Mitchell, Ruth, 1919-2000.

Ruth Mitchell was a stage manager, director, producer and the assistant to the acclaimed director and producer Harold Prince, working on Broadway from the late 1940s through the late 1990s. Born Ruth Kornfeld in Newark, New Jersey in 1919, Mitchell grew up attending Broadway shows and began her career in the theatre as a performer. She appeared in the ensemble of the musicals The Time, the Place and the Girl (1942) and Follow the Girls (1944). On her third show, Annie Get Your Gun (1946), though she appeared on stage, she found her true place backstage, as the assistant to the director, Joshua Logan. She went on to stage manage two plays directed by Logan Happy Birthday (1946) and Mister Roberts (1948). She also was stage manager on three important musicals, The King and I (1951), Pipe Dream (1955) and Bells Are Ringing (1956).

In 1957, Mitchell worked with Harold Prince for the first time when she stage managed West Side Story, which he and his partner Robert E. Griffith produced. After her next show, Gypsy (1959), Mitchell would work exclusively on Prince productions for the following 40 years until her retirement. During the 1960s she was the stage manager on such shows as Fiorello (1959), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), She Loves Me (1963), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Cabaret (1966) and Zorba (1968).

During the 1970s, Mitchell also took on assistant directing and producing, with such shows as Company (1970), Follies (1971), The Great God Brown (1972), A Little Night Music (1973), Candide (1974) and Pacific Overtures (1976). Mitchell was Prince's assistant for On the Twentieth Century (1978), Sweeney Todd (1979), Play Memory (1984), End of the World (1984), The Phantom of the Opera (1988), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993) and Show Boat (1994). She was a producer on Merrily We Roll Along (1981), A Doll's Life (1982), Grind (1985) and Roza (1987). Mitchell was involved in the early stages of Parade (1999), but failing health prevented her from working on the Broadway production.

Mitchell's career was notable not only for being involved in many of the most acclaimed musicals of the second half of the twentieth century, but for her success, as one of the only women working in a male-dominated profession. Mitchell's partner, Florence Klotz, was a costume designer who worked on many shows with Mitchell. Ruth Mitchell died on November 3, 2000 in New York.

From the guide to the Ruth Mitchell papers, 1887-1999, 1946-1999, (The New York Public Library. Billy Rose Theatre Division.)