Abe Burrows

Abe Burrows was an American humorist, author, and director for radio and the stage. He won a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abe_Burrows

He was one of the writers of Guys and Dolls. Guys and Dolls was selected as the winner of the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. However, because of writer Abe Burrows' troubles with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the Trustees of Columbia University vetoed the selection, and no Pulitzer for Drama was awarded that year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guys_and_Dolls

ABE BURROWS, BROADWAY WRITER-DIRECTOR, IS DEAD

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Published: May 19, 1985 (New York Times)

Abe Burrows, the librettist, director, author and comic who wrote a score of shows for Broadway, including Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, died of pneumonia Friday night at his home in Manhattan. He was 74 years old and had been ill for several years.

A bald, bespectacled man with the wry wit, restless energy and New York accent of a Damon Runyon character, Mr. Burrows wrote for radio in the 1930's and had a fling in Hollywood, on the nightclub circuits and in television in the 1940's.

But it was for the Broadway stage, in the 1950's and 60's, that his writing and directing talents and his incorrigibly antic view of life came together in a series of hits that critics hailed as some of the theater's purest moments of comic joy.

Collaborating with the composer-lyricist Frank Loesser and the librettist Jo Swerling, Mr. Burrows struck gold with his first Broadway effort, the book for Guys and Dolls. The 1950 musical fable of Runyonesque gamblers, hustlers and Salvation Army saviors ran 1,200 performances, netted millions of dollars and enjoyed a series of revivals.

Pulitzer Prize Winner

Again with Mr. Loesser, his friend for 30 years until the composer's death in 1969, Mr. Burrows directed and wrote the book for How to Succeed, the jubilant satire of a stock boy's rise to the executive suite, which opened in 1961. The musical won a Pulitzer Prize for Mr. Burrows and Mr. Loesser in 1962.

Other hits written and directed by Mr. Burrows included Cole Porter's Can Can (1953), What Makes Sammy Run (1964) and the American version of the French production Cactus Flower (1965). He was also director and co-author of Say, Darling (1958), and was co-author of the 1955 production of Silk Stockings.

Mr. Burrows also directed Two on the Aisle (1951), Reclining Figure (1954), Forty Carats (1968) and Four on a Garden (1972), and was co-author and director of Three Wishes for Jamie (1952) and First Impressions (1959).

Among his credits were a number of Broadway productions that he was called in to rewrite, direct or help save after serious pre-opening problems.

Songs and Autobiography

Mr. Burrows composed numerous songs, many of them virtual improvisations with such titles as I Looked Under a Rock and Found a Rose, and I'm So Miserable Without You, It's Almost Like Having You Around. His best-known song, perhaps, was The Girl with the Three Blue Eyes. His Abe Burrows Song Book was published in 1955.

He also wrote the screenplay for the 1956 film The Solid Gold Cadillac, and his autobiography, Honest Abe: Is There Really No Business Like Show Business? appeared in 1979.

Abe Burrows was born Abram Solman Borowitz in New York City on Dec. 18, 1910, the eldest of three children of Louis and Julia Salzberg Borowitz. In the early 1930's, he went along with the rest of the family in changing the surname to Burrows.

His father was a businessman who loved vaudeville and often took his son to see shows. The boy attended Morris High School in the Bronx, graduated from New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn in 1928 and later attended City College and New York University while working part time as a runner in Wall Street.

Worked on Wall Street

He quit college to work full time on Wall Street and remained there for five years, holding various clerical jobs. In the 1930's, he worked as an accountant, tried selling maple syrup and took a job in his father's wallpaper-and-paint business.

In 1938, he met Frank Gaylen, a young comic writer, and the two began collaborating on nightclub acts, comic sketches and radio scripts. Eventually, they sold material to a comic who appeared on the Rudy Vallee show, and more jobs soon followed.

Mr. Burrows wrote radio material for Peter Lind Hayes, Dinah Shore, the Texaco Star Theater, Fred Allen, Joan Davis and others. In 1941, he helped create Duffy's Tavern, which became an enormously successful show for the CBS radio network. He spent more than four years as the show's chief writer.

In 1946, he was hired by Paramount Pictures as a writer-producer and moved to Hollywood. But he spent only 13 unproductive weeks with the studio and, when his contract expired, he returned to broadcasting.

A Radio Program

Over the next two years, Mr. Burrows had his own radio program, The Abe Burrows Show. He played the piano and sang biting songs, many of which sounded improvised, and he treated his audience to spoofs of life, radio and Hollywood.

He also toured nightclubs, writing and performing his own comic routines, and wrote for a variety of radio and television programs under contract to CBS.

In 1949, Mr. Burrows turned to Broadway. Mr. Loesser had already written the songs for Guys and Dolls when Mr. Burrows was called in to co-write the dialogue that would knit the songs and the whole musical production together. George S. Kaufman, the director, gave him a crash course in play construction.

And soon, Mr. Burrows was devising scenes of floating crap games and the bittersweet antics on Runyon's mythical Broadway, including love stories of the gambler Sky Masterson and Salvation Army Sister Sarah Brown and Nathan Detroit and Miss Adelaide. Adding to rich confusion were characters like Big Jule and Nicely-Nicely.

A Model of Musical Comedy

The show, with a string of show-stopping songs that included A Bushel and a Peck, Take Back Your Mink, Sit Down You're Rockin' the Boat, If I Were a Bell, and I've Never Been in Love Before, opened in Philadelphia in 1950.

I was nervous, Mr. Burrows once recalled. The overture, the opening dance and the three horse players came out. A trumpet blew. First call. Da-da-da-da-da-ra-da-da-dah! And there was a wave of laughter through the audience. I said to my wife: 'We're in!'

The show won the Tony Award and the accolades of critics and theatergoers alike as one of Broadway's greatest hits. Critics would later call it a model of the musical comedy genre, and one of the best productions of the century.

During 1951 and 1952, Mr. Burrows testified twice before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was investigating Communist and leftist associations among people in entertainment, government and other occupations.

Mr. Burrows, after first appearing in a closed session, testified publicly that he had associated with Communists in 1943 and that, while he had never been a member of the Communist Party, he had taken part in Communist cultural activities during World War II, during which he had been deferred from military service.

Another Big Hit

In 1961, How to Succeed, another Loesser-Burrows collaboration, became a phenomenal success on Broadway. Mr. Burrows recalled:

When we were working on 'How to Succeed,' Frankie kept saying, 'I gotta have a ballad.' So one day he said, 'I've got it.' It was 'I Believe in You' and it was a nice song. But I started to think. And I said, 'Frankie, you're going to kill me, but how would you feel if the fella sings it to himself?

You know, it's a story of a guy climbing up, a real egotist. And Frankie looked at me and he says, 'Damn it,' and he got very angry with me because I was taking away his ballad. He wanted it to be a love song.

Mr. Burrows said Mr. Loesser, whose flashes of anger never lasted very long, then gradually began to get a look on his face that was almost like a smile - and, grumbling, accepted the idea that was to set the whole tone of the musical.

Close Friends

In addition to a Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Burrows and Mr. Loesser shared a Tony and the New York Drama Critics Award for How to Succeed.

The two men were close friends as well as artistic collaborators. Photos of Mr. Burrows and Mr. Loesser always hung on the wall of Mr. Burrows's study, one showing them shaking hands after winning the Pulitzer, another picturing them with heads together at a party.

Mr. Burrows married Ruth Levinson in 1936. The couple had two children and were divorced in 1948.

Mr. Burrows is survived by his second wife, the former Carin Smith Kinzel, whom he married in 1950; a son, James, of Los Angeles; a daughter, Laurie Burrows Grad of Los Angeles; a brother, Selig, of New York City; a sister, Shirley Alter of Los Angeles, and three grandchildren.

The funeral will be held at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home, Madison Avenue and 81st Street, tomorrow at 2:30 P.M.