Tom Eyen born 14 August 1940 (d. 1991)Tom Eyen was a Tony Award and Grammy Award winning American playwright, lyricist, television writer, and theatre director.
Born in Cambridge, Ohio, Eyen is best known for works at opposite ends of the theatrical spectrum. Mainstream theatregoers became acquainted with him in 1981 when he partnered with composer Henry Krieger and director Michael Bennett to write the book and lyrics for Dreamgirls, the hit Broadway musical about a Supremes-style singing trio.
Eyen's career started, however, with avant garde plays and musicals that he wrote and directed off-off Broadway in the early 1960s, which eventually led to off-Broadway success in the 1970s with the controversial nudity-filled performance-art play The Dirtiest Show in Town and Women Behind Bars, a camp parody of women's prison exploitation films.
[Pictured below: Tom Eyen with Warhol Superstar Candy Darling, who appeared in a 1973 off-Broadway revival of Eyen's 1964 play The White Whore and the Bit Player]
Eyen also worked in television and contributed scripts to the 1976-78 ground-breaking evening soap opera parody, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. In 1978, he earned an Emmy Award nomination for writing Midler's television special Ol' Red Hair is Back.
Eyen and Krieger first worked together on the 1975 musical version of Eyen's revue The Dirtiest Show in Town, called The Dirtiest Musical in Town. Nell Carter's performance in that musical inspired Eyen and Krieger to craft a musical about black back-up singers, which they workshopped for Joe Papp but shelved when Carter dropped out in 1978. A year later, the project caught the interest of Broadway director-producer-choreographer Michael Bennett, who asked Eyen to direct a workshop production of Big Dreams, as the musical was then known, with Divine and gospel singer Jennifer Holliday as Carter's replacement. However, Holliday left the project, unhappy that her character died at the conclusion of the first act. After several workshops and numerous rewrites, Bennett decided that he needed Holliday, and the team rewrote act two to build up Holliday's character.
Produced on Broadway in 1981, Dreamgirls was the biggest success of Eyen's career. It was nominated for thirteen Tony Awards, including two for Eyen: Best Book and, as lyricist, Best Original Score. The show won six Tonys, including Best Book. It also earned Eyen a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Lyrics. The original cast album won Eyen a Grammy Award as lyricist, and one of the show's songs, And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going, sung by Holliday, became a top hit and is now a standard.
When a film adaptation of Dreamgirls by writer/director Bill Condon was released in 2006 by DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures, the soundtrack became a number one hit, and two of Eyen's songs from the soundtrack, And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going, sung by Jennifer Hudson, and One Night Only, sung by Beyoncé Knowles (credited as Deena Jones & The Dreams), became hits again.Eyen's 1984 attempt to duplicate his Dreamgirls success with Kicks: The Showgirl Musical, a collaboration with composer Alan Menken about members of the Rockettes during World War II, never made it past the workshop stages, though individual numbers from the show are sometimes performed in concert.
Eyen died of AIDS-related complications in Palm Beach, Florida at the age of 50. In 1993, he posthumously received the Jerome Lawrence & Robert E Lee Theatre Research Institute Award at The Ohio State University, where his papers are archived.