1905 Quivery-voiced actor Sterling Holloway is born in Cedartown, Georgia. He becomes a fixture of Broadway’s The Garrick Gaieties revues of the 1920s and ’30s, and achieves a kind of immortality providing the voice for Disney’s Winnie the Pooh in cartoons starting in the 1960s.
1924 Future director George Abbott and actor Clara Blandick are featured in Hatcher Hughes‘ hillbilly feud drama, Hell-Bent Fer Heaven, which opens at the Klaw Theatre and goes on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
1934 Billie Burke produces the first Ziegfeld Follies after the death of founder Florenz Ziegfeld. The Ziegfeld Follies of 1934 features Fanny Brice, Eve Arden, Buddy Ebsen, Vilma Ebsen, Jane Froman, Eugene Howard, Willie Howard, and the music of Vernon Duke. It runs at the Winter Garden.
1956 Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne are The Great Sebastians, a pair of fraudulent performers with a mind-reading act. The comedy by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse is staged by Bretaigne Windust at the ANTA Playhouse.
1965 T.S. Eliot dies in London at the age of 77. He is credited with the revival of poetic drama after penning Murder in the Cathedral in 1935. He also wrote The Cocktail Party, The Family Reunion, and The Confidential Clerk. His book of poems, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, is the inspiration for the musical Cats.
1969 Adrienne Kennedy scripts two one-acts titled Cities in Bezique at the Public Theater. Joan Harris and Cynthia Belgrave are members of the cast, directed by Gerald Freedman.
1976 Yul Brynner stars in Home Sweet Homer, a musical based on the final chapters of The Odyssey, with a score by Man of La Mancha composer Mitch Leigh. Despite the presence of La Mancha star Joan Diener, the show closes on opening night.
1981 Another one-performance show opens and closes on Broadway: Frankenstein, by Victor Gialanella. The cast includes John Carradine, David Dukes, John Glover, and Dianne Wiest.
2004 Director Sam Mendes, choreographer Rob Marshall, and former cast members attend the 2,378th and final performance of the 1998 Tony-winning Cabaret revival at Studio 54.
2014 Spider-Man Turn Off The Dark, the high-flying, multimillion dollar musical with music by Bono and The Edge, ends its Broadway run at the Foxwoods Theatre after 1,066 performances. The production broke Broadway records for longest preview period (182 performances) and for most expensive musical (it cost $75 million). Over the course of its extended preview period, original director Julie Taymor left the project, and writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and director Philip Wm. McKinley were brought on to try to fix the show. Members of the production suffered numerous injuries during the run, including cast members Christopher Tierney and Daniel Curry.
More of Today’s Birthdays: William Bendix (1906–1964), Sorrell Booke (1930–1994), Dyan Cannon (b. 1937), Jim Norton (b. 1938), Martin Vidnovic (b. 1948), Patrick Cassidy (b. 1962), Natascia Diaz (b. 1970), Dave Malloy (b. 1976), Clyde Alves (b. 1980).
Watch highlights from Spider-Man Turn Off The Dark:
