11,729 stories by "Trav S.d."
The 60 year professional career of character actor Dick Elliott (1886-1961) may be neatly divided into two distinct halves: 1) the first three decades, about which very little is known, but …
In the days before the internet, when I was kid poring away at my Beatle-ology studies, I had an unfortunate and incorrect tendency to regard Badfinger as a one-hit-wonder, a footnote in the…
Today marks a true cause for celebration " the 200th birthday of the famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903). It probably hasn't escaped your attention that landscape arc…
We are so sorry that the title of this post is not also the name of an act. It's just our way of telling you that the article treats also of our touchstone's significant others. We learned o…
Jazz piano player and singer Rose Murphy (1913-1989) came along just a shade too late for the major vaudeville circuits, but she was there just afterward, in the late 1930s as an opening and…
There is no reason to suspect that, had she lived until the age of sound, Mary Thurman (Mary Christiansen, 1895-1925) wouldn't have continued to have been at the very least a well-known supp…
There were two performing characters name of Doc Roberts traversing Southern highways and byways back about a century ago. The parallel names seems to have been a coincidence, rather than an…
It is interesting to speculate whether the French comedy team Foottit and Chocolat could have worked with popular success in American vaudeville. The "Master and Man" aspects of their stage …
Contemporary lovers of classic cinema have likely seen Basil Sydney (1894-1968) in supporting roles in any number of films: Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), Olivier's Hamlet (1948), Disney's Tre…
Inevitably I'll do a post I think about Downton Abbey and the broader oeuvre of Julian Fellowes, for a I have good and bad things to say on the subject! But at present there's more to be sai…
Be bop legend Charlie Mingus (1922-79) would have been 100 years old today. I love be bop, but being a theatre person primarily, I first learned about Mingus through a theatrical connection.…
As I wrote here, Tom Jones is one of my favorite movies, and consequently (though not of necessity), it became one of my favorite novels. Tony Richardson's 1963 adaptation is no doubt cinema…
Today is the 90th birthday of Elaine May (b. 1932). Having already done a post on her old comedy team with Mike Nichols, and one on Nichols himself (I'll probably do at least one more), we t…
In the spirit of our earlier posts on Drunk Comedians and Plus-Sized Comedians, this year we observe 420 Day with a brief listicle on certain comedians who are identified with the cannabis p…
Today, May Robison (Mary Robison, 1858-1942) is best remembered for starring as the original Apple Annie in Frank Capra's Lady for a Day (1933). The film was released during the 50th year of…
This post is so titled to differentiate its subject from the guy who played Grandpa Munster. THIS Al Lewis (1901-1967) was a tin pan alley songwriter, mostly a lyricist, whose career spanned…
The precise date of Lodena Edgecumbe's birth is not known; she was a foundling, discovered in San Francisco shortly after the 1906 Earthquake when only a few days old. Edgecumbe was the surn…
If you were like me and roughly between the ages of 8 and 16 when Don Kirshner's Rock Concert was on television, you might have asked the question, "Who is Don Kirshner, and why does he have…
I would likely have done a post on English actor George Frederick Cooke (1756-1812) anyhow, but the lore surrounding his death, posthumous dismemberment, and the permanent residency of his r…
April 17 is National Bat Appreciation Day. In the past we have used this day as an occasion to explore Mary Robert's Rinehart's The Bat, and we have certainly talked quite a lot about Batman…
World Circus Day is always the third Saturday in April; this year, we thought we would use the occasion to help you maximize the usefulness of the content in the Travalanche circus section, …
This World Circus Day presents us with an occasion to explore a stage and screen vehicle we have mentioned many times on this blog, Polly of the Circus. This influential play was penned in 1…
60 years ago (April 15, 1962) an important show biz act, then known as The Osmond Brothers. made its television debut. The group was a barber shop quartet made up adorable Mormon kids from U…
Carl Rosini (Jakob Rosenzweig, 1885-1969) was the original Rosini, the man from who the later magician Paul Rosini took his name (much as Harry Houdini took Robert-Houdin's), although in the…
Tonight at midnight Eastern time, TCM will be premiering something truly rare: an independently made silent film from 1938! Seattle native Richard H. Lyford would eventually amass many legit…
