| Douglas Carter Beane | |
| Birth Place: | Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Notable Works: |
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Douglas Carter Beane is an American playwright and screenwriter. He has been nominated for five Tony Awards and won two Drama Desk Awards. His plays are essentially works with sophisticated, "drawing room" humor but just as often farce, particularly his work in musical theater.
His works include the screenplay of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, and several plays including The Country Club and The Little Dog Laughed, which was nominated for the 2007 Tony Award for Best Play and As Bees in Honey Drown, which ran at New York's Lucille Lortel Theatre in 1997.
Beane was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and raised in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania.[1] [2] [3]
Beane trained as an actor, graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts New York campus in 1980. He is very involved with his alma mater, workshopping new pieces with the students.[4]
Beane is the artistic director of the Drama Department Theater Company in New York.
Beane wrote the book for Xanadu, a stage musical adaptation of the 1980 film of the same name, adding new plot twists and humor parodying the original movie. The musical was workshopped in 2006 and early 2007 with director Christopher Ashley and actors Jane Krakowski, Tony Roberts, and Cheyenne Jackson. The musical opened on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theatre on July 10, 2007. Kerry Butler and Cheyenne Jackson were the Broadway leads. Beane won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical.
In 2011, Beane was hired to "doctor" the book for the musical Sister Act [5] alongside Bill and Cheri Steinkellner for which he was nominated for a Tony Award, Best Book of a Musical.[6]
Beane wrote the book for the musical Lysistrata Jones and rewrote the book for a new adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella which opened on Broadway in 2013.[7] [8] Also opening in 2013 was his new play for Lincoln Center, The Nance, starring Nathan Lane and directed by Jack O'Brien.[8] [9] Beane has revised the libretto for the Metropolitan Opera's new production of the operetta Die Fledermaus which was performed in 2013- 2014.[10]
Beane's 2013 play The Nance was a change of pace, essentially a drama set in the 1930's starring Nathan Lane as Chauncey Miles, a fading vaudeville comic specializing in nance characters, effeminate, mocking parodies of homosexual men. Miles is in fact gay and filled with self-hate and bitterness yet gets a chance at true love for the first time late in his life. Most reviews were favorable although much of the praise was directed at Lane's performance. The play was filmed by PBS and aired on Live from Lincoln Center the following year.
Beane's play "The Closet" premiered in 2018 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival for a limited two-week run starting June 30th. The play starred Matthew Broderick as a widely disliked heterosexual nerd working at a religious supplies company who suddenly becomes interesting and popular when his co-workers and family presume he is having an affair with his new roommate,,a flamboyant homosexual (played by Brooks Ashmanskas). The farce received generally good reviews and was compared to Norman, Is That You?. https://nystagereview.com/2018/07/04/the-closet-a-gay-deceiver-for-a-new-century/
Beane is married to his frequent collaborator, composer Lewis Flinn, and the two are parents to two adopted children, Cooper and Gabrielle.[11]