1896 Birthday of Ethel Waters, Broadway star of musicals and plays including The Member of the Wedding, As Thousands Cheer, Cabin in the Sky, and Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds.
1949 Broadway premiere of Marc Blitzstein‘s opera Regina, based on Lillian Hellman‘s The Little Foxes. It runs 56 performances at the 46th Street Theatre.
1956 Rosalind Russell stars in the title role of Patrick Dennis‘ Auntie Mame, opening at the Broadhurst Theatre for a 639-performance run. The saga of a boy sent to live with his devil-may-care aunt later serves as the basis for the musical Mame.
1957 Ricardo Montalban and Lena Horne play sultry lovers in the musical Jamaica by E.Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen. It runs 555 performances at the Imperial Theatre.
1957 Birthday of Brian Stokes Mitchell, Broadway’s top romantic leading man in musicals of the late 1990s onward. Starring roles include Ragtime; Kiss of the Spider Woman; Kiss Me, Kate; Jelly’s Last Jam; Man of La Mancha; Shuffle Along; and August Wilson‘s drama, King Hedley II. He is named one of the “Sexiest Men Alive” by People magazine.
1967 Although Eugene O’Neill never wanted his 1939 play, More Stately Mansions, to be produced, it opens on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theatre. The cast, which includes Colleen Dewhurst, Ingrid Bergman, and Arthur Hill, is directed by José Quintero. The show runs 142 performances. A controversial revival of the show is done in October 1997 at New York Theatre Workshop by Dutch director Ivo van Hove.
1971 The first Broadway revival of Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green‘s 1944 musical On the Town opens at the Imperial Theatre. The cast includes Donna McKechnie, Bernadette Peters, and Phyllis Newman. It runs only 73 performances.
1972 Simon Gray‘s play about a professor losing his wife, homosexual male lover, and sobriety, Butley, opens at the Morosco Theatre. Alan Bates wins a Tony Award for his starring role in the James Hammerstein-directed production, which runs 135 performances. A 2006 Broadway revival of the play stars Nathan Lane.
1982 An announcement is made by the League of New York Theatres and Producers that at least 14 shows produced on Broadway this season are financed by movie companies.
1988 John Houseman, star of theatre, radio, film, and television, dies at age 86. He was one of the founders of the Voice of America in World War II, and, with Orson Welles, the Mercury Theatre of the Air, best remembered for its 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, a mock documentary about a Martian invasion which some listeners mistook for a real news broadcast. Houseman is also remembered for the Academy Award he won for playing Professor Kingsfield in the film The Paper Chase in 1973, a role he repeated in the TV series.
1991 Joseph Papp dies after a battle with cancer. A producer and activist, Papp started The Public Theater (now the Joseph Papp Public Theater), through which he nurtured unknowns such as David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Thomas Babe, David Hare, George C. Wolfe, Elizabeth Swados, Andrei Serban, Robert Alan Ackerman, Wallace Shawn, and Carson Kievman. Major productions include Hair and A Chorus Line. He was 70.
1991 Arthur Miller‘s The Ride Down Mount Morgan opens at London’s Wyndham Theatre. It is the first time a Miller play has debuted outside of the U.S. Tom Conti plays a man with two wives who, when convalescing after an auto accident, is forced to confront his selfishness and his choices. A production of the comedy-drama, starring Patrick Stewart and Frances Conroy, comes to Off-Broadway’s Public Theater in 1999 and then reaches Broadway’s Ambassador Theatre the following year.
2002 Carol Burnett makes her Broadway playwriting debut with her autobiographical Hollywood Arms, co-written with her daughter, Carrie Hamilton, who died during the show’s tryout. Michele Pawk wins a Tony Award playing the role based on Burnett’s mother, but the show runs just 76 performances at the Cort Theatre.
2010 The Scottsboro Boys, the John Kander and Fred Ebb musical that takes the racially insensitive “minstrel show” of yore and reimagines it to tell the true story of a case of racial injustice, opens at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre. Directed by Susan Stroman and with a libretto by David Thompson, the musical tells the tale of a group of young men who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. Despite running only 49 performances, the production is nominated for 12 Tony Awards.
2012 After three days of canceled performances due to the effects of Hurricane Sandy, most Broadway shows resume. With New York’s public transportation system still largely crippled by the storm, some actors are reported to have walked for hours to reach their theatres.
2014 Hugh Jackman returns to Broadway in Jez Butterworth‘s The River, opening at Circle in the Square. Laura Donnelly and Cush Jumbo co-star in the mysterious drama about a man who brings his new girlfriend to a remote cabin for a night of trout-fishing.
More of Today’s Birthdays: Barbara Bel Geddes (1922-2005). Lee Grant (b. 1927). Ron Rifkin (b. 1939). David Ogden Stiers (1942-2018). Brian Stokes Mitchell (b. 1956).
From Ragtime to Shuffle Along: Celebrating Brian Stokes Mitchell’s Greatest Stage Roles
