Glen MacDonough

Glen MacDonough (November 12, 1870 – March 30, 1924) was an American lyricist, librettist, and playwright born in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Thomas B. MacDonough, worked as a theater manager, and his mother, Laura Don, was an actress and writer. Before turning to the stage, MacDonough worked as a feature and human interest journalist in New York City, contributing prolifically to publications including the New York Advertiser, where he produced more than a thousand short stories in a single year. He subsequently left journalism to pursue a career in the theater.

MacDonough's earliest credited work, The Prodigal Father (1892), was a comedy with songs of the type then commonly described as a musical extravaganza. The following year he collaborated with songwriter Reginald DeKoven on The Algerian (1893). Throughout the 1890s he wrote farces, comedies, and the books and lyrics for a succession of musical comedies, among them Miss Dynamite (1894) and Delmonico's at 6 (1895). His Broadway credits span multiple forms and include the play The Belle of Bridgeport, the musical Eva, the musical Chris and the Wonderful Lamp, the play Among Those Present, and Bird Center, among other productions.

MacDonough is most widely remembered as the librettist of Victor Herbert's operetta Babes in Toyland (1903). Between 1896 and 1909, he and Herbert collaborated on four additional operettas: The Gold Bug (1896), It Happened in Nordland (1905), Wonderland (1905), and Algeria (1908), which Herbert revised the following year as The Rose of Algeria. MacDonough also wrote the lyrics for Chris and the Wonderful Lamp (1899), with music by John Philip Sousa, and contributed lyrics to the first musical stage adaptation of L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz (1902).

Beyond original work, MacDonough served as the American adapter of Johann Strauss's Vienna Life (1901) and of Franz Lehár's The Count of Luxembourg (1912). In 1909 he wrote the book for The Midnight Sons. His final produced work was Within Four Walls, a play completed in 1923, a year before his death. In 1914, MacDonough was among the nine founding members of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). He married Margaret Jefferson in 1896 in Buzzard's Bay, Massachusetts, and died on March 30, 1924, in Stamford, Connecticut. Over the course of his career, his name became associated with more than two dozen plays and musical works.