“Oh Happy We” – the creators of Candide the Musical Hal Prince Winner of twenty Antoinette Perry awards for his blockbuster musicals, director and producer Hal Prince has revolutionized American theater with his innovative productions. His list of Broadway hits strings over half a century and includes The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Candide, Evita, The Phantom of the Opera, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and Show Boat. Collaborating with composers such as Leonard Bernstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Stephen Sondheim, Prince is "the undisputed master of the Broadway musical," according to David Richards in the New York Times.
Tyrone Guthrie Tyrone Guthrie was an English theater director who founded the Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ontario, and the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. His career began in BBC radio with his plays Squirrel's Cage and Matrimonial News, which led him to a position as script editor in London. In 1933, Guthrie became the new resident director of the Old Vic where he staged a number of productions: Wycherly's The Country Wife, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. Two of his productions, Hamlet and Othello, became famous for their Freudian interpretations. From1953 to 1955, Guthrie was the artistic director to the Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ontario and continued to direct until 1957. The Guthrie Theatre fulfilled his vision for a fully professional classical repertory company and opened in 1963.
Lillian Hellman She has been called one of the most influential female playwrights of the twentieth century; the voice of social consciousness in American letters. Hellman could claim five long-running Broadway dramas. In plays such as The Children's Hour, The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine, The Searching Wind, Another Part of the Forest, and Toys in the Attic Hellman explored controversial themes from lesbianism to fascism, as well as examined the stifling effects of greed and avarice in family relations. Hellman’s plays were strong in their exploration of the evil bred in the human character by social forces.
Richard Wilbur Winner of two Pulitzer prizes for poetry as well as a National Book award, and a Bollingen translation prize, Richard Wilbur has been honored as poet laureate of the United States from 1987 to 1988. As Peter Stitt noted in Richard Wilbur in Conversations with Peter Dale, Wilbur stands apart from his contemporaries in three major ways: "[He] exhibits a classic, objective sensibility in a romantic, subjective time; he is a formalist in the midst of relentless informality; and he is a relative optimist among absolute pessimists." A translator who has adapted many plays of Molière and Racine. Wilbur has written poetry for children, produced critical works on writers and his writing on poetry and literature is collected in Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976, and The Catbird's Song: Prose Pieces, 1963-1995.
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