The life and works of legendary comic playwright George S. Kaufman and his collaborators are being celebrated in an updated and revised legacy website that was launched officially this week.
Produced by Laurence Maslon, Trustee of The George S. Kaufman Literary Trust and musical theater historian (who runs the Trust for Kaufman’s daughter, Anne, along with actor David Pittu), the site explores each of Kaufman’s forty-plus plays and musicals with synopses, analysis, cast breakdowns, graphics, photographs, and critical articles available for download about selected shows.
A wide range of new projects and initiatives will launch with the site, based on plays and musicals by Kaufman and his collaborators including Moss Hart, the Gershwins, Edna Ferber, the Marx Brothers, Irving Berlin and many more. Their collected works include such beloved and successful classics for the stage and screen as You Can’t Take It with You, Of Thee I Sing, The Royal Family, Animal Crackers, The Man Who Came to Dinner, A Night at the Opera, and Merrily We Roll Along.
GEORGE S. KAUFMAN was the pre-eminent comic dramatist of the first part of the 20th Century. Being an avid bridge player, Kaufman knew the importance of a good partner; almost all of his forty-plus plays, musicals, and sketches were written with collaborators. His first, among many, was Marc Connelly, with whom he wrote Merton of the Movies and Beggar on Horseback. With Edna Ferber, he wrote The Royal Family (1927), Dinner at Eight (1931) and Stage Door (1937). He also wrote the books for two Marx Brothers musicals, The Cocoanuts (1925) with Irving Berlin, and Animal Crackers (1928), where he teamed up with Morrie Ryskind. Kaufman and Ryskind continued with the Gershwins on Of Thee I Sing and its sequel Let’ Em Eat Cake as well as the screenplay for the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. This was also the period of Kaufman’s seminal collaboration with Moss Hart, which yielded such plays as Once in a Lifetime, Merrily We Roll Along, You Can’t Take It With You (Pulitzer Prize, 1937), and The Man Who Came to Dinner. Kaufman’s long career as a director had its biggest success with his production of Guys and Dolls (1950). Kaufman died in 1961.
2024 has been a year of several high-profile Kaufman projects taking center-stage. The first Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Along broke box office records and won five Tony Awards, including Best Revival. In mid-October, Odyssey Opera in Boston produced both Of Thee I Sing and Let ’˜Em Eat Cake, the two presidential Kaufman/Gershwin musicals. This October 29, MasterVoices will present a concert version adaptation of the Kaufman/Gershwin/Ryskind musical, Strike Up the Band at Carnegie Hall. The concert will feature a new book by Maslon and MasterVoices artistic director/conductor Ted Sperling, with a cast including Victoria Clark, John Ellison Conlee, David Pittu, and Christopher Fitzgerald. On November 3, the Gershwin Initiative at the University of Michigan will premiere their archival score of Of Thee I Sing in concert hosted by NPR’s Anastasia Tsiouclas.
The Literary Trust has been working with licensors at Dramatists Play Service and Concord Theatricals to make Kaufman’s comedies more accessible and more readily available for both professional and amateur productions. Kaufman’s comedies have been licensed and performed thousands of times by hundreds of theatre companies in venues all over the world. Among the new projects available for license are:
The George S. Kaufman legacy website was designed by Luis Rivera and his team at Avante Logic.
