Today's Birthdays 1/25

[do_re_milla]

Posted: 1/25/09 at 4:55pm

Robert Burns 1/25/1759 - 7/21/1796 Scottish national poet, Auld Lang Syne; Behold, my love, how green the groves; To A Mouse; A Red, Red Rose

W. Somerset Maugham 1/25/1874 - 12/16/1965 Writer, Source Material, Director - The Circle (my 1st straight role) 1989 (Stewart Granger, Rex Harrison, Glynis Johns, Roma Downey, Patricia Conolly); Rain; The Constant Wife (Ethel Barrymore, C. Aubrey Smith); Sadie Thompson (June Havoc); film's Of Human Bondage, The Razor’s Edge

Virginia Woolf 1/25/1882 - 3/28/1941 British author, source mat'l, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own - The Hours

Mildred Dunnock 01/25/1901 - 7/5/1991 performer - Life Begins; The Corn Is Green; 1943 Richard III directed by George Coulouris; Lute Song (Mary Martin, Yul Brynner, Clarence Derwent); orig Death of a Salesman (Lee J. Cobb, Arthur Kennedy, Cameron Mitchell, Tom Pedi [any relation to Christine?]); In the Summer House; orig Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore; 1977 Tartuffe; tv's & film's The Corn is Green; Death of a Salesman; The Girl in White; Celanese Theatre's On Borrowed Time; Broadway Television Theatre's Craig's Wife; The Jazz Singer; You Are There The First Command Performance of Romeo and Juliet (1597); Inner Sanctum; The Trouble with Harry; Love Me Tender; Baby Doll; Alfred Hitchcock Presents; Peyton Place; The Nun's Story; The Story on Page One; BUtterfield 8 (Elizabeth Taylor); The Power and the Glory; Great Ghost Tales - The Monkey's Paw; Sweet Bird of Youth (Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Shirley Knight, Rip Torn); Behold a Pale Horse; Young Blood Hawke; What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?; And Baby Makes Six and Baby Comes Home; The Pick-up Artist

Paula Laurence 01/25/1916 - Oct 29, 2005 Wife of Charles Bowden, performer; I once did a show with her & Steve Ross, she was still a brilliant singing comedian with a huge voice! Paula Laurence began her acting career in Orson Welles' Federal Theatre Project production of Horse Eats Hat in 1937. Other Off-Broadway credits include productions at City Center and the Phoenix Theatre Company. Regionally, she acted at the Westport Country Playhouse, run by her husband, producer and director Charles Bowden, who produced many of Tennessee Williams’ plays. After Williams' death, the Bowdens became the guardians of the playwright's institutionalized sister, Rose Williams - One Touch of Venus; 1946 Cyrano de Bergerac (Jose Ferrer); Ivanov (John Gielgud, Vivien Leigh, Miller Lide)

Barbara Carroll 1/25/1925 marvelous jazz pianist, arranger, occasional vocalist: LPs: Everything I Love, This Heart of Mine, Live at the Carlyle, Old Friends

Dean Jones 01/25/1931 performer - There Was a Little Girl; Under the Yum-Yum Tree; Company; Into the Light (Susan Bigelow); film's The Love Bug, That Darn Cat, Tea and Sympathy, Beethoven

Elizabeth Allen 01/25/1934 performer - Romanoff and Juliet; The Gay Life (Barbara Cook, Jules Munchen); Do I Hear a Waltz?; Sherry; tv's & film's The Paul Lynde Show, C.P.O. Sharkey, Bracken’s World

Leigh Taylor-Young 1/25/1944 performer - tv's & film's I Love You Alice B. Toklas, Soylent Green, Can’t Stop the Music, Honeymoon Academy, Peyton Place, Dallas

Richard Poe 01/25/1946 performer - Execution of Justice; M. Butterfly; Our Country's Good (Cherry Jones); Moon Over Buffalo; 2006 The Pajama Game

Ruth Williamson 01/25/1954 performer - 2004 La Cage aux Folles; Smile; Epic Proportions (another 1 I enjoyed that didn't make it)(Kristin Chenoweth)

Jenifer Lewis 1/25/1957 performer - Eubie (us/repl); Comin' Uptown(repl)Rock 'N Roll! The First 5,000 Years; Hairspray (repl); tv's & film's Beaches; Murphy Brown; Sister Act I & II; What's Love Got To Do With It; A Different World; Undercover Blues; Corrina, Corrina; The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; Blast from the Past; The Ponder Heart; Strong Medicine; Boston Legal; Prop 8: The Musical; Not Easily Broken

SHOWS THAT OPENED ON THIS DATE:

1968 Robert Anderson's family drama I Never Sang for My Father opens at the Longacre Theatre with a cast that includes Lillian Gish, Hal Holbrook and Alan Web. It runs 124 performances.

1969 Dancer-actress Irene Castle dies today in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. She partnered with her husband Vernon in shows such as Watch Your Step, and she appeared alone in Miss 1917.

1973 National Lampoon's Lemmings plays at the Village Gate in New York City. This revue, inspired by the magazine National Lampoon, has a cast that includes future "Saturday Night Live" stars John Belushi, and Chevy Chase, among others. The eleven-month run is directed by Tony Hendra.

1996 One day before the Off-Off-Broadway opening of Rent, author-composer Jonathan Larson dies of an aortic aneurysm. Much litigation would follow regarding both the circumstances of his death and the authorship of the musical, but none of it would tarnish the runaway success of Larson's story of young, hand-to-mouth, downtown New Yorkers who refuse to pay "last year's rent."

2000 Brian d'Arcy James, Julia Murney, Idina Menzel, and Taye Diggs star in Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party at Manhattan Theatre Club, which begins preview performances tonight. The production is the first of two musicals with the same title and based upon the same source material that will open in New York this season. Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe's The Wild Party will open in April at the Virginia Theater.

2009 Hedda Gabler with Mary-Louise Parker & Michael Cerveris

ON THIS DAY IN:

1533 England's King Henry VIII secretly married his second wife, Anne Boleyn.

On Jan. 25, 1915, the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, inaugurated U.S. transcontinental telephone service.

2002 At a special sold-out performance attended by Colm Wilkinson, Cameron Mackintosh, Judy Kuhn and Trevor Nunn, Broadway's Les Miserables celebrates its surpassing the 6.137-performance run of A Chorus Line, and becoming the second-longest running show in Broadway history. The cast performs a combination of songs from the two shows -- "One" and "One Day More."

2003 Closing day for the gothic musical Dance of the Vampires after just 56 Broadway performances at the Minskoff Theatre, losing its entire investment, estimated at $12 million. Based on the Roman Polanski film, The Fearless Vampire Killers, the show had been a major hit in Vienna, where it originated. But New York critics faulted its uneven tone, sometimes trying to be campy, sometimes trying to be scary. OK, I guess I was the only 1 who had fun at this 1 & thought parts of it were hysterical.

(sources: IBDB, IMDB, NYT's ON THIS DAY, 440.com’s Those Were The Days, Playbill.com)

Milla