1859 Birthday of A.L. Erlanger (1859-1930), who, as half of the team of Klaw and Erlanger, produced dozens of Broadway shows during the first three decades of the 20th century, including…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1919 Birthday of Betty Comden, Broadway lyricist and librettist, mainly in collaboration with Adolph Green. Her works include On the Town, Wonderful Town, Peter Pan, On the Twentieth Century…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1887 Birthday of Vernon Castle who, with wife and dancing partner Irene Castle, would redefine not just what dancing represented on Broadway, but the kind of music used for that dancing. He …
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1922 Comedy team Potash and Perlmutter are Partners Again. The show plays 31 weeks at the Selwyn Theatre.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1924 Birthday of Sheldon Harnick, who will go on to write lyrics to musicals including Fiorello!, She Loves Me, The Apple Tree and Fiddler on the Roof.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1899 Happy birthday Edward Kennedy Ellington, who, taking the surname "Duke," became one of the 20th century's most important musician-composers. His Broadway shows, Beggar…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1900 Cho-Cho San and her passionate and tragic love illuminate David Belasco's adaptation of John Luther Long's story, Madame Butterfly. It is oddly paired on a double bill at…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1903 The Cohan family is Running for Office. Son George M. Cohan wrote the book and the music at the 14th Street Theatre. It will run for six weeks.
SOURCE: Playbill at 01:00AM1926 Sex. It's a comedy. Mae West plays a Canadian woman with no time for those mountees; it's the British navy for her. It runs through one season, but the following it is raided as…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1927 When a woman loves sailors so much she follows them all around the world, it's time to Hit the Deck. Vincent Youmans provides the score for Herbert Fields' book adapted from the…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1905 Sir Henry Irving's production of The Merchant of Venice was to have opened the annual Shakespeare Festival at Stratford-upon-Avon. But Irving was taken ill and Frank Benson …
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1564 Okay, no one's actually certain that April 23, 1564 was William Shakespeare's birthday, but that's the accepted date. Over the next 52 years, the Bard would pen such works a…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1895 Broadway debut of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, starring Henry Miller as Jack Worthing.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1925 Tallulah Bankhead and Edna Best are Fallen Angels at London's Globe Theatre. Noël Coward's comedy describes two wives who get drunk while trying to get even with their husbands…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1908 The four Cohans (George, Helen, Jerry and Josephine) are the stars of The Yankee Prince. George M. Cohan wrote, directed and co-produced this musical at Broadway's Knickerbocker…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1946 Actor Tim Curry is born in Cheshire, England. He will create memorable Broadway roles including Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, Mozart in Amadeus, Dada artist Tristan Tzara in…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1936 In Irwin Shaw's Bury the Dead the task becomes impossible as the six dead soldiers refuse the grave. This one-act protest against the war will run three months at the Ethel Barr…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1917 John Barrymore stars in Gerald DuMaurier's Peter Ibbetson at Broadway's Republic Theatre. Lionel Barrymore, Constance Collier, Madge Evans, and Laura Hope Crews are also in the …
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1906 John Philip Sousa supplies the music for The Free Lance. Herbert Gresham stage this 35 performance run at the New Amsterdam Theatre on Broadway.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1929 In The Camel Through the Needle's Eye, Miriam Hopkins plays a poor woman who discovers the hard way that money can't buy happiness. This drama will run six months.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1865 Our American Cousin starring Laura Keene is in performance tonight when John Wilkes Booth shoots President Abraham Lincoln at the Ford's Theatre in Washington D.C. Booth's broth…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1905 The colossal Hippodrome Theatre opens on Broadway today. The inaugural production is the colorful extravaganza A Yankee Circus on Mars. It will run 176 performances.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:16AM1914 Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Herbert Beerbohm Tree are the very first Eliza Doolittle and Professor Higgins. George Bernard Shaw's tale of class and character, Pygmalion, wins 118 perf…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1868 Birthday of master actor George Arliss, who starred in a series of historical vehicles, including Hamilton and Disraeli.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1926 Actor-manager Henry Miller, 66, dies today in New York. He acted opposite many of the leading ladies of the time, including Helena Modjeska. As a leading man with the Empire Stock C…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1904 New York City bids adieu to Longacre Square, which had no particular reputation, and says hello to Times Square, which soon develops quite a reputation indeed. Mayor George B. McClellan…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1906 Britain's first actor-M.P., A.E.W. Mason, delivers his first speech. The theatre community sees this as a victory, hoping it will have an advocate in the House of Commons.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1921 Sarah Bernhardt, who recently had one leg amputated, comes to London to play the title role in Louis Verneuil's Daniel at the Prince's Theatre. When she found a wooden leg unwie…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:12AM1911 Minnie Maddern Fiske stars as Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh, a woman anxious to conceal her mid-continent past under a veneer of British manners. Harry James Smith's comedy runs at t…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1923 There's trouble At Mrs. Beam's — this boardinghouse keeper thinks one of her guests is a killer. There will be 280 performances at London's Royalty Theatre of this C. K. M…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1918 Actor-manager Henry Miller opens his theatre in New York City. It's designed to seat 1,000 spectators and capable of handling the latest staging innovations. In 1998 the theatre…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM
