Today's Birthdays 10/21

[do_re_milla]

Posted: 10/21/06 at 12:02am

Dizzy Gillespie 10/21/1917 - Jan 6, 1993 trumpeter - 1986 Sweet Charity [Special thanks to Dizzy Gillespie]

Don Elliott 10/21/1926 - Jul 5, 1984 Composer, Performer, Musician; The Don Elliott Quartet - A Thurber Carnival (Peggy Cass, Tom Ewell, Paul Ford, Alice Ghostley); The Beast in Me (Kaye Ballard, Bert Convy, James Costigan, Richard Hayes, Nancy Haywood, Allyn Ann McLerie); The Only Game in Town (Tammy Grimes, Barry Nelson, Leo Genn); The Sunshine Boys (Jack Albertson, Sam Levene, Lee Meredith, Minnie Gentry, Lewis J. Stadlen)

Georgia Brown 10/21/1933 - 7/5/1992 performer - OLIVER; CARMELINA; tv's Cheers

Matt Bennett 10/21/1933 - Mar 21, 1991 performer - 1976 NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (Richard Chamberlin, Dorothy McGuire)

Simon Gray 10/21/1936 writer - WISE CHILD; BUTLEY (Alan Bates); OTHERWISE ENGAGED (Tom Courtney); 2006 Butley

Everett McGill 10/21/1945 performer, stage mgr - THE PLOUGH & THE STARS (Philip Bosco, Nancy Marchand, Roberta Maxwell); EQUUS (Peter Firth, Anthony Hopkins, Marian Seldes)

Carrie Fisher 10/21/1956 performer, daughter of singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds - 1973 IRENE; Censored Scenes From King Kong (Peter Riegert, Chris Sarandon, Alma Cuervo); film's Star Wars series, The Blues Brothers, When Harry Met Sally, Hannah and Her Sisters, Shampoo; writer: Postcards from the Edge, Surrender the Pink, Delusions of Grandma

SHOWS THAT OPENED ON THIS DAY:

1929 Naughty Marietta - Ilse Marvenga, Roy Cropper

1953 Onetime Algonquin Round Table wit Dorothy Parker, her star already dimmed by alcohol abuse, tries her hand at a Broadway play. THE LADIES OF THE CORRIDOR is panned by her onetime collegues, and runs just 45 performances.

1975 Treemonisha

1977 A host of future female stars make up the cast of Wendy Wasserstein's Uncommon Women and Others, which opens tonight at the Marymount Manhattan Theatre, housed within Marymount Manhattan College on the Upper East Side. Jill Eikenberry, Glenn Close and Swoosie Kurtz play a group of women recalling their college days in this production, which will run only 22 performances. Although reviews are only lukewarm, Ms. Kurtz will go on to win an Obie for her role.

1981 Playwrights Horizons opens the Christopher Durang double bill of The Actor's Nightmare and Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All to You today. Elizabeth Franz plays the nun whose pupils all despise her. Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Post, "Durang takes irreverence to the point of saintliness — he not only makes a profession of it, he turns it into a religion."

2002 Star-studded concerts paying tribute to the works of former collaborators Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim go to head-to-head at two famed New York venues. "A Concert Spectacular of Musical Highlights Featuring Stars from the Kennedy Center Sondheim Celebration" bows at Avery Fisher Hall with performances from the six musicals presented at the D.C. theatre the previous summer — Sweeney Todd, Company, Sunday in the Park with George, Passion, Merrily We Roll Along and A Little Night Music — as well as songs rendered by Barbara Cook.

ON THIS DATE IN:

1961 Ellen Stewart acquires the basement space on the Lower East Side that she will eventually turn into Cafe La Mama. The theatre will foster its own company, La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, in 1964. The company, which still operates under this name, was founded by Tom O'Horgan, best known for his direction of the rock musical Hair. This generation-defining musical was first produced at La Mama ETC in 1967 and went on to Broadway a year later.

1983 The Brooks Atkinson Theatre box office is robbed at gunpoint while the star Ben Kingsley, is napping in his dressing room between performances of Edmund Kean.

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

Milla