Today's Birthdays - 5/1

[do_re_milla]

Posted: 5/1/09 at 4:17pm

Junius Brutus Booth 05/01/1796 - 11/30/1852 performer, the 1 that started it all: father of Junius Brutus Booth, Jr. who excelled as a theatrical manager, while Edwin Booth surpassed his father as an actor. A third son was the accused assassin of President Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth; he, himself, was a contemporary of Kean

Kate Smith 5/1/1909 - 6/17/1986 the American singer who was considered the "first lady of radio," was born. 1931 - Singer Kate Smith began her long and illustrious radio career with CBS on this, her birthday. The 22-year-old Smith started out with no sponsors and a paycheck of just $10 a week for the nationally broadcast daily program. However, within 30 days, her salary increased to a more respectable $1,500 a week!

Glen Ford (Gwyllyn Ford [Birthname])05/01/1916 - 8/30/2006 performer; father of Peter Ford, husband of Cynthia Hayward, Katherine Hays, Eleanor Powell (1943-1959) divorced; 1 son, Peter - Soliloquy (Clarence Derwent, John Beal ); film's The Teahouse of the August Moon, Blackboard Jungle, Midway, Don’t Go Near the Water, Cimarron; Final Verdict. I am very,very sad that he never received an Oscar!

Danielle Darrieux 05/01/1917 performer - Coco [replacement]; Ambassador (Nikolas Dante, Andrea Marcovicci); film's Mayerling (1936); Ruy Blas (194; Alexander the Great (1956); The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967); Dangerous Liaisons (2003)

Jack Paar 5/1/1918 - 1/27/2004 the touchstone of TV hosts: The Jack Paar Show; The Tonight Show

Tad Mosel 05/01/1922 - 8/24/2008 writer, performer - Mr. Mosel was among a handful of writers, including Paddy Chayefsky, Gore Vidal and Rod Serling, who have received much of the credit for what has been called the golden age of live television. Beginning in 1947 and ending a decade later, dramatic plays performed live were a staple of network broadcasts. Mr. Mosel wrote more than two dozen original scripts, not all of them credited, for shows like ?Playhouse 90,? ?Studio One? and ?Philco Television Playhouse.? For ?Producers? Showcase,? he adapted ?The Petrified Forest,? the Robert Sherwood play about customers in a remote cafe being held hostage by a gang of outlaws. It starred Henry Fonda, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in a reprise of the bad-guy role, Duke Mantee, he played in the 1936 film. On television, Mr. Mosel worked frequently with the producer Fred Coe, and it was Mr. Coe who asked him to adapt James Agee?s autobiographical novel, ?A Death in the Family,? for the stage. Agee died in 1955, but the book, published in 1957, won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Mr. Mosel?s adaptation, with the title ?All the Way Home,? was praised for preserving the tender spirit of the novel, about a Tennessee family in 1915 overcome by grief when the father is killed in a car accident. Directed by Arthur Penn, the play opened on Nov. 30, 1960, on Broadway at the Belasco Theater, but even with fine reviews, especially for Colleen Dewhurst?s performance as the mother ? and a script that won a Pulitzer Prize ? ticket sales were slow, and the producers posted closing notices four separate times, including on the day after opening night. Each time, ticket sales picked up, creating a series of last-minute rescues that newspapers began referring to as ?The Miracle on 44th Street.? It finally closed on Sept. 16, 1961, after 333 performances. Mr. Mosel went to Amherst College but left to enlist in the Army after Pearl Harbor. After three years in the Army, one in the South Pacific, he finished at Amherst, then attended Yale Drama School and Columbia. He was writing plays as well as acting, and he landed the nonspeaking (but scene-stealing) part of a haplessly lost private in a comic farce, ?At War With the Army,? which ran on Broadway for several months in 1949. The same year, his first teleplay made it to the screen. Mr. Mosel never matched the success of ?All the Way Home.? He wrote the screenplay for the popular film ?Up the Down Staircase? (1967) and the teleplay for a television version of ?All the way Home? in 1971. source: NY Times obit. - At War With the Army (Gary Merrill); All the Way Home (Colleen Dewhurst, Lillian Gish, Arthur Hill)

Louis Nye 05/01/1922 - 10/9/2005 performer - Flahooley (Barbara Cook, Yma Sumac); 1970 Charley's Aunt (Maureen O'Sullivan); tv's & film's Beverly Hillbillies; Love Boat; Inspector Gadget; Curb Your Enthusiasm; Sex Kittens Go to College

Joseph Heller 05/01/1923 - Dec 12, 1999 lyricist, writer; God Knows, Sex and the Single Girl, Dirty Dingus Magee, Catch-22 - We Bombed in New Haven; film's Catch-22; Sex & the Single Girl

Jack Aaron 05/01/1933 performer - The Sunshine Boys (Jack Klugman, Tony Randall, Matthew Arkin); 1989 Cafe Crown (Bob Dishy, David Margulies, Anne Jackson & Eli Wallach, Fyvush Finkel); All the Girls Came Out to Play (Dennis Cole)

Dennis Creaghan 05/01/1942 performer - 45 Seconds From Broadway; The Elephant Man (Philip Anglim)

SHOWS THAT OPENED ON THIS DATE:

1786 Mozart's opera "The Marriage of Figaro" premiered in Vienna.

1929 Albert Carroll, Dorothy Sands and James Cagney are members of this final collection of The Grand Street Follies. The show will survive just 93 performances at the Booth Theatre on Broadway.

1947 The Telephone / The Medium
- The Telephone with Marilyn Cotlow
- The Medium with Marie Powers

1958 Jane Eyre with Jan Brooks, Eric Portman, Blanch Yurka

1983 Originally intended as a revival of the 1927 Gershwin musical Funny Face, Tommy Tune's My One and Only has transformed into its own new musical as it opens on Broadway. The show, with book by Timothy S. Mayer and Peter Stone and music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin, respectively, will play 767 performances at the St. James Theatre.

1991 Eight years later, Tommy Tune is still on Broadway as he directs and, of course, choreographs The Will Rogers Follies which opens at the Palace Theatre tonight. The show will garner 11 Tony nominations and win six of them, including two for Tune and Best Musical.

1996 An Ideal Husband with Dulcie Gray & Michael Denison [what a wonderful couple], Penny Downie, Martin Shaw, David Yelland, Angela Thornton, Denis Holmes

2000 Dirty Blonde with Claudia Shear, Kevin Chamberlin & Bob Stillman

2001 King Hedley II with Brian Stokes Mitchell & Leslie Uggams

2003 Bernadette Peters stars in a major Broadway revival of Gypsy, which runs 13 months and is nominated for a Tony Award as Best Revival.

2006 The Drowsy Chaperone

ON THIS DAY IN:

1883 - Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody) staged his first Wild West Show.

1931 New York's 102-story Empire State Building was dedicated.

1941 The Orson Welles film "Citizen Kane" premiered in New York.

On May 1, 1960, the Soviet Union shot down an American U-2 reconnaissance plane near Sverdlovsk and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers.

(sources: IBDB, IMDB, NYT's ON THIS DAY, 440.com’s Those Were The Days, Playbill.com)

Milla