Biography
Born on 7 December 1950 in Maryland, USA, Bramble grew up on his family’s rural property there and later established himself as a librettist and director in musical theatre. Retired actress Tallulah Bankhead, who lived nearby and maintained close ties with the family, helped secure him an early position in the New York offices of impresario David Merrick. Four years of that apprenticeship preceded his decision to pursue independent writing and to court producers for his own projects. Two major pieces begun in the early 1970s remained unproduced for several years while he gained experience in off-off-Broadway and regional venues during the middle and later part of the decade. He first reached Broadway by supplying the book, in collaboration with veteran librettist and lyricist Michael Stewart, for The Grand Tour, a musical drawn from Franz Werfel’s play Jacobowsky And The Colonel; the production completed 61 performances at the Palace Theatre early in 1979. Bramble and Stewart again joined forces for the 1980 off-Broadway mounting of Elizabeth And Essex, taken from Maxwell Anderson’s Elizabeth And The Queen. His decisive breakthrough arrived in April 1980 when Barnum, the book of which he had written, opened at the St. James Theatre and ultimately logged 854 performances. The same calendar year, in August, brought a further triumph: the stage adaptation of the beloved 1930s film musical 42nd Street, carrying a Stewart-Bramble libretto, launched a 3,486-performance engagement at the Winter Garden. Subsequent efforts proved less fortunate; a revised version of The Three Musketeers, Bramble’s first outing as director, closed after eight performances in 1983. That setback, compounded by a violent mugging on a New York street, prompted his move to London in 1985. Among later projects were Fat Pig, presented in 1987 at the Leicester Haymarket and drawn from Jérome Savary’s Paris staging of a musical based on Colin McNaughton’s children’s book, incorporating circus skills and acrobatics reminiscent of Barnum; and Notre Dame, staged in 1991 at the Old Fire Station, Oxford, and derived from Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame De Paris. In 1992 Bramble wrote and directed the one-woman show Someone Else’s Rainbow, centered on Judy Garland and performed by Elaine Loudon for the benefit of London Lighthouse. He continues to supervise and stage international productions of both Barnum and 42nd Street.
Albums
