1852 Broadway premiere of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on the novel about slavery by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
1920 The Bat, the hugely popular thriller by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, opens at the Morosco Theatre and goes on to run 867 performances.
1926 George Burns and Gracie Allen make their vaudeville bow at the Palace in New York.
1928 Birthday of actor Marian Seldes, who appears in nearly two dozen Broadway plays including Deathtrap, Equus, The Chalk Garden, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, and several plays by Edward Albee, including Tiny Alice and A Delicate Balance. Her performance as Julia in A Delicate Balance wins her the 1967 Tony Award as Best Feature Actress in a Play. In 2010, she is honored with a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.
1937 Eva Le Gallienne is Hamlet in a new production of Shakespeare’s tragedy, opening at the Cape Playhouse in Massachusetts. Also in the cast is future stage legend Uta Hagen, making her professional debut as Ophelia.
1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning stage and screen writer Sidney Howard is killed in a tractor accident. Howard, approximately 48 years old, won the Pulitzer for his 1924 play, They Knew What They Wanted. That play would later be made into the Frank Loesser musical, The Most Happy Fella. Just before his death, Howard had completed the screenplay for the film, Gone With the Wind.
1996 Landmark New York theatre company Circle in the Square declares bankruptcy and goes through years of legal wrangling before reopening in 1999 with the rediscovered, and critically lauded, Tennessee Williams drama, Not About Nightingales.
1999 Ten years and 10 Phantoms down as Howard McGillin becomes Broadway’s 11th The Phantom of the Opera. Hugh Panaro, the preceding Phantom, exits to take the title role in Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg‘s Martin Guerre. The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, which opened at the Majestic Theatre in 1988, has also featured Michael Crawford, the originator of the role, Kevin Gray, Mark Jacoby, and Davis Gaines.
Today’s Birthdays: Rags Ragland (1905–1946). Gene Kelly (1912–1996). Lee Roy Reams (b. 1942). Charles Busch (b. 1954). Andrew Rannells (b. 1978).
Watch Andrew Rannells and Stephanie J. Block rehearse for a 2014 New York Pops concert:
