Today's Birthdays 1/26

[do_re_milla]

Posted: 1/26/07 at 7:13pm

Maria Augusta Trapp 01/26/1905 - 3/28/1987 author, source mat'l; I'll never forget as a little girl in the late Spring going to visit my godfather in Stowe, Vt. We went to the chalet inn that the Trapp family built & maintained. There was Maria herself, tending a beautiful flower garden. It was a thrill. - The Sound of Music

Charles Lane 1/26/1905 performer - Love in E Flat (Joe Ponazecki, Marcia Rodd); film's Music Man; Twentieth Century; Golddiggers of 1933; Ball of Fire; Arsenic & Old Lace; Teacher's Pet; It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World; Murphy's Romance; War and Remembrance

James Van Heusen 01/26/1913 - Feb 7, 1990 - Swingin' The Dream (Louis Armstrong, Dandridge Sisters); Nelli Bly; Carnival in Flanders (Dolores Gray, John Raitt); Skyscraper; Walking Happy; 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 - Romeo & Juiliet (Katharine Cornell); Order Please; tv's & film's Rebel Without a Cause; Perry Mason

Anne Jeffreys 01/26/1923 performer, born in N.C., Wife of Robert Sterling (1951 - present); apparently Kurt Weill became a big fan of hers when he heard her sing "Tosca" at the Brooklyn Opera House and hailed her for his musical version of the Elmer Rice Pulitzer Prize play "Street Scene," for which she received critical acclaim. Ck out link below for more interesting info on shows & beautiful pics of Miss Jeffreys - Street Scene (Ellen Repp); My Romance; Kiss Me Kate [replacement]; Three Wishes for Jamie (Charlotte Rae, John Raitt); 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); race car driver; salad dressing and spaghetti sauce maker; activist - Picnic; The Desperate Hours (Karl Malden, George Grizzard); Sweet Bird of Youth; Baby Want a Kiss; 2002 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

William Redfield 01/26/1927 - Aug 17, 1976 father of Adam Redfield, performer - Out of This World; A Man for All Seasons (Paul Scofield, Albert Dekker); A Minor Adjustment (Joan Darling); Dude (Nell Carter); orig Our Town; Virginia "An American Musical Romance"

Eartha Kitt 1/26/1928 performer; 2006 Nightlife Lifetime Award - 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; tv's & film's The Edge of Night; Gargoyles; Apocalypse Now, The Right Stuff, Silverado, The Hunt for Red October, The Silence of the Lambs; Urban Cowboy

Julian Schlossberg 01/26/1942 producer; Founder and owner of Castle Hill Productions. Off-Broadway credits include "Adult Entertainment," "The Unexpected Man," "If Love Were All," "Death Defying Acts," "Vita & Virginia," and "Power Plays" among others. - It Had to Be You (Joseph Bologna, Renee Taylor); The Beauty Queen of Leenane; Taller Than a Dwarf; Fortune's Fool; 2004 Sly Fox; tv's & film's Going Hollywood: The '30s; Going Hollywood: The War Years; Elia Kazan: A Director's Journey; Nichols & May Make 2

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; Dracula, the Musical; tv's & film's Carrington; Hotel du Lac; The Good Father

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.

1992 A Little Hotel on the Side with Tony Randall, Lynn Redgrave, Paxton Whitehead, John Fiedler, Rob Lowe, Carol Woods, Danny Burstine's Bway debut

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, IMDB, NYT's ON THIS DAY, 440.com’s Those Were The Days, Playbill.com, annejeffreys.com)

Milla