1931 Playwright, producer David Belasco dies today in New York City. He began his theatrical life as a child actor in California and started writing plays in his twenties. He adapted the Joh…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1907 Writer-playwright Daphne du Maurier is born to actor Gerald and actress Muriel du Maurier. Daphne will later adapt her novel Rebecca into a play.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1905 Theatrical producer Sam S. Shubert dies today in a train accident. His brothers Lee and J.J. will honor him by naming many of the theaters they are to build after him, including their f…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1838 John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865), perhaps the most infamous actor in American history, is born today. The son of actor Junius Brutus Booth, and brother of actors Junius Brutus Booth Jr…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1915 Among the dead after the sinking of the Lusitania are producer-manager Charles Frohman and playwright Charles Klein. Frohman's first success was Shenandoah. In 1893 he opened th…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1912 Richard Le Gallienne's Orestes stars Edyth Olive and Rathmel Wilson. It plays at London's Boudoir Theatre.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1859 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 12:00AM1922 Comedy team Potash and Perlmutter are Partners Again. The show plays 31 weeks at the Selwyn Theatre.
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 12:00AM1946 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 12:00AM1886 Birthday of Willie Howard (1886-1949), half of the comedy team of Willie and Eugene Howard, who will appear in vaudeville, in musicals Sally and Girl Crazy, and in various editions …
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1914 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 12:00AM1913 On The Purple Road there's a disguised Napoleon waiting to woo an unsuspecting girl named Wanda. Valli Valli is the innocent soon to meet her Waterloo at the Liberty Theatre in New …
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1947 The first Tony Awards ceremony is held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Thirteen awards are presented to the likes of Helen Hayes, Ingrid Bergman, Fredric March, Jose Ferre…
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…
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