Name Sherman Yellen Role Playwright | Spouse Joan Fuhr | |
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Children Christopher Yellen, Nicholas Yellen Parents Lillian Yellen, Nathan Yellen Movies An Early Frost, Great Expectations, I'll Take Manhattan, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Similar People | ||
Sherman Yellen (born February 25, 1932, New York City) is an American playwright and screenwriter.
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Biography
Sherman Yellen was born in 1932 to Nathan and Lillian Yellen. He attended the High School of Music & Art and graduated from Bard College on the Hudson in 1953 where he met Joan Fuhr. The couple wed after their graduation, and have two sons, Nicholas and Christopher.
At Bard, Yellen studied creative writing with Texas novelist William Humphrey, was named John Bard Scholar in his sophomore year and received the Wilton E. Lockwood Award for Literature upon graduation. In later years he received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters. He attended graduate school at Columbia University where he majored in 18th century English Literature.
Career
Yellen's first play was New Gods For Lovers, which was produced at the HB Playhouse in New York. This play, entered in a playwrighting competition, won the Hallmark Award, and he began to write television drama for the Hallmark Hall of Fame, and for NBC television, creating such shows as A Cry of Angels, Beauty and the Beast (Emmy nomination and Christopher Award) and the breakthrough drama about AIDS, An Early Frost (Emmy Award).
His American Civil War television drama, Day Before Battle, was written in collaboration with his friend, playwright Peter Stone, and appeared on Studio One. He went on to write notable adaptations of such literary classics as Great Expectations, Dr.Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, Phantom of the Opera and The Last Giraffe - a contemporary show about the Rothschilds giraffe, as well as the PBS series The Adams Chronicles (Emmy Award).
Yellen's work in Broadway theatre includes his Tony-nominated libretto for the musical, The Rothschilds, with music by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick; Rex, a musical about the life and loves of Henry VIII with music by Richard Rodgers - recently revised with Sheldon Harnick, and given a well received revival at the Toronto Light Opera Company and was staged in 2013 by the Utah Festival Opera; and Strangers, a biographical drama about Sinclair Lewis. His satirical sketch, Delicious Indignities, was a highlight of the ground-breaking erotic revue, Oh! Calcutta! He later incorporated the music of popular songwriter Jimmy McHugh into a new musical about young journalists in Paris in 1927, Lucky in the Rain, which had a successful run at the Goodspeed Opera. His collaboration with the late composer Wally Harper on Say Yes created a light hearted musical comedy about the 1939 New York World's Fair, produced in 2000 by The Berkshire Theatre Festival. In both this work and Josephine Tonight!, a musical biography of the early life of Josephine Baker produced by Theatre Building Chicago, Yellen was librettist and lyricist to composer Harper. "Josephine Tonight!" was recently revived as "Blackbird" and was staged in Washington, D.C. and Florida.
Yellen's most recent straight play was December Fools, a comedy-drama about a musical comedy composer's widow and her contentious daughter; two women locked into the past who are struggling with each other in the present, produced by Abingdon Theatre Arts in New York, and in the same year, 2006, Josephine Tonight was produced by Theatre Building Chicago, a musical which The Chicago Sun-Times called a "shining new musical." Josephine Tonight! was revised by Yellen for a five actor African American cast in which the cast covers all the parts, black and white. It was produced in this form in 2012 at MetroStage in Alexandria, Virginia.