Hinton Battle, a dancer, singer, actor, and choreographer who urged audiences to “Ease on Down the Road” as the Scarecrow in Broadway’s “The Wiz,” and who later won three Tony Awards while performing acrobatic leaps, percussive taps, and 190-degree kicks across the stage and screen, died Jan. 30 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 67.

Dancer and educator Leah Bass-Baylis, a family representative, confirmed his death but did not give a cause.

Battle was only 18 when he made his Broadway debut in January 1975, playing the Scarecrow in the original Broadway production of “The Wiz.” A classically trained dancer, he had auditioned for the musical as a member of the chorus, in support of an all-Black cast that included Stephanie Mills as Dorothy, Tiger Haynes as the Tin Man, Ted Ross as the Lion, Dee Dee Bridgewater as the good witch Glinda and André De Shields as the great and powerful wizard of the show’s title.

But during a pre-Broadway tryout in Philadelphia in 1974, the production’s Scarecrow, Stu Gilliam, came off the stage sick. There were no understudies at the time, according to William F. Brown, who wrote the show’s book, although Battle had learned most of the character’s lines while recovering from a sprained ankle earlier in the year. Between scenes, he was rushed into costume and prepped for the stage.

“All these people were screaming at me: ‘Hold your head up! Let me get this eyelash on here!’” he told The Washington Post in 1981. “One guy was putting on makeup, another one feeding me lines, someone was putting on my wig, and Stephanie [Mills] was trying to tell me good luck.” He made it through the show, he told another interviewer, with help from eye signals and Mills, who was “pulling me by the straw.”

Battle took over the role permanently, delivering what New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes called a “gracefully loose-limbed performance” as a member of the comic trio that accompanies Dorothy on the road to Oz. The show won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and was adapted into a 1978 film starring Diana Ross, with Michael Jackson replacing Battle as the Scarecrow.

For Battle, the musical was supposed to mark only a brief departure from his ballet career. “All I wanted to do was get back to ballet class,” he told the New York Times of his early days as the Scarecrow, a character he ended up playing for two years. “But it loosened me up and introduced me to a world I didn’t know much about. In ballet, taking four classes a day, you don’t know much about anything else that’s going on.”

Battle went on to embrace musical theater, appearing in four Broadway shows between 1981 and 1991. He won Tony Awards for three of them: as a dazzling but unnamed performer in the Duke Ellington revue “Sophisticated Ladies” in 1981; as the title character’s tap-dancing uncle, Dipsey Bates, in “The Tap Dance Kid” in 1984; and as John Thomas, a lively Marine stationed in Saigon at the close of the Vietnam War, in “Miss Saigon” in 1991.

All three awards were for Best Featured Actor in a Musical. No performer, living or dead, has won the prize more than Battle.

“His technique was impeccable,” said his friend Debbie Allen, the actor, dancer, and director, who met Battle in New York in the early 1970s and worked with him on the choreography for two Academy Awards ceremonies. “He was trained in ballet, but he could tap-dance like he was one of the Nicholas Brothers. He was athletic – he had legs that went up like mine. He was kicking his head every time his leg went up!”

Bass-Baylis, who performed with Battle in “The Tap Dance Kid,” said in an email that he had “the sheer drive and strength to jump so high that you thought he was flying.” He was also strikingly versatile: “Whatever genre of dance he was presented with, through hard work and perseverance, he seemed to be able to superimpose his technique and create something new and better than the original.”

Battle said it took time to branch out beyond ballet. Once dubbed “Clubfoot Battle” by dancers who laughed at his tap attempts, he learned to do a proper tap dance only after being cast in “Sophisticated Ladies,” which starred arguably the world’s foremost tap dancer, Gregory Hines. He had struggled through a soft-shoe routine for his audition but then forced himself to study, taking intensive classes with tap master Henry LeTang before performing routines for songs like “I’ve Got To Be a Rug Cutter.”

His dancing led to work with leading directors including Bob Fosse, for the musical revue “Dancin’,” and Michael Bennett, as a replacement actor in the original Broadway production of “Dreamgirls.” Beginning in 1983, he was featured in the musical as R&B superstar James “Thunder” Early, succeeding actor Cleavant Derricks in the role of a James Brown-like singer. The part went to Eddie Murphy when “Dreamgirls” was adapted into a 2006 film, although Battle made it into the movie as a car salesman turned record producer, a top aide to the music executive played by Jamie Foxx.

On-screen, Battle appeared in episodes of “Quantum Leap,” “Touched by an Angel” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” as a tap-dancing demon who causes people to break into song. He also worked as a choreographer, crafting routines for students at the Baltimore School for the Arts before working with entertainers including Anita Baker, Joni Mitchell, and Sister Sledge.

In 2006, he choreographed the Outkast movie musical “Idlewild,” a Depression-era period piece that featured more than 100 dancers. The film incorporated acrobatic, Lindy Hop-inspired dance sequences as well as a fusion of swing and hip-hop styles that he dubbed “swop.”

“Choreographing is a whole different feeling,” he once told the Times. “You create it, you give it to the dancers and they have to bring it to life. And meanwhile, you’re standing backstage and thinking, ‘My life is in your hands; please make it work.’”

A dancing natural

The third of five children, Hinton Govorn Battle Jr. was born in Neubrücke, West Germany, on Nov. 29, 1956. His father was a U.S. Army sergeant whose postings took the family to Kansas and later to Washington. His mother was an accounting clerk. Unable to afford dance lessons when she was growing up, she enrolled her two daughters as soon as they turned 5, then made sure that Battle followed suit.

“I didn’t have to do much pushing,” she told The Post in 1984. “He sang and he danced all the time. If he got up from the table to go into another room, he danced his way into the room.”

Battle studied at Washington’s Jones-Haywood School of Ballet, and at 13 he earned a scholarship to George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in Manhattan. He lived there for a few years, dining on canned tuna and struggling to live on $200 a month, before going back to Washington, where one of his sisters suggested he audition for “The Wiz.” (The sister, Lettie, also made it to Broadway, getting a role as a dancer in the show.)

Onstage, Battle later played the slick defense attorney Billy Flynn in a Broadway revival of “Chicago” and starred as Coalhouse Walker Jr. in a touring production of “Ragtime.” In 2006, he co-directed an off-Broadway production of “Evil Dead: The Musical,” based on the Sam Raimi film franchise.

Battle never married. Survivors include his two sisters.

Late in his career, Battle focused on teaching, co-founding the Hinton Battle Dance Academy in Japan, where he performed and taught master classes. He was able to draw on his success as well as his occasional mishaps onstage – like the time he fractured his hip after being knocked to the floor during a dance number in “The Wiz.”

That accident came not long after he went down a 10-foot prop tree, landed on his face, and pierced his lip while in the middle of his first song. The show went on, Battle told The Post, although, for the rest of the performance, he thought to himself, “I can’t get blood on Dorothy’s dress.”