Saturday, October 6, 2012
1919 Hitchy-Koo 1919 proves to be a minor success for star Raymond Hitchcock, but it produces the first song hit, "Old Fashioned Garden," for its 28-year-old composer, Cole Porter.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMFriday, October 5, 2012
1896 Broadway premiere of Secret Service, which becomes a perennial touring hit for its author and star, William Gillette.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMThursday, October 4, 2012
1880 Writer Damon Runyon, whose short story "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown" will go on to form the basis for the musical Guys and Dolls, is born today.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMWednesday, October 3, 2012
1859 Eleanora Duse born in Italy. One of the leading actresses of her day, "The Great Duse" will champion the realistic playwrights of the early 20th century, and will have some of…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMTuesday, October 2, 2012
1890 Julius Henry Marx is born in New York. Under the nickname "Groucho," he and his brothers form one of the most enduring comedy acts ever, The Marx Brothers, rising from Vaudevi…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMMonday, October 1, 2012
1928 Mae West's controversial play Pleasure Man opens at the Biltmore Theatre. It's the story of an actor who has impregnated so many women that the brother of one of them takes up a…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMSunday, September 30, 2012
1915 The huge Hippodrome Theatre opens one of its most successful extravaganzas, Hip! Hip! Hooray!. Described by the New York Times as "a gargantuan spectacle, smarter and more sumptuou…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMFriday, September 28, 2012
1892 Birthday of playwright Elmer Rice (1892 -1967), author of many dramas including Street Scene, Counsellor-at-Law, Dream Girl, The Grand Tour and the libretto to Kurt Weill's musical …
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMThursday, September 27, 2012
1898 Birthday of Vincent Youmans (1898-1946), one of the iconic Broadway composers of the 1920s, whose career will go into a nosedive after that bubbly decade ends. His scores will include N…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMTuesday, September 25, 2012
1928 Chee-Chee, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's musical about castration in ancient China, opens to searing reviews and goes on to close after just 31 performances, the team's shor…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMSaturday, September 22, 2012
1921 The Music Box Revue of 1921 is the premiere performance at the new Music Box Theatre, which opened on 45th Street today. This is the first edition of the Revue, itself the first to exhi…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMSaturday, September 15, 2012
1889 Robert Benchley, the acclaimed actor, critic, and humorist of the early Twentieth Century, is born today. Benchley will marry Gertrude Darling and make his stage debut in this month in …
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMFriday, September 14, 2012
1910 Birthday of Lehman Engel (1910-1982), the Tony-winning Broadway conductor who will found the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop. Among the shows he will conduct are original productions of Wo…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMThursday, September 13, 2012
1894 Birthday of British playwright J.B. Priestley (1894-1984), author of plays An Inspector Calls, When We Are Married, Laburnum Grove and A Severed Head.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMWednesday, September 12, 2012
1866 The Broadway musical is born. The Black Crook opens at Niblo's Garden, a musical extravaganza featuring a melodramatic plot and scantily-dressed ballerinas who serve as chorus girls…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMTuesday, September 11, 2012
1912 Jane Cowl becomes a star while performing in Within the Law by Bayard Veiller, which opened on this night. The play is about a woman wrongfully accused of theft. This was also the prem…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMSaturday, September 8, 2012
1914 A farce about selling soap called It Pays to Advertise, by Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter Hackett, opens at the Cohan Theatre. It stars Grant Mitchell and Ruth Shepley.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMFriday, September 7, 2012
1909 Director Elia Kazan is born. Kazan would go on to direct the award-winning plays Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire. His success reached to the silver screen as well. He w…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMFriday, August 31, 2012
1897 John Drew and Billie Burke (in her Broadway debut) are the stars of the new play, My Wife, opening tonight at the Empire Theatre. There will be 129 performances.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMThursday, August 30, 2012
The warring parties in the "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" lawsuits -- one-time director Julie Taymor and the show's producers -- have reached what appears to be a tentative settlement.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:18PMTuesday, August 28, 2012
1917 Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse open their romantic musical-comedy Leave It To Jane tonight at the Longacre Theatre. The score includes "Just You Watch My Step," &q…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMMonday, August 27, 2012
1878 Birthday of Sam S. Shubert (1878-1905), co-founder of the theatre-owning and producing titan, the Shubert Organization. Broadway's Shubert Theatre is named for him.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMFriday, August 24, 2012
1985 Morrie Ryskind dies in his home in Washington, DC. The playwright who collaborated with George S. Kaufman, Ira Gershwin, and George Gershwin on three musicals, Strike Up the Band, Let &…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMWednesday, August 22, 2012
1922 Theoni V. Aldredge, one of Broadway's foremost costume designers of the late 20th century, is born today in Greece. Included among her dozens of Broadway projects will be A Chorus L…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMMonday, August 20, 2012
Reports on An End to Dreaming, Antigone Unearthed, Blanche: The Bittersweet Life of a Wild Prairie Dame, and KRiEp.
SOURCE: TheaterMania at 10:00AMThursday, August 16, 2012
1913 Montague Glass' comedy Potash and Perlmutter begins a hit run at the Cohan Theatre, starring George Sidney and Alexander Carr as the hapless pair.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMTuesday, August 14, 2012
Reports on Tail! Spin!, Gay Camp, and The Importance of Doing Art.
SOURCE: TheaterMania at 09:38AMMonday, August 13, 2012
Reports on Pink Milk, The Zebra Shirt of Lonely Children and Dark Hollow: An Appalachian Woyzeck
SOURCE: TheaterMania at 10:15AM1895 Bert Lahr (nee Irving Lahrheim), the future stage and screen clown, is born today in New York. Following an early career in Vaudeville, Lahr will enjoy a widely successful career on Bro…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMSaturday, August 11, 2012
1867 Actor-producer Joseph Weber, of Weber and Fields, is born today.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AMFriday, August 10, 2012
1911 Birthday of playwright Jerome Chodorov, who wrote the play, My Sister Eileen, which he later adapted as the book for the musical Wonderful Town, which won him a Tony Award. Other plays …
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM 
