Friday, 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 12:00AMMonday, June 29, 2015
Press photograph of Frank Sinatra, ca. 1946
The Sinatra: An American Icon exhibition has many wonderful media stations for visitors—songs, excerpts from television specia…
SOURCE: The New York Public Library at 12:14PMSunday, June 28, 2015
1902 Birthday of Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), one of the most prolific and successful Broadway composers. His greatest successes came in partnership with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II (O…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMSaturday, June 27, 2015
1888 Birthday of Antoinette Perry (1888-1946), an actress and groundbreaking woman stage director who will help found the American Theatre Wing. In gratitude, the Wing will name its annu…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMWednesday, June 24, 2015
1942 Gypsy Rose Lee and Bobby Clark are featured in Michael Todd's musical revue, Star and Garter, which opens a 609-performance run at the Music Box Theatre.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMTuesday, June 23, 2015
Michael C. Hall, star of TV's "Dexter" and a recent replacement as star of Broadway's Hedwig and the Angry Inch, has been chosen to star in this fall's world premiere o…
SOURCE: Playbill at 01:31PMMichael C. Hall, star of TV's "Dexter" and a recent replacement as star of Broadway's Hedwig and the Angry Inch, has been chosen to star in this fall's world premiere o…
SOURCE: Playbill at 01:31PMMoscow’s ‘smallest but noisiest playhouse’ perseveres with latest documentary project in the face of legal threats and eviction by the authorities Peering at the audience from behind m…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:11AMSunday, June 21, 2015
1903 Caricaturist Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003) is born today. His distinctive looping line drawings will capture the essence of Broadway shows from the 1920s through the early 2000s. The Ma…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMFriday, June 19, 2015
1939 Lee and J. J. Shubert collaborate with Hellzapoppin creators Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson to present The Streets of Paris on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theatre. The revue's stars inc…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMThursday, June 18, 2015
July 9 at Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s West End BAFTA Award-winning writer and actor Stephen Merchant makes his West End debut in Richard Bean’s comic two-hander The Mentalists, runni…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:34AM 
