1844 William Harrigan, half of the iconic 1880s writing and performing team of Harrigan and Hart, is born today. He and Tony Hart will create the popular Mulligan Guards characters reflectin…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1924 Henry Oscar and Esme Biddle are the leads of Byron by Alice Law, at the Century Theatre in Bayswater, England. In a very small role is someone named Laurence Olivier.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1895 Birthday of legendary film choreographer Busby Berkeley (1895-1976), whose career will be launched with a 12-show burst of creativity on Broadway between the end of 1926 and the…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1923 Lionel Barrymore stars in David Belasco's Laugh, Clown, Laugh!, the Pagliacci-like story of a middle-aged clown who adopts a young girl, but later, as she grows into womanho…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1906 Anna Held is The Parisian Model who inherits money mysteriously. Harry B. Smith provides the book and lyrics to Max Hoffman's score. While the show is directed by Julian Mitchell, t…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1864 Edwin Booth opens a four-month stand in Hamlet at the old Winter Garden Theatre.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1882 U.S. premiere of W. S. Gilbert & Arthur Sullivan's operetta Iolanthe, about fairies and other supernatural folk who get involved with Parliamentary peers.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1849 Birthday of author Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924), author of several Broadway plays in the early the 20th century, including Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Little Princess, The Pr…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1937 Ethel Barrymore and Dudley Digges star in The Ghost of Yankee Doodle. Written by Sidney Howard, the play deals with a woman pacifist whose industrialist family stands to profit from sel…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:37AM1694 Birthday of French author François Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire (1694-1778) whose satirical novel "Candide" served as source material for the 1956 Leo…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1922 The Lucky One is the brother who doesn't get the girl in this A. A. Milne play. Staged at the Theatre Guild by Theodore Komisarjevsky with a cast including Dennis King, Romney Brent…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:30AM1906 George Arliss and Mrs. Fiske star in The New York Idea, Langdon Mitchell's play which runs 66 performances at the Lyric Theatre.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1836 Birthday of satirist William S. Gilbert, later to achieve immortality as the lyricist half of the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta-writing team that produced The Mikado, The Pira…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1901 Birthday of actor/director/producer/teacher/acting coach Lee Strasberg (1901-1982) in Austria-Hungary. As a founder of the Group Theatre and Artistic Director of the Actors Stud…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1889 Playwright and director George S. Kaufman (1889-1961) is born today in Pittsburgh. A former newsman, Kaufman will make his mark with the comedy Dulcy in 1921, and will go on to writ…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1875 British comic operetta titans W. S. Gilbert & Arthur Sullivan make their U.S. debut today with Trial by Jury at the Eagle Variety Theatre, where it runs 8 performances.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1905 Blanche Bates is Minnie, sweetheart of the mines in Girl of the Golden West. She tends a saloon, fugitive lover and pursuing sheriff. Writer, director, producer David Belasco was no str…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1833 Birthday of master actor Edwin Booth (1833-1893), a major interpreter of Shakespeare and brother to actor Junius Brutus Booth and presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth. Broadway&#…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1874 Birthday of pioneering African-American performer-composer Bert Williams (1874-1922), who wrote music for Broadway's In Dahomey (1903) and Abyssinia (1906), but achieved…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1872 Birthday of Maude Adams (1872-1953), Broadway's first Peter Pan, who originated the role in 1904, and returned at least three times through 1915.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1900 Opening night of legendary musical Floradora at the Casino Theatre for a 553-performance run — the first major hit of the 20th century. The production is remembered principally fo…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1818 Playwright and novelist Ivan Turgenev is born in Russia. His most notable play is A Month in the Country, but he will make a bit of history in 2002 when his 150-year-old play Fo…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1913 Birthday of June Hovik, better known as June Havoc, even better known as namesake of Baby June, the character based on her in the musical Gypsy. The show pretty accurately sums up her c…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1904 The timeless anthem "Give My Regards to Broadway" is first sung tonight on the Broadway stage tonight at the opening of George M. Cohan's Little Johnny Jones at the Libert…
SOURCE: Playbill at 11:00PM1854 Birthday of John Philip Sousa (1854-1932), composer of countless marches, who also found time to write Broadway musicals including Chris and the Wonderful Lamp (1900), The Free Lanc…
SOURCE: Playbill at 11:00PM1895 Birthday of Charles MacArthur (1895-1956), newsman-turned-playwright, whose wisecracking oeuvre includes The Front Page, Twentieth Century (the play on which the musical On …
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1787 Birthday of British actor Edmund Kean (1787-1833), considered one of the finest actors of the early 18th century. Among his greatest roles was Shakespeare's Richard III. He will…
SOURCE: Playbill at 11:00PM1916 A new play by a new playwright opens at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York's Greenwich Village, far from Broadway and Times Square, but the play and the author will soon revolut…
SOURCE: Playbill at 11:00PM1903 Daniel Frohman opens the New Lyceum Theatre on Manhattan's West 45th Street with E. H. Sothern in The Proud Prince. Designed by Herts & Tallant, the theatre was later rechri…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM1920 Opening night for Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, starring Charles S. Gilpin as a onetime railway porter who goes to Africa and rises to become the corrupt head of a new e…
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:10AM1896 Birthday of Ethel Waters (1896-1977), Broadway star of musicals and plays including The Member of the Wedding, As Thousands Cheer, Cabin in the Sky and Lew Leslie's Blackbirds.
SOURCE: Playbill at 12:00AM
