Tuesday, August 18, 2015
1873 Birthday of Otto Harbach (1873-1963) who will write lyrics and/or book for more than three dozen musicals including Roberta; No, No, Nanette; The Cat and the Fiddle; Rose-Marie …
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMMonday, August 17, 2015
1871 Playwright Jesse Lynch Williams is born today. During the 1917-1918 theatre season, Williams' play, Why Marry, will win the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for drama.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMSaturday, August 15, 2015
1879 The legendary Barrymore theatre family gets one more to add to its roster today as Ethel Barrymore is born. Her father is actor Maurice Barrymore and her brothers are John and Lionel. B…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMFriday, August 14, 2015
1888 Comedian DeWolf Hopper debuts his dramatic recitation of the poem Casey at the Bat at Wallack's Theatre. It will become a cornerstone of his act for the next 40 years.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMThursday, August 13, 2015
“Elaine Stritch: Still Here,” “Exact Change” and “Naked Hamilton” are among the shows in this year’s FringeNYC, which opens on Friday.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 07:37PMWednesday, August 12, 2015
Contact Strips of Anna Held (above) and Lillian Burkhardt
One of the themes of the exhibition Head Shots is the selection process through which performers view options and chose their heads…
SOURCE: The New York Public Library at 04:54PM1881 Birthday of Cecil B. DeMille (1881-1959), who began his career as a Broadway actor in shows including Hearts Are Trumps and To Have and To Hold, and a Broadway playwright and produc…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMSunday, August 9, 2015
1967 Playwright Joe Orton is found dead today in his London flat. Also found dead is his companion, writer and actor Kenneth Halliwell. It appears that Halliwell murdered the Loot playwright…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMSaturday, August 8, 2015
Star is latest in a line of film actors to be lured by live shows When John Hannah was a young boy in East Kilbride, the son of a toolmaker and a supermarket cleaner, a future as the star of…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:52AM1975 Liza Minnelli to the rescue! With only six days to learn the role of merry murderess Roxie Hart, the Academy Award-winning stage and film star agrees to fill in for an ailing Gwen V…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMFriday, August 7, 2015
1886 Future stage actress and second wife of Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., Billie Burke is born today in Washington, D.C. Born Mary William Ethelbert Appleton, Burke spent her childhood in England,…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMThursday, August 6, 2015
1947 Today's Variety announces that John Garfield will star in the premiere production of a new Tennessee Williams play, titled A Streetcar Named Desire. As history will have it, however…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMWednesday, August 5, 2015
1977 All Broadway marquee lights are dimmed tonight in honor of actor Alfred Lunt who died two days earlier. This is only the third time up to that point that such an action has been taken.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMMonday, August 3, 2015
1921 Composer Richard Adler is born today. Along with Jerry Ross he will go on to write two of the most influential musicals of the 1950s: The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees. The successful pa…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMSunday, August 2, 2015
Theatre of the Oppressed NYC Artists Respond
SOURCE: Culture Bot at 03:23PMSaturday, August 1, 2015
The Sick of the Fringe initiative highlights the mental health toll of Edinburgh’s endurance testIn Edinburgh from Friday, audiences of festival fringe-goers will sit in the dark in venues…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:28PMThursday, July 30, 2015
Ken Davenport, Cody Lassen, Hunter Arnold and Deaf West Theatre announced July 30 that the actors who played the rebellious students in the acclaimed Deaf West production of Steven Sater and…
SOURCE: Playbill at 01:43PMWednesday, July 29, 2015
Image from published sheet music of Little Nemo. Image ID: g99c836_001
A guest post By Brian D. Valencia
In one of two overblown patriotic spectacles, the Act 2 finale of Little Nemo in S…
SOURCE: The New York Public Library at 11:21AMTuesday, July 28, 2015
1920 Two of Broadway's greatest songwriting talents make their mainstem debuts today: lyricst Lorenz Hart, age 25, and composer Richard Rodgers, age 18, open their first musical, Poor Li…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMMonday, July 27, 2015
Bertha Kalich. Image ID: TH-25311
While curating Head Shots, we looked for unusual formats that performers believed would represent their careers better than the standard portrait. Or, at…
SOURCE: The New York Public Library at 04:39PMFriday, July 24, 2015
1920 Producer Alexander H. Cohen, known for bringing quality plays to Broadway for six decades, is born today. Lastly represented on Broadway by the Noel Coward play, Waiting in the Wings, s…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMThursday, July 23, 2015
1938 Helen Hayes is named the stage's greatest performer when the New York Sun prints its list of great performers today. Compiled after polling 150 notable people, mostly in the theatre…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMMonday, July 20, 2015
1961 Stop The World - I Want To Get Off opens tonight at the Queen's Theatre on London's West End. The musical, which follows the life of one man from birth to death, will run 4…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMFriday, July 17, 2015
1953 Actress Maude Adams dies today. Born in 1873, Adams, at the age of 32, played the title role in James M. Barrie's Peter Pan when it had its American premiere at the Empire Theatre i…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMSunday, July 12, 2015
1895 Birthday of Oscar Hammerstein II, scion of a notable theatrical family who went on to become its most famous and honored member as a lyricist and librettist. Hammerstein enjoyed a major…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMSaturday, July 11, 2015
1915 A King is born today... in the form of Yul Brynner. Brynner will, of course, go on to star as one half of the title of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The King And I, opposite Gert…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMWednesday, July 8, 2015
Edwin Booth. Stereograph by J. Gurney & Son. Image ID: 89096
When we started to think about an exhibition on Head Shots based on the Library for the Performing Arts’ collections, we…
SOURCE: The New York Public Library at 02:52PMSunday, July 5, 2015
1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the American National Theatre and Academy bill today, calling for a self-supporting national theatre. ANTA will get off to a slow start but wil…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMSaturday, July 4, 2015
1898 Birthday of actress Gertrude Lawrence (1898-1952), longtime acting partner of Noël Coward (Private Lives, Tonight at 8:30) and star of musicals by the Gershwin brothers (Oh, Kay!, …
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMFriday, July 3, 2015
1878 The original Yankee Doodle Dandy, George M. Cohan (1878-1942) is born on the 3rd of July, (not the 4th as was family legend) says. A member of the vaudeville team The Four Cohans wi…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMThursday, July 2, 2015
1900 Birthday of director/producer/writer Tyrone Guthrie (1900-1971) who will stage Broadway productions of The Tenth Man, Tamburlaine the Great and the Leonard Bernstein musical Candide.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM 
