VIDEO: On This Day, February 9- SUNSET BOULEVARD Returns to Broadway
On this day in 2017, three-time Tony Award-winner Glenn Close returned to Broadway inAndrew Lloyd Webber’sSunset Boulevard.
Playbill Vault’s Today in Theatre History: February 9
1865 Birthday of Beatrice Stella Tanner, better known by her stage name, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She has a long correspondence with playwright George Bernard Shaw and appears in many of his plays, creating the role of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion.
1926 Charles MacArthur and Edward Sheldon have a hit with the campy potboiler Lulu Belle. Lenore Ulric stars as a Mississippi nightclub singer who ruins the life of a rising young attorney who falls for her, but realizes in the end that she loves him, too. It runs 461 performances at the Belasco Theatre and is made into a film with Dorothy Lamour.
1931 The romance between poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett is dramatized in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, which stars Katharine Cornell and Brian Aherne. The production runs 370 performances at the Empire Theatre.
1962 Already convicted, a man searches for a Signpost to Murder to prove his innocence. Monte Doyle’s thriller runs 419 performances at the Cambridge Theatre in London. Derek Farr and Margaret Lockwood star.
1966 Singer-entertainer Sophie Tucker dies at age 82. She appeared in numerous revues, including Ziegfeld Follies of 1909 and Earl Carroll’s Vanities of 1924.
1972 British actor-director Robert Atkins dies at age 85. He performed in and directed many Shakespearean productions for the Old Vic.
1979 Alice Delysia, once a major star of London’s West End, dies at age 90. Among the many revues she starred in was On With the Dance, with book and lyrics by Noël Coward.
1984 Chita Rivera and Liza Minnelli play mother and daughter in The Rink, John Kander and Fred Ebb‘s musical about a family that runs a roller-skating rink. After five nominations, Rivera wins her first Tony Award for the role. The show runs 204 performances at the Martin Beck Theatre.
1988 Kate Nelligan and Alec Baldwin star in Serious Money, Caryl Churchill‘s drama about greed in the Reagan/Thatcher era. It runs just 15 performances at the Royale Theatre.
2007 British stage actor Ian Richardson, who starred in the BBC’s 1990 drama series House of Cards, and played Jean-Paul Marat in Marat/Sade and Henry Higgins in the 1976 Broadway revival of My Fair Lady, dies at age 72.
2011 Keira Knightley and Elisabeth Moss star in Lillian Hellman‘s The Children’s Hour at the Comedy Theatre in London. Knightley plays Karen Wright, and Moss plays Martha Dobie, who together run a girls’ boarding school in 1930s New England, where they become entangled in a story of deceit, shame, and courage when a schoolgirl’s whispers spread, triggering a chain of events with extraordinary consequences.
2016 The world premiere of John Patrick Shanley‘s Prodigal Son opens Off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club. Timothée Chalamet stars as a teenage boy from the Bronx, who is suddenly thrown into the world of a private school in New Hampshire. Robert Sean Leonard co-stars as the boy’s teacher.
2017 Three-time Tony Award winner Glenn Close returns to Broadway in a revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Sunset Boulevard at the Palace Theatre. Close once again plays Norma Desmond, the role for which she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical in the show’s original 1994 Broadway production.
More of Today’s Birthdays: Cyril Scott (1866-1945). Ronald Colman (1891-1958). Peggy Wood (1892-1978). Carmen Miranda (1909-1955). Carole King (b. 1942). Mia Farrow (b. 1945). Judith Light (b. 1949). Ciaran Hinds (b. 1953). Montego Glover (b. 1974).
Watch highlights from the 2017 Broadway revival of Sunset Boulevard, starring Glenn Close:
VIDEO: Christy Altomare Visits Backstage LIVE with Richard Ridge- Watch Now!
Watchas Richard chats with beloved Broadway leading lady, Christy Altomare, who will soon join Seth Rudetsky for two very special concerts on Sunday, February 7 3pm and Monday, February 8 8pm.
Playbill Vault’s Today in Theatre History: February 7
1812 Birthday of author Charles Dickens, whose A Christmas Carol has been adapted to the stage dozens of times and provides a durable annuity for theatre troupes everywhere. Among other major stage hits adapted from his work: The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Pickwick, and Oliver!
1883 Birthday of composer Eubie Blake, one of the first Black composers to write a Broadway musical. His scores include Shuffle Along, Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds, and Swing It. His life and songs are the subject of the hit 1978 revue Eubie! He also appears as a character in George C. Wolfe‘s 2016 musical Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed.
1922 The wealth of an eccentric uncle will be hers if star Florence Eldridge can keep her sanity in The Cat and the Canary. John Willard‘s melodrama runs 43 weeks at the National Theatre in New York.
1923 Another season and another inheritance, but this time a woman must keep her temper. Wildflower stars Edith Day. Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II devised the plot; music is provided by Herbert Stothart and Vincent Youmans. Oscar Eagle stages.
1957 Cyril Ritchard plays a strange visitor to a Virginia home who claims to be an alien passing judgment on the Earth in Gore Vidal‘s A Visit to a Small Planet. The comedy runs 388 performances a the Booth Theatre.
1959 First play reading at Joe Cino’s Caffe Cino in New York’s Greenwich Village. The space had opened as a bar in December 1958, but under Cino’s flamboyant stewardship, it grows into the cradle of the Off-Off-Broadway movement, providing a launching pad for the earliest works of Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Jean Claude van Itallie, Tom Eyen, and many other playwrights. Its productions examine subjects no commercial producer of the time would touch, especially those with gay themes. After Cino’s suicide in 1967, his circle of theatre artists found Off-Broadway’s Circle Rep.
1968 Two estranged brothers reunite to settle their father’s estate in Arthur Miller‘s new play The Price, opening at the Morosco Theatre. Pat Hingle, Kate Reid, Harold Gary, and Arthur Kennedy star. It runs 429 performances.
1971 The Trial of the Catonsville Nine plays at the Good Shepherd Faith Church in New York. Saul Levitt and Daniel Berrigan’s play exposing the trial of the Berrigan brothers’ anti-war protests, stars Ed Flanders and Michael Kane. After 130 performances, it transfers to Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre for 29 more showings.
1976 Philadelphia’s Shubert Theatre, acquired by The Academy of Music in 1972 and refurbished, re-opens with a revival of My Fair Lady.
1980 Film star Janet Gaynor makes her Broadway debut in Harold and Maude, opening at the Martin Beck Theatre. The production is panned by critics, and closes two days later.
2002 Film star Kevin Bacon stars on Broadway as a former minister suffering a crisis of faith in An Almost Holy Picture.
2012 A revival of Terrence McNally‘s music-kissed biographical drama Master Class, starring Tyne Daly as a late-career diva Maria Callas, opens at the West End’s Vaudeville Theatre. Stephen Wadsworth once again directs Daly in the role, having previously done so in 2010 at the Kennedy Center, and in 2011 on Broadway.
More of Today’s Birthdays: George Ade (1866-1944). Eddie Bracken (1915-2002). Pete Postlethwaite (1946-2011). David Bryan (b. 1962). Eddie Izzard (b. 1962). James Snyder (b. 1981).
Audra McDonald, Billy Porter, and More in Shuffle Along on Broadway
The State of Broadway: February 2021
We’ve rounded up all of the latest news on the current state of Broadway for February 2021. Which shows are returning and which are not What’s the status of the Tony Awards Check out what’s new
Look Back Dear World on Starring Angela Lansbury on Broadway
February 6 marks the 52nd anniversary of Dear World, the musical by Jerry Herman, Jerome Lawrence, and Robert E. Lee, which opened at Broadway’s Mark Hellinger Theatre (currently home to the Times Square Church) in 1969. The production starred Angela Lansbury, whose performance as Countess Aurelia earned her the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical—her second, after her 1966 win for Mame.
Dear World, an adaptation of Jean Giraudoux’s play The Madwoman of Chaillot, tells the story of a countess (Lansbury) who schemes with her associates to stop businessmen from drilling for oil under the streets of their Parisian neighborhood. The production ran for 45 previews and 132 performances. It went go on to be revised by its creators and has since been revived numerous times, including a 2017 Off-Broadway staging by York Theatre Company, which featured Tyne Daly as Countess Aurelia.
Look Back Dear World on Starring Angela Lansbury on Broadway
In addition to Lansbury, the original Broadway production starred Milo O’Shea as The Sewerman, Jane Connell as Gabrielle, Carmen Mathews as Constance, Kurt Peterson as Julian, Pamela Hall as Nina, Will Larsen as the Chariman of the Board, and Ted Agress as the Juggler, alongside Nicole Barth, Bruce Becker, Toney Brealond, Jane Coleman, Michael Davis, Jack Davison, Jacque Dean, Richard Dodd, Clifford Fearl, Miguel Godreau, John Grigas, Marian Haraldson, Tony Juliano, Charles Karel, Gene Kelton, Zale Kessler, Carolyn Kirsch, Urylee Leonardos, Joe Masiell, James Maher, Ty McConnell, Larry Merritt, Ruth Ramsey, Orrin Reiley, Patsy Sabline, Connie Simmons, John Taliaferro, Margot Travers, Gene Varrone, Charles Welch, and Mary Zahn. Rounding out the company were M’el Dowd, Camila Ashland, Barbara Blair, John Grigas, and Merrill Leighton as standbys.
Directed and choreographed by Joe Layton, Dear World featured scenic design by Oliver Smith, costume design by Freddy Wittop, lighting design by Jean Rosenthal, and sound design by Robert Liftin with stage management by Robert L. Borod and Sal Pernice. For the complete cast and creative team, visit Dear World on the Playbill Vault.