Today's Birthdays 1/26

[do_re_milla]

Posted: 1/26/04 at 9:36pm

Maria Augusta Trapp 01/26/1905 author, source mat'l - The Sound of Music

James Van Heusen 01/26/1913 - Feb 7, 1990 - Academy Award-winning composer: Swinging on a Star [1944], All the Way [1957], High Hopes [1959], Call Me Irresponsible [1963]; wrote the music to over 75 songs for Frank Sinatra with lyricists Johnny Burke and Sammy Cahn: My Kind of Town, Second Time Around

William Hopper 1/26/1915 - 3/6/1970 performer - tv's & film's Rebel Without a Cause; Perry Mason

Anne Jeffreys 01/26/1923 performer - tv's & film's I Married an Angel, Dick Tracy [1945], Boys’ Night Out, General Hospital [soap], Clifford

Earl Scruggs 01/26/1924 performer, composer, Collaborator with Lester Flatt (Foggy Mountain Boys) - Hayride

Paul Newman 01/26/1925 performer, Husband of Joanne Woodward (January 29, 1958 - present) - Picnic; The Desperate Hours (Karl Malden, George Grizzard); Sweet Bird of Youth; Baby Want a Kiss; Our Town; film's Academy Award-winning actor: The Color of Money, [1986], Cool Hand Luke, Hud, The Sting, The Hudsucker Proxy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Verdict, Exodus; director: Rachel, Rachel, Harry and Son; race car driver; salad dressing and spaghetti sauce maker

William Redfield 01/26/1927 performer - Out of This World; A Man for All Seasons (Paul Scofield, Albert Dekker); A Minor Adjustment (Joan Darling); Dude (Nell Carter)

Eartha Kitt 1/26/1928 performer - stage play: Faust, film: New Faces of 1952, Boomerang; note: Kitt’s birth certificate [found in 1997] lists her actual birthdate as Jan. 17, 1927

Jules Feiffer 01/26/1929 performer, Writer, Source Material - The Apple Tree; Little Murders (Barbara Cook, Eliott Gould); Oh! Calcutta!; Knock Knock; Grown Ups; Short Talks on the Universe; Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist [1986]; scriptwriter: Carnal Knowledge, Little Murders, Popeye

Scott Glenn 01/26/1941 performer - The Impossible Years (Alan King, Bert Convy); Burn This; film's Apocalypse Now, The Right Stuff, Silverado, The Hunt for Red October, The Silence of the Lambs

Julian Schlossberg 01/26/1942 producer - It Had to Be You (Joseph Bologna, Renee Taylor); The Beauty Queen of Leenane; Taller Than a Dwarf; Fortune's Fool; Sly Fox

Christopher Hampton 01/26/1946 Writer, Lyricist - 1971 A Doll's House; The Philanthropist; Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Alan Rickman, Lindsay Duncan); Sunset Boulevard; Art; Life (x) 3

David Strathairn 01/26/1949 performer - Einstein and the Polar Bear; 1997 Three Sisters; 2001 Dance of Death; 2003 Salome (Al Pacino, Marisa Tomei, Dianne Wiest)

SHOWS THAT OPENED ON THIS DATE:

1927 Saturday's Children, an unlikely comedy penned by Maxwell Anderson, follows the break-up of a marriage and is produced by the Actor's Theatre. Ruth Hammond and Richard Barbee are the couple, Beulah Bondi and Ruth Gordon are also in the cast. There will be 310 performances.

1931 The Theatre Guild produces Lynn Riggs' cowboy play Green Grow the Lilacs, starring Lee Strasberg, Tex Cooper and Franchot Tone. It runs 64 performances at Guild Theatre. A decade later it will be suggested to the team of Rodgers and Hammerstein as the possible basis of a musical. They will turn it into Oklahoma!

1934 - The Apollo Theatre opened in New York City as a ‘Negro vaudeville theatre’. It became the showplace for many of the great black entertainers, singers, groups and instrumentalists in the country. If you made it... you played it... at the Apollo Theatre. Ella Fitzgerald discovered here!

1950 Paul Scofield, Claire Bloom and Margaret Rutherford Ring Round the Moon at the Globe Theatre. Peter Brook directs this Jean Anouilh comedy, adapted by Christopher Fry. There will be 682 performances. Spring 1999 saw a revival of the show on Broadway.

1975 Giant talking lizards emerge from the sea and talk philosophy with a picnicking human couple in Edward Albee's Seascape. It runs just 63 performances at the Shubert Theatre, with Frank Langella as the head lizard, but then wins the Pulitzer Prize.

1988 Watch that chandelier! Tonight's the night Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera makes Broadway's Majestic Theatre its seemingly permanent haunt. Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman star in this musicalization of Gaston Leroux's forever-adaptable novel.

1989 Black and Blue opens tonight at the Minskoff Theater. The show is a musical revue, celebrating the influence of American jazz and blues. Black and Blue will receive 10 1989 Tony Award nominations and win three, including one for Ruth Brown as Best Actress in a Musical. Having his first Broadway opening is a 15-year-old tap genius named Savion Glover.

1996 The opening of the Off-Off-Broadway musical Rent proves both triumphant and tragic. Triumphant, because reviews and audience interest pushes the show to Broadway, where it becomes an award-winning smash. Tragic, because one day earlier, Jan. 25, 1996, author-composer Jonathan Larson died of an aortic aneurysm.

2003 Noel Coward's short-lived 1946 operetta Pacific 1860, gets its long-delayed U.S. premiere as part of the Musicals in Mufti series at Off-Broadway's York Theatre Company.

ON THIS DAY IN:

1913 - Jim Thorpe wrote to the chairman of the Amateur Athletic Union and revealed that he had played professional baseball in 1909 and 1910. He returned the two gold medals (decathlon and pentathlon) that he had won in the 1912 Olympic games in Stockholm, Sweden. Sixty years later, and twenty years after his death, the AAU restored Jim Thorpe’s amateur standing and the Olympic honors.

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

Milla