Ralph G. Allen became head of UT’s Speech and Theatre Department in 1972. He established the Clarence Brown Theatre Company in 1974 and brought to campus—to establish the professional theatre company and to work with students—such notables as Anthony Quayle, Mary Martin, and Joshua Logan. Allen’s smash hit Broadway play Sugar Babies premiered as a Clarence Brown Theatre production. On Broadway, Sugar Babies starred Ann Miller and Mickey Rooney in his Broadway debut. It was a tribute to the old-fashioned burlesque revue and opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre in October 1979. It ran for 1,208 performances. Allen also produced a revival of Ibsen’s Ghosts, for the Kennedy Center in 1982. In collaboration with David Campbell, he wrote the book and lyrics for the Broadway musical Honky Tonk Nights, which was about black vaudeville. It ran for just four performances in 1986.
Allen was an authority on the eighteenth-century painter Philip James de Loutherbourg, who designed scenery for David Garrick, and on burlesque. He visited theaters around the country and amassed a collection of some five thousand comedy sketches by visiting with elderly comics and writing down their routines. A graduate of Amherst College and the Yale School of Drama, he was the recipient of the first Phi Kappa Phi National Artist Award in 1983 after being nominated by the UT chapter of Phi Kappa Phi.