim. And so it did, with Myra Cochnar at the helm, tending to every detail. What made Landmark special was the commitment to full live orchestras and a major theater facility, which, for Landmark, was the Rodey Theater on the UNM campus. She also found the late Dahl Delu, a Tony Award set designer. In all, Ms. Cochnar produced 35 musicals during her tenure before turning over responsibilities to Louis Giannini and Sandia Preparatory School, which she had said was "a very comfortable fit."

Myra Cochnar had been vice chair of the board of Special Olympics New Mexico, vice chai of the Albuquerque Civic Light Opera, board member of the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, vice chair of the membership committee of the Albuquerque Rotary Club and a member of the 1999 Leadership New Mexico Class.

She leaves Robert, her husband of 55 years; a son, Evan, an attorney with the State of New Mexico, and a sister, Natalie, of Boca Raton, Fla. A celebration service will be held at a later date.