“I told myself,” Meehan explained, “‘Wait a second, these guys are in the theatre. I didn’t think it was a good idea.”Įventually, he decided to take the job for the opportunity to work with Charnin and Strouse.
“ said, ‘Here is the idea,’” Meehan explained, “‘Little Orphan Annie’ and I thought, ‘No I don’t want to do that.’ I wanted to do West Side Story, I wanted to do My Fair Lady. The idea, however, did not initially thrill Meehan. Six months after meeting Charnin, he offered Meehan the job of writing a book for a new musical by Charnin and composer Charles Strouse, who had already written two Tony Award-winning shows: Bye, Bye, Birdie and Applause. “ started his career as a chorus member as one of the juvenile delinquents in West Side Story on Broadway.” Meehan described Charnin as “a Broadway guy.” “The producer/director of that show was a man named Martin Charnin,” Meehan explained. This brief television writing stint launched his Broadway career after it helped him meet one of the producers. The story became Annie, the Women in the Life of a Man, the TV movie starring Anne Bancroft, the Academy Award-winning actress for The Miracle Worker, which won Meehan a primetime Emmy.
One day, he received a call from television producers who wanted to adapt one of his short stories for TV. Eventually, some of his short stories were published in the magazine, and he became known as a writer of comic short stories. Meehan attended Hamilton College and, after a brief time in the army, joined the staff of the New Yorker writing for its “Talk of the Town” section. “I never imagined that I would actually write for the theatre,” he admitted. The Emmy Award winner and three-time Tony Award winner has written books for the musicals Young Frankenstein, Elf, Chaplin, Cry-Baby and Bombay Dreams, among others, and has just opened Rocky, a Broadway musical adaptation of the 1976 Sylvester Stallone movie of the same name.Īt the very onset of his career, Meehan himself did not imagine where his writing would take him.
“The shows I write are famous,” he said, “but I’m not.” Although he has written Broadway hits like Annie, The Producers and Hairspray, which all played over 2000 performances in their original productions, Broadway book writer Thomas Meehan admitted that fame eludes him.
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