Jamie Hammerstein

James Hammerstein was a producer and a frequent director of the musicals of his father, the famed librettist and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II.

He was educated at the University of North Carolina and began his career as a replacement extra in a production of Mister Roberts in 1950. By the late 1950s he was producing and directing musicals on Broadway and the London stage.

Hammerstein made his career in the theater, often directing revivals of the classic musicals his father wrote with collaborator Richard Rodgers, including Oklahoma!, The King and I, and The Sound of Music.

In addition to the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein, James Hammerstein directed the New York premieres of Harold Pinter's play Tea Party, Simon Gray's Butley and Wise Child, and Israel Horowitz's Indian Wants the Bronx, among the works of still others. He toured a U.K. production of The King and I in 1989, and his Sound of Music played at the New York City Opera in 1990. In 1996, he co-directed a Broadway revival of State Fair, a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that became a 1945 film of the same title.