Abbott, George (Francis)

Abbott, George [Francis] (1887–1995), director, playwright, and producer. Born in Forestville, New York, he studied with Professor George Pierce Baker in the famous 47 Workshop. Some of his early plays were mounted by the Harvard Dramatic Club by theatres in Boston, and in 1913 he made his acting debut in New York in The Misleading Lady, continuing to perform until the mid‐1920s. Thereafter his onstage appearances were rare, although in 1955 he played Mr. Antrobus in an important revival of The Skin of Our Teeth. Apart from helping to rewrite Lightnin' in 1918, he did not resume serious playwriting until 1925 when he collaborated with James Gleason on The Fall Guy and with Winchell Smith on A Holy Terror. Abbott scored a huge hit with Broadway (1926), which he wrote with Philip Dunning and which he also staged. His lean, taut direction, followed by his forceful staging in the same season of another hit, Chicago, established him as a master of swift‐paced melodrama. That reputation was consolidated when he collaborated on and directed two more popular pieces, Four Walls (1927), written with Dana Burnett, and Coquette (1927), with Ann Preston Bridgers. Turning to farce, he triumphed with his staging of Twentieth Century (1932), Three Men on a Horse (1935), which he wrote with John Cecil Holm, Boy Meets Girl (1935), Brother Rat (1936), Room Service (1937), and What a Life (1938). Meanwhile he also turned his talents to directing, and sometimes writing, musical comedy, at first working often with Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. He staged, among others, Jumbo (1935), On Your Toes (1936), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), Too Many Girls (1939), Pal Joey (1940), On the Town (1944), High Button Shoes (1947), Where's Charley? (1948), Call Me Madam (1950), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1951), Wonderful Town (1953), The Pajama Game (1954), Damn Yankees (1955), Fiorello! (1959), and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962). Between 1932 and 1954, he produced many of the shows he wrote or directed. He was librettist and director of the failed musical Music Is (1976), then at the age of ninety‐five co‐produced and staged yet another revival of On Your Toes in 1983. In 1987 he directed a revival of Broadway, but the mounting was a quick failure. Abbott's last hurrah was a successful Broadway revival of his Damn Yankees in 1995 in which he nominally served as artistic consultant. Exceptional in his ability to keep his shows moving, while never seeming heavy‐handed or forced, Abbott was a strict, somewhat formal disciplinarian. Lehman Engel wrote of him, “He always wore a necktie and never removed his jacket at rehearsal. What he said was positive and absolute.” Autobiography: Mister Abbott, 1963.