Author Bios

George S. Kaufman

George S. Kaufman was a playwright, director, theater journalist, and editor whose work was consistently showcased on Broadway for decades. He is lauded as one of the most successful playwrights of the interwar period— he mostly wrote comedies and political satire. Forty-four of his works were produced on Broadway in his lifetime. 

Kaufman was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1889. After graduating from high school, Kaufman attended law school for three months before leaving to work odd jobs instead. Kaufman began his career in the theater as a columnist and editor. The writer received his first newspaper job as a humor columnist for The Washington Times in 1912. He worked there for two years before accepting a position as a drama reporter for The New York Tribune. After working for the Tribune for two years, Kaufman became a drama editor at The New York Times, where he worked until 1930. 

Kaufman simultaneously wrote plays during this time, many of which he co-authored with an additional playwright. Someone in the House, his first play to be produced on Broadway, premiered in 1918. This production set a precedent, as every Broadway season from 1921 through 1958 featured a play that was either written or directed by Kaufman. Kaufman himself produced many of these works. 

Though Kaufman outwardly expressed that he didn’t like to pair music and theater, he found great success through musical theater collaborations. His most notable musical collaboration was with the Marx Brothers, for whom he was known to write intelligent nonsense. Outside his collaboration with the Marx Brothers, Kaufman won the Pulitzer Prize in drama for Of Thee I Sing in 1932. George Gershwin and George Kaufman’s win for Of Thee I Sing is historic as it was the first musical to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize. In 1937, Kaufman won his second Pulitzer Prize for the play You Can’t Take It With You. In 1951, Kaufman won the Tony Award for Best Direction for his work on the original Broadway production of Guys and Dolls.

Though not his primary medium, Kaufman also engaged with the film industry. Many of Kaufman’s stage works were adapted into Hollywood films. Most notably, the film adaptation of Kaufman’s play, You Can’t Take It With You won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1938. He additionally wrote screenplays primarily intended for film, and served as a director for the 1947 film, The Senator Was Indiscreet. 

Personally, Kaufman was an avid fan of the card game Bridge, which he humorously commented on in pieces written for and published by The New Yorker. Kaufman was married twice in his lifetime. He was married to Beatrice Bakrow from 1917 until her death in 1945. Kaufman had many affairs during this marriage, and the most publicly scandalized was his affair with actress Mary Astor. Kaufman married Leueen MacGrath four years after Beatrice’s death in 1949, and divorced in 1957. Kaufman died in New York in 1961 of old age. 

Howard Ashman

Howard Ashman was a playwright, lyricist, director, and producer most admired for his work on Disney’s animated feature films and collaborations with composer Alan Menken. Ashman extensively contributed to stage plays, musicals, and Disney films in New York prior to his untimely death in 1991. 

Ashman hails from Baltimore, Maryland, where he was born and raised. He pursued his undergraduate education at Boston University and Goddard College prior to pursuing his MFA at Indiana University. Following the completion of his MFA in 1974, Ashman moved to New York where he worked as an editor and playwright. After living and working in New York for three years, he founded and served as director of The WPA, an Off-Broadway theater.

Ashman met his longtime collaborator Alan Menken at the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. The Tony-award winning program is meant for musical theater composers, lyricists, and librettists. Among his classmates were notable theater creators Maury Yeston and Ed Kleban. Menken (composer) and Ashman (lyricist) first collaborated on original stage musicals. Their first successful project together was a musical adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rose Water. However, the collaborators first received widespread praise for their work on Little Shop of Horrors, which Ashman conceived, wrote, and directed. Their production of Little Shop of Horrors played Off-Broadway for five years and received a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lyrics.

Immediately following the success of Little Shop of Horrors in 1986, Ashman was hired to write for Disney’s animated feature film Oliver & Company. This initial work with Disney ultimately provided Ashman with access to Disney’s animated feature film The Little Mermaid, and Menken and Ashman collaboratively wrote every song in the film. Prior to The Little Mermaid, Disney had not produced a fairy tale film for 30 years. Ashman’s prominent role in the film’s creation helped catalyze the “Disney renaissance,” which he continued to spearhead as both a creative and producer for similar films that followed. Ashman notably pitched the Aladdin adaptation to Disney and was recruited to save the then-failing film, Beauty and the Beast. Ashman’s health began to decline while working on Beauty and the Beast, and he died of AIDS in 1991 right before the film’s release. Some of Ashman’s songs were posthumously included in the 1992 animated feature film Aladdin.

Throughout his career, Ashman received numerous awards and nominations. His award winnings include two Oscars, two Golden Globes, four Grammys, and a Drama Desk. Additionally, he received the Disney Legend Award in 2001. Ashman is resting in Oheb Shalom Memorial Park in Baltimore, Maryland.

Tom Stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard (born Tomas Straussler) is a prominent playwright and screenwriter. He is highly praised for his politically-focused work, and is lauded for such titles as Arcadia, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In addition to his plays, Stoppard contributed as a co-writer on many films, most notably The Russia House and Shakespeare in Love. 

Tom was born July 3, 1937, in the Czech Republic. However he fled as a child due to Nazi occupation. In 1945, his mother married a British army major named Kenneth Stoppard. Kenneth gave Tom his surname and inspired him to become a bona fide Englishman. 

Stoppard began his schooling at the Dolphin School in Nottinghamshire, and completed his schooling at Pocklington School in Yorkshire. After completing his education at Pocklington, Stoppard chose to work as a journalist at the Western Daily Press instead of attending a university. In 1958, he accepted a position as a feature writer, columnist, and drama critic at the Bristol Evening World, which formally connected him to professional theater spheres. 

Stoppard completed his first full length stage play, A Walk on the Water, in 1960. Stoppard received his big break when A Walk on Water was staged in Hamburg, and then broadcast on British television in 1963. In this time period, Stoppard continued to work as a drama critic, while producing separate works for radio, television, and the stage. Tom Stoppard’s popularity rapidly increased when his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was produced through the National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1967, and he prolifically wrote plays thereafter.=

Many of Stoppard’s works place an emphasis on human rights issues and philosophical concepts. His style, colloquially referred to as “Stoppardian,” often uses comedic techniques to convey deeper philosophical themes and ideas. However, the intellectuality of his work was criticized for being devoid of political and personal impact, so Stoppard made a greater effort in his later work to emphasize interpersonal narratives and political complexities.        

Stoppard is the recipient of numerous awards, including Tony’s, an Academy Award, and an Olivier Award. He began receiving many achievement-based awards in the 21st century. Among the most impressive was his listing among Time magazine’s top 100 most influential people in a 2008 publishing. 

A large archive of Stoppard’s papers, featuring items such as handwritten drafts, cast lists, set drawings, photographs, legal documents, diary sheets, and sheet music, are archived at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Stoppard has married three times and has four children.

Heather Hach

Heather Hach is a screenwriter, librettist, and novelist. She is mostly known for writing the book for the musical adaptation of Legally Blonde. She is also highly regarded for writing the screenplay for the 2003 remake of Freaky Friday.

Hach studied Journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder. After graduating from Boulder, she pursued a career in journalism, both as a research assistant at The New York Times in Denver and as an editor at Sports and Fitness Publishing.

Hach became involved in the film and television industry in 1998. She served as a production staff member for the TV series Caroline in the City prior to securing her role as a writing assistant on the TV series Dilbert. 

After Hach received and completed the Walt Disney Screenwriting Fellowship in 1999, she wrote the screenplay for Freaky Friday in 2003. She also married her husband, Jason Hearne, this year. 

Hach’s next big success came in 2007, when she wrote the libretto for the musical Legally Blonde. Her work won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical, and was nominated for both a Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical and a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical. In 2008, MTV produced a TV series titled Legally Blonde: The Musical-The Search for Elle Woods which led a nationwide search and audition process for the next actress to play Elle Woods on Broadway. Hach appeared as a judge on the TV series.  

Elmer Rice

Elmer Rice was an American playwright, novelist, and director of the early-19th century. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929 for his play, Street Scene, and is also known for his plays The Adding Machine and Dream Girl. Rice is mostly remembered for breaking theatrical conventions and deviating from theatrical realism in writing and directorial work. 

Rice was born on September 28, 1892, in New York City, where he grew up in tenement housing. As a teenager, Rice dropped out of high school in order to support his father, who had epilepsy. After passing state examinations, Rice attended New York Law School. After graduating in 1912, he practiced law for two years before quitting the profession. Rice chose to pursue writing full-time instead. 

On Trial, was Rice’s first massive success. It was the first documented play to employ a reverse-chronological structure, and notably ran for 365 performance in New York. After its New York run, the play toured the United States and received three film adaptations. Rice’s next big success was The Adding Machine, which he wrote in 17 days in 1923.

Rice wrote many unsuccessful and unproduced plays thereafter, many of which commented on political and social issues that resulted from World War 1. Though he didn’t enjoy his previous legal work, he was inspired to integrate courtroom drama into many of these plays. As he grew more interested in producing and directing his own plays, Rice decided to purchase the Belasco Theatre in New York in the 1930’s. 

Street Scene was Rice’s second success. It is lauded for painting a realistic picture of slum life by using hyper-naturalism. The script, which was written in 1929, was later adapted into a successful opera by Kurt Weill. After writing a few more flops during the Depression, Rice co-founded Playwrights’ Company in New York, where he wrote and directed his own work. His 1945 work and one of his last successes, Dream Girl, was first produced through Playwrights’ Company.

Actively addressing social issues and injustices was very important to Rice. He aligned with the American Civil Liberties Union, the Authors’ League, and the Dramatists Guild of America. Rice was also the first director of the Federal Theatre Project, but resigned because he believed the Roosevelt administration attempted to restrict artistic freedoms.   

Rice was married and divorced twice in his lifetime, and produced 5 children across the two marriages. He lived in Stamford, Connecticut, for many years, but ultimately passed away in Southampton, England, on May 8, 1967, of pneumonia and a heart attack. 

Jules Massenet

Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet was a French composer and educator of the Romantic era predominantly known for his operatic compositions. His operas are often admired for their theatricality, lyricism, and sensuality, as is exemplified in Manon (1884) and Werther (1892). In addition to operas, Massenet also composed oratorios, ballets, orchestral works, incidental music, piano pieces, and songs throughout his career. 

Massenet was born at Montaud in the modern city of Saint-Étienne as the youngest of four children. His mother, Adélaïde Royer de Marancour was an amateur musician who first encouraged Massenet’s engagement with music and provided him with piano lessons. In 1848, Massenet’s family moved to Paris, where he attended school at Lycée Saint-Louis. In 1853, Massenet was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire and pursued musical studies at the Conservatoire in tandem with his general studies at the Lycée. While studying at the Paris Conservatoire, Massenet notably became a loyal protégé of French composer and educator Ambroise Thomas, who heavily influenced his compositions and career trajectory. 

In 1863, Massenet won the prestigious Prix de Rome prize in 1863 with his cantata, David Rizzio. His first well received full length opera composition was Le Roi de Lahore which was produced at the Paris Opéra in 1877. Massenet’s successes with the Prix de Rome prize and Le Roi de Lahore launched his career, and he proceeded to be commissioned by major opera houses and write over forty works for the stage prior to his death.

In addition to pursuing composition, Massenet returned to the Conservatoire as a professor in 1878, where he educated notable successors such as Gustave Charpentier, Ernest Chausson, Reynaldo Hahn, and Gabriel Pierné. He taught at the Conservatoire until 1896 after the death of the director and his beloved mentor, Ambroise Thomas.

In the final years of his career, some of Massenet’s works had become classified as unadventurous and traditional. But his works received widespread reconsideration by critics approximately 10 years after his death, and they are now widely accepted as well respected and canonical works of the Belle Époque period. Massenet died in Paris from abdominal cancer in August of 1912. His wife and family were with him when he passed.

Lorenzo Da Ponte

Lorenzo Da Ponte was an Italian librettist, mostly known for lyricising many of Mozart’s operas including Don Giovanni and Cosí Fan Tutte. 

Da Ponte was born in the Republic of Venice in 1749. After Da Ponte’s mother passed away, his father converted the family from Judaism to Catholicism in order to marry a Catholic woman. As a result, Da Ponte and his brothers studied at a seminary, and Da Ponte was later ordained as a Catholic priest in 1773. 

However, Da Ponte led a scandalous life after his ordainment. While serving as a priest, he had two children with a mistress and was found guilty in court for public concubinage and abduction. After his trial in 1779, Da Ponte was banished from Venice for 15 years.

Da Ponte moved to Austria, where he worked as a writer for noblemen. At the beginning of the 1780’s, Da Ponte was introduced to composer Antonio Salieri, who helped Da Ponte apply for a position as a librettist at the Italian Theatre in Vienna. Da Ponte was awarded the position, and began a collaboration with Mozart at the theater. Some of Da Ponte’s most famous librettos include The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte, Don Juan, and Una cosa rara. 

Da Ponte traveled to New York after suffering from debt in Europe. In New York, Da Ponte opened a book shop, and became the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia College. In 1833, Da Ponte founded America’s first opera house in New York City. Though his company only lasted two years, it prefaced the establishment of the Metropolitan Opera. 

Da Ponte passed away in 1838 in New York.