Herman Shumlin was a prolific Broadway theatrical director and theatrical producer beginning in 1927 with the play Celebrity and continuing through 1974 with a short run of As You Like It, notably with an all-male cast.
Background
Herman Shumlin was born on December 6, 1898 to George Shumlin and Rebecca Slavin in Atwood, Colorado, where his parents were attempting to raise sheep. That venture failing, they moved successively to Illinois and Indiana before settling in 1906 in Newark, New Jersey, where Shumlin grew up.
Education
Financial need forced Shumlin to quit school at age fifteen.
Career
He held jobs at a hardware factory and a railroad yard.
In 1924, after working for a New Jersey office promoting Metro films, he wrote for two showbusiness papers, the New York Clipper (1921 - 1924) and Billboard (1924 - 1925).
A job in 1925 as a press agent for musical librettists Laurence Schwab and Frank Mandel preceded employment as general manager for producer-director Jed Harris. Shumlin turned to producing in 1927; his first four productions were box office flops, with Celebrity (1927), The Command Performance (1928), Tonight at 12 (1928), and Button, Button (1929) between them running for a total of 118 performances.
In 1930 he had his first success with John Wexley's 285-perfor-mance anti-capital punishment melodrama about men on death row, The Last Mile (1930), which made Spencer Tracy a star.
Shumlin followed with one of Broadway's most memorable productions, Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel (1930), a 444-performance hit that also marked his directorial debut (he directed most of his later productions). The smooth movement of the large-cast, episodic play's panoramic action, set in various parts of a big hotel, was facilitated by Shumlin's use of a jackknife stage, wheeled platforms that folded into the wings at either side as required. When the production opened, Shumlin owned only a single suit and a pair of shoes, but within a week he splurged $675 on clothes. Shumlin, who spent 1931 in Hollywood as an assistant producer to Samuel Goldwyn, had two more Broadway successes during the decade.
The Children's Hour (1934), a first drama by Lillian Hellman (Shumlin's play reader at the time), managed 691 showings. This impressive work, about juvenile mendacity and suspected lesbianism in a girls' school, created a storm of debate and was the first of several Shumlin productions dealing with sensitive issues. Because the play was banned in Boston, Shumlin took on the Massachusetts state legislature and managed to get that body to alter its censorship procedures. Until business policies separated them, Shumlin was closely associated with Hellman, staging five of her plays.
Their next blockbuster was her stinging blow at turn-of-the-century southern capitalism, The Little Foxes (1939), starring Tallulah Bankhead. Shumlin's failures during the 1930's included Clear the Wires! (1932); The Bride of Torozko (1934); Sweet Mystery of Life (1935); Hellman's Days to Come (1936); and Thornton Wilder's The Merchant of Yonkers (1938), directed by Max Reinhardt and later revised as the still-popular The Matchmaker.
As a freelance director, he staged Ten Minute Alibi (1933) and S. N. Behrman's Wine of Choice (1938). Shumlin followed The Little Foxes with a string of theatrical successes in the early 1940's: James Thurber's and Elliot Nugent's seriocomic defense of academic freedom, The Male Animal (1940); The Corn Is Green (1941), Emlyn Williams's semiautobiographical account of a compassionate schoolteacher and an intellectually gifted boy in a Welsh mining town, which revived Ethel Barrymore's career; and Hellman's drama about invidious fascism, Watch on the Rhine (1941).
Shumlin also directed the movie version (1943), starring Bette Davis and Paul Lukas. His only other film was Confidential Agent (1945), with Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall.
He worked as a director on two flops handled by other producers: A Passenger to Bali (1940), on which he assisted John Huston without credit, and Behrman's The Talley Method (1941).
After Watch on the Rhine, Shumlin only rarely had something to show for his labors, either as a director or producer. Lesser offerings he both produced and staged included The Great Big Doorstep (1942); his final Hellman play, The Searching Wind (1944); Only in America (1959); his only off-Broadway show, Transfers (1970); and Flowers (1974).
Works he directed for others included Kiss Them for Me (1945), in which Judy Holliday debuted; Jeb (1946); The Biggest Thief in Town (1949); Candida (1952), his only classic revival, starring Olivia de Havilland; Regina (1953), a revival of the opera version of The Little Foxes; Tall Story (1959); Little Moon of Alban (1960); Dear Me, the Sky Is Falling (1963); and Spofford (1967), notable because it was his only effort as a playwright (he adapted it from a Peter De Vries novel). Amid this succession of less-acclaimed productions, Shumlin retained the ability to mount important works. His three significant stagings from later in his career were the impressive, long-running (808 performances) Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee play about the Scopes "monkey" trial, Inherit the Wind (1955), starring Paul Muni; and two controversial dramas by German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, The Deputy (1964) and Soldiers (1968).
The Deputy, which suggested that the pope allowed Roman Jews to die at the hands of the Nazis during World War II, stirred up a storm of protest and was picketed nightly.
He died in New York City.
Achievements
Politics
A man of many (usually short-lived) enthusiasms, he often supported liberal causes and was even branded a Communist for his social and political views. His outspoken opinions ranged from world politics to theatrical policies, including his frustration at the limited time permitted for rehearsals; his distaste for the hit-and-miss nature of commercial theater (he wanted to run a profit-sharing permanent company); and his anger with the United States Department of Labor and Actors Equity over their restrictions on the importation of nonstar English actors for English roles.
Views
Quotations:
Noted for his sponsorship of socially committed drama, he told an interviewer that any play he did had to contain "people who are recognizable as human beings, written by an author who understands human beings. And reflecting the times in which we are living. "
Personality
Shumlin, who presented a professorial appearance, was a tall, mustached, bespectacled, tastefully dressed, bullet-headed man who took to shaving his head.
Although capable of seeming imperious, the intense, chain-smoking producer and director had a warm side as well and, with actors, was considered an understanding, patient, and encouraging figure.
Connections
His first two marriages, to actresses Rose Keane and Carmen Englander, ended in divorce. His third wife was producer Diana Green Krasny; Shumlin had no children.