(This is a PROGRAM from the week beginning Monday, April 1...)
This is a PROGRAM from the week beginning Monday, April 1, 1946; Kermit Bloomgarden & George Heller presents DEEP ARE THE ROOTS, by Arnaud d'Usseau and James Gow; Staged by ELIA KAZAN, Setting Howard Bay, Costumes by Emeline Roche, Cast, in order of appearance: Helen Martin, Evelyn Ellis, Edwin Jerome, Barbara Bel Geddes, Barbara O'Neil, Donald MacDonald, Lloyd Gough, Gordon Heath, Andrew Leigh, George Dice, Douglas Rutherford; Measuring 6 1/2" by 9" this program has a stapled binding and 32 pages/plus a cover. The cover is printed in a sepia color ink on paper that is bone color and has a semi-gloss finish. The interior pages are the same paper stock and printed in black. This program/Playbill contains oodles of wonderful old advertisements and info about this production and other goings-on in New York City. Included is a full page Chesterfield Cigarette ad on the back cover -- Condition .. very good overall -- mild signs of aging, and a little rust on the staples --would not be mistaken for brand new-but it is not damaged, This item, like all of our vintage paper items, is being stored in and will be sent to you in an acid free plastic sleeve
Kermit Bloomgarden was an American theatrical producer. He ran the American Theatre Wing in the 1940's and 1950's.
Background
Kermit Bloomgarden was born on December 15, 1904, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, United States, the son of Russian-born Zemad Bloomgarden and Annie Groden. His father owned a matzoh factory, ran a chicken market, and was a butcher.
Education
Kermit Bloomgarden attended Commercial High School in Brooklyn before working his way through night school at New York University, from which he graduated with a degree in accounting in 1926.
Career
Following five years of employment as a certified public accountant, Kermit Bloomgarden served as accountant to Broadway producer Arthur Beckhard in 1932, worked as general manager for producer-director Herman Shumlin for a decade from 1935, and was employed as the Group Theatre's business manager. Bloomgarden made his producing debut with a flop, Heavenly Express (1940), starring John Garfield; was manager of the Stage Door Canteen during World War II; and became a full-time producer in 1945, coproducing Arnaud d'Usseau's and James Gow's controversial play Deep Are the Roots, about a black soldier's racial problems on returning home from combat. Bloomgarden's productions often demonstrated a commitment to meaningful drama with socially provocative content, but he always insisted that good playwriting took precedence over any particular message. He honored the playwright over the director, whom he felt was too dominant in modern theater.
Other powerful Bloomgarden productions of the 1940's were the 182-performance Another Part of the Forest (1946) by Lillian Hellman, about younger versions of the rapacious characters in her The Little Foxes; William Wister Haines's Command Decision (1947), a riveting war drama (408 performances); and, his greatest contribution, Arthur Miller's modern classic about the failure of the American dream, the award-winning, 742-performance Death of a Salesman (1949), starring Lee J. Cobb. The decade's failures included Woman Bites Dog (1946) and Hellman's adaptation of Emmanuel Robles's Montserrat (1949). Those in the 1950's included The Man (1950), The Legend of Sarah (1950), Hellman's The Autumn Garden (1951), The Wedding Breakfast (1954), The Night of the Auk (1956), Maiden Voyage (1957), which closed out of town, The Gang's All Here (1959), and Jean Anouilh's The Fighting Cock (1959). Nevertheless, Bloomgarden chalked up a remarkable list of distinguished hits and near-hits; in the 1955-1956 season he contributed four major works.
The skein began with a modestly successful revival of Hellman's The Children's Hour (1952) and continued with Miller's 197-performance, Tony-winning The Crucible (1953), which suggested the House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings on Communism via a tale about the Salem witchhunts; Miller's vibrant drama about Brooklyn longshoremen, A View from the Bridge, on a double bill with A Memory of Two Mondays (1955); The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett's moving, 717-performance, Pulitzer Prize-winning adaptation of the Holocaust victim's story; Anouilh's Joan of Arc drama, The Lark (1955), adapted by Hellman and starring Julie Harris (229 performances); and Bloomgarden's first musical, Frank Loesser's 676-performance The Most Happy Fella (1956), adapted from a 1924 Sidney Howard play and winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Also successful were Look Homeward, Angel (1957), Ketti Frings's version of Thomas Wolfe's autobiographical novel (564 performances) and another musical, Meredith Willson's The Music Man (1957), which, true to Bloomgarden's instincts for trying new things, introduced heretofore dramatic actor Robert Preston as a musical comedy star (1, 375 performances). Of these theatrical landmarks, Bloomgarden considered his finest work to be The Lark, because of its elegantly simplified production relying on projections and lights. He often called for less heavy scenery and more imaginative means in production.
The 1960's, when Bloomgarden increasingly shared producer credit, was a decade riddled with failures, with the exceptions of Hellman's Toys in the Attic (1960), a 556-performance drama about the twisted relationship between two spinster sisters and their scapegrace brother (Jason Robards, Jr. ); John Hersey's depiction of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, The Wall (1960), starring George C. Scott; and Ilya Darling (1967), the musical version of the film Never on Sunday (318 performances). Among the decade's failures were the musical The Gay Life (1961); Bloomgarden's first off-Broadway production, A Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1962); the musical Nowhere to Go but Up (1962); Hellman's My Mother, My Father, and Me (1963); off Broadway's Next Time I'll Sing to You (1963); Stephen Sondheim's musical Anyone Can Whistle (1964); The Playroom (1965); and Athol Fugard's Hello and Goodbye (1960), off Broadway.
During his mostly successful final decade, Bloomgarden again mixed off Broadway with Broadway, beginning with a Japanese off-Broadway rock musical import, The Golden Bat (1970). He grappled with illness for several seasons (his right leg was amputated in 1971 as a result of complications from arteriosclerosis), but returned with the long-running (1, 166 performances) off-Broadway Lanford Wilson comedy-drama, The Hot L Baltimore (1973), about the denizens of a sleazy hotel; Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize-winning but commercially weak fantasy Seascape (1975); Ionescopade (1974), an off-Broadway dud; and the Broadway transfer of English dramatist Peter Shaffer's hugely successful (1, 209 performances), Tony winning drama, Equus (1974), starring Anthony Hopkins and depicting the psychiatric treatment of a boy who has maimed a group of horses.
Bloomgarden supported the development of new audiences, and often arranged nominally priced tickets for students. One of his quirks was never to hold opening-night parties, so as to avoid the potential pain of hearing negative reviews. He believed that the quality of a script took precedence over its potential moneymaking possibilities; a play in which he believed personally held a 35-40 percent chance of success, while one selected merely as a gold mine had a 5 percent chance. Still, he admitted, each experience was a new one, and little could be learned from previous ones. Raising money was always a nasty problem, and many of his biggest hits originally ran into obstacles in finding backers. Bloomgarden liked to involve a large number of backers (eighty-two on Death of a Salesman), both to prevent anyone from losing too much and to avoid any backer's having undue power. His producing included participation at rehearsals, where he served as the oil to lubricate the relationship between author and director. He considered producing a creative endeavor not merely a business arrangement. When he died of a brain tumor in New York City, he was in the process of producing Pavel Kohout's Poor Murderer.
Shy, nervous, and soft-spoken, Bloomgarden could become distractingly preoccupied. Owlfaced, and stockily built, he wore conservatively tailored suits and chain-smoked cigars and cigarettes until ordered by a doctor to stop. He liked to wear a battered hat as a good-luck charm to his openings. Bloomgarden was an avid baseball fan and, in his late sixties, enjoyed discotheques.
Connections
He married Hattie Richardson (who sang under the name Linda Lee) in 1939; she died in 1942. In September 1943 he wed actress Virginia Kaye, from whom he was eventually divorced. They had two children.