The show opened in August 2002 and became a phenomenal success, winning eight Tonys, including best book of a musical. Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote that the show succeeded in “recreating the pleasures of the old-fashioned musical comedy without seeming old-fashioned.”

Mr. Waters — who also wrote and directed the movie “Cry-Baby” — was delighted with how “Hairspray” turned out.

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Mr. O’Donnell “was an eccentric guy,” Mr. Waters said in a telephone interview. “An old-fashioned wit. He looked like central casting had sent him, just an odd theater person, and I mean that with great respect. He was assured but soft-spoken, which was kind of confusing.”

Mr. O’Donnell was born in Cleveland on July 19, 1954. He and his twin brother, Steve, were the youngest of 10 children. Their father was a welder, their mother a homemaker.

“We felt like the whole family was funny and playful, but as the youngest, Mark enjoyed a special privilege to be that much sillier,” Steve O’Donnell, who has been the head writer for both David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel, said in an e-mail.

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Mr. O’Donnell attended public schools in Cleveland. He graduated from John Marshall High School and then received a scholarship to Harvard, where he worked on the humor magazine, The Harvard Lampoon.

His other plays include “That’s It, Folks!,” “Fables for Friends” and “Tots in Tinseltown.” He also wrote two novels, “Getting Over Homer” and “Let Nothing You Dismay,” and published two collections of stories. His work appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire and The New York Times.

Besides his twin brother, Steve, Mr. O’Donnell is survived by eight siblings: Kathy Roberts, Christine Virga, Fran Pavlik, and Denny, Tony, Maggie, Bill and Maureen O’Donnell.

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Both his agent and his twin brother said that money and success did not change Mr. O’Donnell. He lived in the same apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that he had moved into after college, which he had never bothered to renovate. He navigated the city on a bicycle.

“He still maintained a postcollegiate lifestyle,” Steve O’Donnell said. “Though he was generous to charities and causes, he dressed and lived like a blue-collar bachelor from Cleveland, which, after all, he was.”

He was, Steve O’Donnell said, “almost unearthly in his sweetness.” But, he added, “beneath an often innocent deportment there was a mighty, incisive wit.”