Video: Ashley Tisdale Busts Out HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL Choreo From Self-Quarantine
High School Musical star, Ashley Tisdale, took to social media today to cheer up her fans from self quarantine
Playbill Vault’s Today in Theatre History: March 17
1924 Doris Keane and Jacob Ben-Ami are Welded. Eugene O’Neill‘s drama outlines a marriage that is stronger than the couple realizes. It lasts three weeks at the 39th Street Theatre.
1926 The songwriting team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart highlight The Girl Friend at the Vanderbilt Theatre in New York. Herbert Fields pens the story of a man who trains for a bicycle race using a butter churn.
1943 Would you Kiss and Tell? Hugh Herbert‘s play about the lives of teenagers runs 956 performances at the Biltmore Theatre in New York.
1960 Dear Liar exposes the relationship between George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Using their correspondence as a starting point, Jerome Kilty shapes the play, which he also stages. Brian Aherne and Katharine Cornell star.
1992 Glenn Close, Richard Dreyfuss, and Gene Hackman headline Ariel Dorfman‘s Death and the Maiden which opens at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. The plays sees plenty of holiday-appropriate green in advance sales, but the show receives mixed reviews and closes August 2.
1993 Theatre legend Helen Hayes dies at the age of 92. Known as the First Lady of the American Theatre, the awards and honors she received during her lifetime (including the first Tony for Best Actress) filled an entire room in her home. As if that wasn’t enough, in 1955, the 50th anniversary of her professional stage debut, a Broadway theatre was named for her and in 1993, the Helen Hayes Awards were established in her name to honor achievement in theatre in her hometown Washington, DC.
1996 Stephen Sondheim and George Furth team up for a non-musical murder mystery, Getting Away With Murder, with a top-notch cast including Terrence Mann, Christine Ebersole, John Rubinstein, Josh Mostel, and Jodi Long. It runs just 17 performances, but is memorable for its macabre ad. The logo, which showed a pistol-toting gargoyle, was changed after the closing notice to show the gargoyle with the gun pointed at its own head.
2005 A banner day for musical theatre as Monty Python’s Spamalot opens on Broadway, starring Tim Curry, Hank Azaria, and David Hyde-Pierce, and The Light in the Piazza begins previews. The two shows dominate the 2005 Tony Awards with Piazza winning the most (six) and Spamalot coming away as Best Musical.
2011 A revival of Tom Stoppard‘s Arcadia opens on Broadway at the Barrymore Theatre. Billy Crudup, who made his Broadway debut as Septimus Hodge in the original New York production, takes on the role of Bernard Nightingale. Based on the 2009 London revival directed by David Leveaux, the cast also includes Raúl Esparza and Margaret Colin.
2014 Gene Feist, who in 1965 founded the theatre troupe that would grow into the multi-theatre Broadway behemoth, the Roundabout Theatre Company, dies at age 91.
2016 The Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway revival of She Loves Me opens at Studio 54. Laura Benanti, Zachary Levi, Gavin Creel, and Jane Krakowski star.
Today’s Birthdays: Shemp Howard 1895. Tamara Geva 1907. Mercedes McCambridge 1918. Gary Sinise 1955. Vicki Lewis 1960.
Watch highlights from the 2016 Broadway revival of She Loves Me:
Celebrate 50 Years of Purlie With ‘I Got Love’
Broadway fans are celebrating 50 years of a particularly memorable, toe-tapping musical theatre song March 15, the anniversary of Purlie opening at the Broadway Theatre in 1970.
Melba Moore stopped the show (and even the cast album) with her full-throated, no-holds-barred performance of “I Got Love,” earning a Tony Award for Featured Actress in a Musical at the end of the season, while Cleavon Little won a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical as the title character. (Smash fans may recognize the song from Jennifer Hudson’s performance of it in Season 2.)
Based on Ossie Davis’ play Purlie Victorious, Purlie is about a traveling preacher who returns home to save the community church. He’s aided in his quest by Lutibelle (Moore). Directed by Philip Rose and choreographed by Louis Johnson, the show earned five Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical. The show ultimately ran for 688 performances at three theatres. The cast included The cast included C. David Colson, John Heffernan, Sherman Hemsley, Linda Hopkins, Helen Martin, and Novella Nelson.
A 1972 revival lasted just 14 performances; Encores! included the show in its 2005 season, starring Blair Underwood and Anika Noni Rose.
Moore recreated her performance in a 1981 Showtime adaptation with fellow original Broadway cast members Hemsley and Hopkins, with Robert Guillame as Purlie, Brandon Maggart as Cotchipee, Clarice Taylor as Idilla, and Don Scardino as Charlie. Watch her performance of “I Got Love” in that adaptation above.
BWW TV: Taylor Trensch & Kyle Scatliffe Open Up About the Importance of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
Ever since it opened on Broadway last winter, To Kill a Mockingbird has been making history at the Shubert Theatre, where it has already become the highest-grossing American play ever. The history-making continued on February 26…this time at Madison Square Garden.
53 Creative Playbill Collections and Displays
Playbills have become a beloved keepsake when attending a Broadway show. They’ve been displayed on coffee tables, preserved in Playbill binders, and framed and mounted on the wall. But there are hundreds of ways theatregoers can show off their collections, so we asked our social media followers to share how they display their Playbill collections. See the gallery below, and follow @playbill on Instagram to see featured Playbill collections on #FanFriday.
53 Playbill Collections
President of Musicians Union Calls for Government Aid for Displaced Workers
Ray Hair, president of the American Federation of Musicians, has issued a statement calling forgovernmentaid for the thousands ofmusicians and otherunemployed entertainment industry workers who have been displaced by the Covid-19 outbreak.