Today's Birthdays 5/28

[do_re_milla]

Posted: 5/27/07 at 10:15pm

Tony Pastor 5/28/1837 - 8/26/1908 American vaudeville entertainer; Father of upscale variety, opened theatre in NY 1879

Edward Keane 05/28/1884 - Oct 12, 1959 performer - A Weak Woman (Frank Morgan); Estelle Winwood; Four Walls (Lee Strasberg); The Nut Farm (Natalie Schafer); The Inside Story (Louis Calhern, Brian Donlevy)

Jim Thorpe 5/28/1888 - 3/28/1953 Olympic gold medalist: decathlon, pentathlon [Stockholm: 1912]; baseball: NY Giants, Boston Braves; football: All-American; president of what became the NFL

Ian Fleming 5/28/1908 - 8/12/1964 English novelist; created James Bond character

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau 5/28/1925 - 1 of tha all-time great bariton lieder singers; ck out his songbook CDs (e.g. anything by Brahms & Schubert's Die Winterreise) & his Le Nozze de Figaro; can you imagine being in the audience for the 1966 Falstaff (Verdi) in Vienna. Directed by Luchino Visconti, conducted by Leonard Bernstein! Time Magazine calls him "the world's greatest Lieder singer". I studied Gr. Lied & arias w/Betty Blackhead (Eliz. Schwarzkopf) & would have loved to have studied w/DFD!

William Roy 05/28/1928 - Sep 2, 2003 Lyricist, Composer, performer & Music Director for Julie Wilson - Maggie (Betty Paul, James Broderick, James E. McCracken, Odette Myrtil, u/s Anita Ellis); New Faces of 1962

Carroll Baker 5/28/1931 performer, I always felt Miss Baker was terribly underrated. Her work in Carpetbaggers & Harlow was very fine. - Escapade (Brian Aherne, Roddy McDowall, Marie Paxton); All Summer Long (Ed Begley, John Randolph, June Walker); Come on Strong (Van Johnson); film's The Carpetbaggers, Giant, Baby Doll, Harlow, Kindergarten Cop

Beth Howland 05/28/1941 performer; wife of Charles Kimbrough, Michael J. Pollard (divorced) - replacement in Once Upon a Mattress & Bye Bye Birdie; High Spirits; Drat the Cat!; Darling of the Day; Company

Gladys Knight 05/28/1944 performer - Smokey Joe's Cafe (additional, whatever that means)

Sondra Locke 5/28/1947 performer, former part to Clint Eastwood. I find her fascinatingly quirky, can't take my eyes off of her when she's on the screen - film's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Bronco Billy, Every Which Way But Loose, The Gauntlet, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Willard, Sudden Impact; director: Ratboy, Impulse

Jason Kravits 05/28/1967 performer - Drowsy Chaparone (Bob Martin, Danny Burstein, Georgia Engle, Sutton Foster, Beth Leavel, Garth Kravits); 2004 Sly Fox [replacement]

Justin Kirk 05/28/1969 performer - Any Given Day; Love! Valour! Compassion!

SHOWS THAT OPENED ON THIS DATE:

1940 Victor Moore, William Gaxton and Vera Zorina star in the Irving Berlin musical Louisiana Purchase, which runs 444 performances at the Imperial Theatre.

1952 Sunday Breakfast - Cloris Leachman

1953 Rodgers and Hammerstein open Me and Juliet, their show about a musical in tryouts out of town. Starring Isabel Bigley, it runs 358 performances at the Majestic Theatre. Also in the cast are Shirley MacLaine, Joan McCracken, Bill Hayes.

1958 Charles Laughton returns to the London stage after a 22 year absence in The Party. He also directs this Jane Arden play about an alcoholic. Albert Finney, Joyce Redman, and Ann Lynn are also in the cast.

1974 Magician Doug Henning combines music with illusions in The Magic Show, which becomes one of the longest-running shows of the 1970s -- 1920 performances at the Cort Theatre.

1987 Off-Broadway's Public Theatre was transformed into Studio B of Cleveland radio station WTLK as Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio airs live to its New York viewing audience. Frederick Zollo directs a cast that features Bogosian himself as a talk show host who undergoes an identity crisis during a broadcast.

ON THIS DAY IN:

1892 - Comedienne Marie Dressler made her New York City singing debut in the comic opera, The Robber of the Rhine.

1929 - Warner Brothers debuted the first all-color talking picture. The film debuted at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City. Ethel Waters, Joe E. Brown and Arthur Lake starred in On With the Show.

1957 - National League club owners voted to allow the Brooklyn Dodgers to move to sunny Southern California and said that the New York Giants baseball team could move with the Horace Stoneham family to Northern California. The teams went on to establish themselves in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

1969 - Mick Jagger (Rolling Stones) and girlfriend Marianne Faithful were arrested in their London home on marijuana possession charges.

1977 - John Davidson escaped a fire at the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate, Kentucky, which killed 164 people and injured 130 others.

1998 Comic actor Phil Hartman of "Saturday Night Live" and "NewsRadio" fame was shot to death at his home in Encino, Calif., by his wife, Brynn, who then killed herself.

(sources: IBDB, IMDB, NYT's ON THIS DAY, 440.com’s Those Were The Days, Playbill.com, fischer-dieskau.de/biography)

Milla