Ostrow, Stuart, 1932-

Stuart Ostrow -- theatre producer, director, author and teacher -- was a driving force behind many successful Broadway productions from the 1960's through the 1990's.

From the description of Stuart Ostrow papers, 1955-2007. (New York Public Library). WorldCat record id: 658057475

Stuart Ostrow-producer, director, author and teacher-was a driving force behind many successful Broadway productions from the 1960s through the 1990s. Born in 1932 in New York City to Abe and Anna Ostrow, he graduated from New York University with a degree in music education. After serving in the Air Force from 1952-1955, he married singer Ann Elizabeth Gilbert in 1957, with whom he had three children. While in the Air Force, Ostrow produced and directed many camp shows.

Ostrow began his work in music and theater as Frank Loesser's apprentice in 1955. By 1961 he had become the vice president and general manager of Frank Music Corporation, working on The Most Happy Fella, The Music Man, Greenwillow, and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. By the time he was 28, Ostrow decided that he had enough experience to try producing on his own, and he flew to London to tell Loesser in person that he was leaving the company to produce his first solo venture, We Take the Town starring Robert Preston.

While We Take the Town never made it to Broadway, Ostrow went on to produce a great variety of successful shows. In 1963, he directed and produced Meredith Willson's Here's Love, based on A Miracle on 34th St. In the 1960s he also produced The Apple Tree (1966) and 1776 (1969), which received not only the New York and London Drama Critics Awards, but the Tony Award for Best Musical. The success of 1776 was followed by Scratch in 1971, a show in which Ostrow worked closely with poet Archibald MacLeish. The show was a commercial flop, but was followed by Stephen Schwartz's Pippin in 1972, which ran for five years and had West End and touring productions. In 1978 Ostrow lent his hand to writing and producing a play, Stages, which closed on opening night. The same fate befell his 1981 production of The Mooney Schapiro Songbook. Ostrow's next major production to reach Broadway was M. Butterfly in 1988. Although slow to build an audience, it ultimately ran for nearly two years on Broadway with success leading to a production on the West End and a national tour. M. Butterfly won the 1988 Tony Award and Drama Desk Award for Best Play, as well as earning a nomination for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Ostrow's next major project, a producing collaboration between Ostrow and Andrew Lloyd Webber, was La Bête in 1991, which struggled due to mixed reviews and casting problems.

In 1973, Ostrow established the Stuart Ostrow Foundation's Musical Theatre Lab, a nonprofit professional workshop for original musical theatre. The Lab ran in several incarnations through the years at St. Clements church in New York, the Kennedy Center and, for a time, at Radcliffe.

He joined the faculty at the University of Houston as the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Chair in Theater in 1994 and relocated the Lab to Houston. He later became the Distinguished University Professor of Theatre at the University of Houston. In addition to his theatrical achievements, Ostrow is the author of A Producer's Broadway Journey, Thank You Very Much (The Little Guide To Auditioning For The Musical Theatre), and Present At The Creation, Leaping In The Dark and Going Against The Grain: 1776, Pippin, M. Butterfly, La Bête & Other Broadway Adventures. The Anatomy of a Broadway Musical, which traces the journey of a musical production from conception to realization, was published in 2010.

From the guide to the Stuart Ostrow papers, 1955-2007, (The New York Public Library. Billy Rose Theatre Division.)