American screenwriter, playwright, and librettist Sherman Yellen (1932- ) is best known for the 1970 Broadway musical The Rothschilds and as a collaborator of Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Richard Rodgers. Yellen's work includes biographical and period dramas, adaptations of literary classics, musicals, straight plays, and television dramas.
Born in New York City, Yellen studied creative writing and graduated from Bard College in 1953. New Gods For Lovers, one of Yellen's early plays, caught the attention of Hilliard Elkins, who asked Yellen to write a libretto based on Fred Morton's book The Rothschilds; this libretto became the first of three of Yellen's works to be produced on Broadway.
The Broadway production of The Rothschilds with music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick opened in 1970 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre; it would be revived off-Broadway in 1990 at the American Jewish Theatre and reimagined as Rothschild & Sons. This revised version, staged at the York Theatre Company in 2015, featured a reduced cast and some new songs and lyrics.
In 1976, Yellen collaborated with Richard Rodgers and Harnick to bring Rex, a musical based on the last years of the life of Henry VIII, to Broadway. Rex was revived as a staged reading at the York Theatre Company in 2000, appeared at Stages!, the Chicago Festival of New Musicals in 2007, and was presented in Toronto in 2010. Yellen's play about Sinclair Lewis, Strangers was produced on Broadway in 1979.
Yellen also flourished as a television screenwriter. In the 1960s Hallmark commissioned Cry of Angels. He wrote the initial episodes of the 1976 PBS mini-series Adams Chronicles and won an Emmy Award for his writing; his adaptations of Phantom of the Opera, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Great Expectations appeared on network television in the 1970s and 1980s.
His later works include Say Yes (also known as This Fair World), a musical set during the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair; Esther Plays the Palace, a 2012 collaboration with Richard Rodgers' grandson Peter Rodgers Melnick; Josephine Tonight, a musical based on Josephine Baker; and Broadway Man (originally titled Jazz Singer) about the life of Al Jolson.
Yellen is the recipient of two Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, and a Christopher Award (for Beauty in the Beast). Bard College presented Yellen with a lifetime achievement award in Arts and Letters. He received a Tony Award nomination for The Rothschilds.