George S. Kaufman
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George Kaufman (November 16, 1889 - June 2, 1961) was an American playwright, theatre director and producer, humorist, and drama critic.
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[edit] Life and career
Born to a Jewish family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Kaufman added the middle initial to his name to lend it balance and rhythm. He graduated from high school in 1907 and pursued legal studies, but grew disenchanted and took on a series of odd jobs. Kaufman then began his career as a journalist and drama critic. He was the drama editor for The New York Times.
[edit] Playwriting career
His Broadway debut was in 1918 with the now-forgotten Someone in the House, written with Larry Evans and W. C. Percival. This play was panned, and it had the further handicap of opening on Broadway during a flu epidemic, when theatre attendance in New York City diminished drastically because the public were warned to avoid crowds. Kaufman sardonically advised his play's producers to print advertisements with this message: "Avoid crowds: see Someone in the House."
It would be quite a long time before Kaufman had another flop. In every Broadway season from 1921 through 1958, there was a play written or directed by Kaufman. Since Kaufman's death in 1961, every decade has featured at least a couple of revivals of his work. There have also been productions based on Kaufman properties, such as the 1981 musical version of Merrily We Roll Along, adapted by George Furth and Stephen Sondheim.
Kaufman was known as "The Great Collaborator" because he wrote very few plays alone. His most successful solo script was The Butter and Egg Man in 1925. With others, Kaufman was prolific: with Marc Connelly he wrote Merton of the Movies, Dulcy, and Beggar on Horseback; with Ring Lardner he wrote June Moon; with Edna Ferber he wrote The Royal Family, Dinner at Eight, and Stage Door; with John P. Marquand he wrote a stage adaptation of Marquand's novel The Late George Apley; and with Howard Teichmann he wrote The Solid Gold Cadillac.
His most successful collaborations were with Moss Hart, with whom he wrote many plays, including Once in a Lifetime, Merrily We Roll Along, You Can't Take It With You, his most-revived play, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, and The Man Who Came to Dinner.
Despite his claim that he knew nothing about music and hated it in the theatre, Kaufman collaborated on many musical theatre projects. His most successful such efforts include two Broadway shows crafted for the Marx Brothers, The Cocoanuts, written with Irving Berlin, and Animal Crackers, written with Morrie Ryskind, Bert Kalmar, and Harry Ruby. These two productions allowed the Marx Brothers to make the transition from their vaudeville roots into the more prominent worlds of "legitimate" musical comedy and film. Kaufman was one of the writers who excelled in writing intelligent nonsense for Groucho Marx, a process that was inevitably collaborative, given Groucho's skills at expanding upon the scripted material. Though the Marx Brothers were notoriously critical of their writers, Groucho and Harpo Marx expressed admiration and gratitude towards Kaufman. (Dick Cavett, introducing Groucho onstage at Carnegie Hall in 1972, told the audience that Groucho considered Kaufman to be "his god".)
In spite of Kaufman's success as a co-writer and director of stage musicals (one of his biggest musical hits was Guys and Dolls, which he directed on Broadway but did not write), there is some truth to the legend about his lack of musical instincts. While The Cocoanuts was being developed in Atlantic City, Irving Berlin was hugely enthusiastic about a song he had written for the show. Kaufman was less enthusiastic, and refused to rework the libretto to include this number. The discarded song was Always, ultimately a huge hit for Berlin (in another show). The Cocoanuts would remain Irving Berlin's only Broadway musical -- until his very last one, <a href="/w/index.p