1914 Female impersonator Julian Eltinge is lyricist and star of The Crinoline Girl. Otto Hauerbach provides the book and Percy Wenrich the score. The show twirls at the Knickerbocker Theatre for 11 weeks.
1918 Actor-manager Sir George Alexander dies in London at age 60. His most popular role was the lead in The Prisoner of Zenda. In 1889 he took his own theatre and began producing the plays of Oscar Wilde and Arthur Wing Pinero.
1922 Phileas Fogg is asked to go Round in Fifty instead of 80 days. The musical runs at London’s Hippodrome for 471 performances. Circling the globe are Renee Reel, George Robey, and Wallace and Barry Lupino.
1933 Right around the Three-Cornered Moon is a family that loses its money and doesn’t know how to work. Ruth Gordon and Brian Donlevy are in the cast of the Gertrude Tokonogy comedy. It runs nearly 10 weeks at the Cort Theatre.
1948 An unusual double-bill of one-acts opens at the Cort Theatre: Thornton Wilder‘s The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden and Jean-Paul Sartre‘s The Respectful Prostitute. It runs a respectable 318 performances.
1969 The Great White Way turns red, white, and blue when 1776 opens at the 46th Street Theatre. The musical about the Declaration of Independence, with music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards and book by Peter Stone, stars Howard Da Silva, William Daniels, Ken Howard, and, making her Broadway debut, Betty Buckley.
1997 Paula Vogel’s How I Learned To Drive opens at Off-Broadway’s Vineyard Theatre and stars Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse. The play transfers to the Century Theatre and wins the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (as it was not eligible for the 1997 award owing to a scheduling technicality.) Despite the award, the show closes as scheduled, four days after winning, on April 19, 1998.
2000 After years of international touring and even a TV broadcast, the Celtic dance revue Riverdance opens at the Gershwin Theatre under the title Riverdance - on Broadway, and runs 605 performances.
2003 Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks opens her first new drama since winning the Pulitzer Prize the previous year, but many newspapers refuse to print the title. Fucking A, her new take on Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s The Scarlet Letter, opens at the Public Theater‘s Anspacher Theater, with a cast that includes Mos Def, Daphne Rubin-Vega, and Bobby Cannavale. Michael Greif directs.
2014 Mitch Leigh, the theatre composer and jingle writer who had a single, but enduring, hit musical in Man of La Mancha, and who, with a handful of repeated, but dramatically escalating musical phrases, gave the world an aspirational anthem in “The Impossible Dream,” dies at age 86. Leigh’s other Broadway musicals include Cry for Us All, Home Sweet Homer, Sarava, Chu Chem, and Ain’t Broadway Grand. Also an accomplished director, he received a Tony nomination for his work on the 1985 revival of The King and I.
2017 Danny DeVito makes his Broadway debut in a revival of Arthur Miller‘s The Price at the Roundabout Theatre Company‘s American Airlines Theatre. The production also stars Mark Ruffalo, Tony Shalhoub, and Jessica Hecht.
Today’s Birthdays: Elsie Janis 1889. Conrad Nagel 1897. Henny Youngman 1906. Leo McKern 1920. Jerry Lewis 1926. Sheila Bond 1928. Victor Garber 1949. Kate Nelligan 1951. Alan Tudyk 1971.
Watch highlights from the 2016 Encores! production of 1776, starring Santino Fontana as John Adams:
