[6] After spending several years in New York, Sherman was appointed playwright in residence at Mills College in Oakland, California, where his rock musical, A Solitary Thing, premiered in 1963.
First produced in London's West End starring Ian McKellen, the play tells the story of Max, a gay man in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.
After Max and his boyfriend are forced to flee the city following the Night of the Long Knives, the two live in hiding for two years before being captured by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp.
He had great success with his re-write of the book for the musical The Boy from Oz, based on Peter Allen's life and career, earning him a second Tony nomination.
Following that critical acclaim, Sherman also premiered stage adaptations of the novels A Passage to India by E.M. Forster and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone by Tennessee Williams.
Sherman adapted Bent for the big screen in 1997 with the help of director Sean Mathias and starring such actors as Clive Owen, Ian McKellen, and Mick Jagger.
[12] Other film titles include Clothes in the Wardrobe in 1992 (released in the US as The Summer House, 1993), an adaptation of Alice Thomas Ellis's novel, with Jeanne Moreau, Joan Plowright, Julie Walters and Lena Headey, Alive and Kicking (1996), directed by Nancy Meckler, with Jason Flemyng, Antony Sher, Dorothy Tutin and Bill Nighy, as well as a collaboration with Franco Zeffirelli on Callas Forever (2002), a biographical film of opera star Maria Callas, with Fanny Ardant and Jeremy Irons.
Sherman also wrote The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (2003), a made-for-TV movie directed by Robert Allan Ackerman, with Helen Mirren, Anne Bancroft and Olivier Martinez, and Mrs Henderson Presents (2005), the tale of an eccentric World War I widow, Laura Henderson, who buys the old Windmill Theatre in London and relaunches it as a venue for female all nude revues.