Category: theater

Calendar: September 30

A Year: Day to Day Men: 30th of September

The Roses and the Cross

September 30, 1919 marks the premiere of Avery Hopwood’s play “The Gold Diggers’ in New York City.

“The Gold Diggers”, a play by Avery Hopwood, was produced by David Belasco, an American theatrical producer and playwright. Belasco, the first writer to adapt the short story “Madame Butterfly” to the stage, pioneered many innovative forms of stage lighting and special effects to the stage. He staged “The Gold Diggers” on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre, now the oldest continuously operating legitimate theater in New York City.

“The Gold Diggers” popularized the term ‘gold digger’ to reference women who seek wealthy partners, as opposed to the earlier usage meaning gold miners. The plot centered on wealthy Stephen Lee, played by Bruce McRae, who is convinced that the chorus girl who is engaged to his nephew Wally, played by Horace Braham, only wants his nephew’s money.

The reviews for the play were mixed; but the opinions of the reviewers did not stop the play from becoming a hit. It opened at the Lyceum Theatre on September 30, 1919 and ran until June of 1921, with 720 performances. The long-running play then went on tour across the United States until 1923, earning almost two million dollars. One result of its long run was that after the other plays Avery Hopwood had written opened in 1920, Hopwood had four shows running on Broadway simultaneously.

Avery Hopwood was an American playwright of the Jazz Age in the United States, a period in the 1920s and 1930s when jazz music and dance styles rapidly gained popularity. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Hopwood graduated from the University of Michigan in 1903 and started out in journalism as a New York correspondent. However, within a year, he had a play, “Clothes”, produced on Broadway. He became known as the “Playboy Playwright”, specializing in comedies and farces, many considered risqué at the time. Among the plays were: “Ladies’ Night” in 1920,; the famous mystery play “The Bat”, later filmed in 1926; and the 1927 “Garden of Eden”, filmed in 1928.

In 1906, Avery Hopwood was introduced to writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten. The two became close friends and sometimes sexual partners. In the 1920s Hopwood had a tumultuous, but abusive, romantic relationship with fellow Cleveland-born playwright John Floyd. Although Hopwood announced to the press in 1924 that he was engaged to dancer and choreographer Rosa Rolanda, it was confirmed later that it was a publicity stunt.

Avery Hopwood died of a heart attack while swimming on the French Riviera on July 1, 1928. The terms of his will left a substantial portion of his estate to the University of Michigan, establishing a Creative Writing Award, encouraging new, unusual and radical writing. Recipients of the award have included poet and essayist Robert Hayden, poet and social activist Marge Piercy,  playwright Arthur Miller, and gay novelist and essayist Edmund White.

Calendar: September 26

A Year: Day to Day Men: 26th of September

Infectious Smile

September 26, 1877 was the birthdate of character actor Edmund Gwenn.

In 1901 Edmund Gwenn went to Australia and acted on stage there for three years, not returning to London until 1904. There he took a small part in “In The Hospital”, which led to him receiving a postcard from George Bernard Shaw, offering him a leading role as Straker, the chauffeur, in Shaw’s “Man and Superman”. Gwenn accepted and the play was a success. He spent three years in Shaw’s company, performing in “John Bull’s Island”, Major Barbara”, “The Devil’s Disciple” and other plays by Shaw.

Edmund Gwenn made his first appearance on screen in a 1916 British short “The Real Thing at Last”, followed by a silent version of “The Skin Game” in 1920 as the character Hornblower. This role he would reprise in a talking version by Alfred Hitchcock, released in 1931. After these films, Gwenn worked steadily until the end of his life, appearing in English stage pays and films, eventually doing more and more on Broadway and in Hollywood.

In 1940 Edmund Gwenn played a delightful Mr Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice”, then played a completely opposite role as an assassin in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 “Foreign Correspondent”. He later played a comedic role in the 1941 “Charley’s Aunt”, in which he romanced Jack Benny, masquerading as a woman. Gwenn was in the 1945 “Bewitched”, “Of Human Bondage” released in 1946, and the 1947 “Green Dolphin Street”.

Then in 1947, Edmund Gwenn became a super star. Twentieth Century-Fox was planning the film “Miracle on 34th Street”. The studio had offered the role of “Kris Kringle” to Gwenn’s cousin, the well-known character actor Cecil Kellaway, but he had turned it down with the observation that the role was too whimsical. Twentieth Century-Fox then offered it to Edmund Gwenn, who immediately accepted. His performance earned him at the age of 71 an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor and, because it is rerun every Christmas season, Gwenn would become for many their all-time favorite screen Santa.

Though rotund, Edmund Gwenn didn’t feel he was rotund enough to look like the jolly old elf most people expected after having read Clement Moore’s “The Night before Christmas”, in which Santa “had a broad face and a little round belly”. Although it was suggested that he could wear padding beneath the Santa costume, Gwenn resisted as he saw the padding effect as too artificial. So he gained almost 30 pounds for the role, a fair amount for a man of his short stature, and added nearly five inches to his waistline.

Gwenn’s final days were spent at the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills, California. Having endured terrible arthritis for many years, he had suffered a stroke, and then contracted pneumonia, from which he died at age 81 on September 6, 1959. His body was cremated, and his ashes are buried in a vault at The Chapel of the Pines in Los Angeles.

Calendar: September 6

A Year: Day to Day Men: 6th of September

Crates of Lathe

September 6, 1642 was the day that theater experienced both a major closing and a major reopening 277 years apart.

The major closing was the banning of all theater at the start of the English Civil War. On September 6, 1642, by an act of Parliament, all theaters in England were closed. This meant specifically that the great playhouses and theatrical companies of London, many from the Elizabethan age, ceased operations for good. The reason given for the ordinance was that attending theater was “unseemly” during such turbulent times.

The real reason was that the playhouses had become meeting places for the Royalist opposition, a group against the Parliament.   Their Puritan rivals, who controlled Parliament, understood this and closed the theaters.  Within a few years most of the grand old structures, now abandoned, had decayed beyond use or were dismantled altogether, leaving no visible trace of the playhouses of Shakespeare’s day.

Theatre would remain illegal until the end of the Interregnum in 1660, when the Puritans lost power and the monarchy was restored. Almost immediately, playhouses reopened and theatrical entertainments resumed. Theatre returned full force with the Restoration of the English monarchy under Charles II, leading to a revival of English drama and performance that paved the way for the great age of acting and wit during the eighteenth century.

it was also on this day, September 6th, that theaters reopened. On September 6, 1919, the great Equity Strike in New York and Chicago by theater actors came to an end. Broadway producers had finally reached an agreement with the upstart actors’ union, the Actors’ Equity Association. The only exception was Broadway’s biggest star and largest employer George M, Cohen who was granted a singular exception to continue as before without unionization.

The strike lasted a month and had closed nearly 40 major productions across the city, with revenue loses in excess of three million dollars.  The two sides reached a five-year deal that finally recognized Equity as the professional actors’ union.  Over the next few years working conditions improved and Broadway flourished for nine years until the 1928 season. The advent of “talkies” caused a decline in the theater with a noticeable lack of attendance and thus profits. The stock market crash of 1929 reset the commercial theatre’s entire economic picture for the next several decades.

Calendar: August 27

A Year: Day to Day Men: 27th of August

Stretching to the Right

August 27, 1665 was the date of the first documented staging of a play in North America.

In 1665, the performance of a play was a crime, as was violating the Sabbath. Defaming the person or character of his/her majesty or their representatives in the colony was also a crime on the books.

The first documented staging of an English-language play in North America was presented on August 27, 1665 at Fowkes Tavern in Accomac County on the eastern shore of Virginia. After the first performance, the play, which has no credited playwright and was rumored to have been of a political nature, was closed by the local authorities for “showing forth profane”. Edward Martin, an Accomac County resident thought to be a Quaker, brought a complaint against the actors, resulting in all three actors in the performance arrested and charged.

The case was tried two weeks later in the very same room of the tavern where the performance occurred. To prove the charge of being profane, the presiding judge had the offending performers reenact the play before the court. The judge, apparently, found nothing especially offensive with the play and actually thought it “entertaining”. Consequently, the judge ruled the performers not guilty of the charges and freed them; he also ordered the critic Edward Martin to pay court costs for wasting the court’s attention in the first place.

The play in question was entitled “Ye Bear and Ye Cubb” , and was likely the invention of the three offending presenters: Cornelius Watkinson, Philip Howard, and William Darby. It took veiled aim at the mother country Britain’s punitive trade laws. Unfortunately, no copy of the play survives, only the public record that documents this curious little bit of very early American theatre history. This play remains the earliest known performance of a play in the British North American colonies and the first one to receive a very poor review.

A Virginia Historical Marker, Marker #WY19, on Route 13 in Accomac, Virginia, shows the probable site of the Fowkes Tavern. 

Calendar: August 5

A Year: Day to Day Men: 5th of August

Searching for Socks

August 5, 1887 was the birthdate of John Reginald Owen, the English character actor.

Reginald Owen studied at Sir Herbert Tree’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and made his professional debut on stage in 1905. When he was still a young actor, he met the author Mrs. Clifford Mills. Upon hearing her idea of a children’s play to be called a Rainbow Story, Owen persuaded her to turn it into a play. This became the play “Where the Rainbow Ends” which opened on December 21st of 1911 starring Owen as Saint George. It received good reviews.

John Reginald traveled to the United States in 1920, originally working on Broadway in New York. He later moved to Hollywood and began a lengthy career in many Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer productions.  Owen is perhaps best known today for his role as Ebenezer Scrooge in the 1938 film version of “A Christmas Carol” , a role he inherited from Lionel Barrymore who suffered a broken hip.

Owen was one of only five actors to play both Sherlock Holmes and his companion Dr. Watson. He first played Watson in the 1932 film “Sherlock Holmes” opposite Clive Brooks. In the 1933 film “A Study in Scarlet”, Owen played Sherlock Holmes opposite Warburton Gamble in the character of Doctor Watson. Owen also has the odd distinction of playing three classical characters of Victorian fiction- Scrooge, Holmes, and Watson- only to have those characters taken over and personified by other actors, namely Alastair Sim as Scrooge, Basil Rathbone as Holmes, and Nigel Bruce as Watson.

Owen appeared, later in his career, on the television series “Maverick” in two episodes and also guest starred in episodes of the series “One Step Beyond” and “Bewitched”. He was featured in the 1964 film “Mary Poppins” and had a small role in the 1962 film production of the Jules Verne novel “Five Weeks in a Balloon”. John Reginald Owen died from a heart attack at age 85 at his home in Boise, Idaho in 1972, after a film career totaling over one hundred films, many of which are today listed as classics- “Of Human Bondage”, “Anna Karenina”, “A Tale of Two Cities”, “The Great Ziegfeld” and “The Call of the Wild”.

Calendar: July 20

A Year: Day to Day Men: 20th of July

A World of Blue Tiles

July 20, 1938 was the birthdate of English actress, Dame Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg in Yorkshire, England.

Diana Rigg’s career in film, television and theater has been wide-ranging. Her professional debut was in the production of “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” at the York Festival in 1957. She made her Broadway debut with the play “Abelard and Heloise” in 1971, earning the first of three Tony Award nominations for Best Actress in a Play. She received her second nomination in 1975 for her role in “The Misanthrope”.

In the 1990s, Diana Riggs had triumphs with roles at the Almeida Theater in Islington, England, including “Medea” in 1992, which moved to Broadway where she received the Tony Award for Best Actress, “Mother Courage” at the National Theater in 1995, and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” at the Almeida Theater in 1997. In 2011 Riggs played Mrs. Higgins in “Pygmalion” at the Garrick Theater in the West End of London; in February of 2018 she returned to Broadway in a non-singing role of Mrs. Higgins in “My Fair Lady”.

Diana Rigg appeared in the British 1960s television series “The Avengers” from 1965 to 1968 opposite Patrick McNee as John Steed, playing the secret agent Emma Peel in 51 episodes. Rigg auditioned for the role on a whim, without ever having seen the program. Although she was hugely successful in the series, she disliked the lack of privacy that it brought. Also, she was not comfortable in her position as a sex symbol, She also did not like the way that she was treated by the Associated British Corporation (ABC).

In 2013, Diana Rigg secured a recurring role in the third season of the HBO series “Game of Thrones”, portraying Lady Olenna Tyrell, a witty and sarcastic political mastermind popularly known as the Queen of Thorns, the grandmother of regular character Margaery Tyrell. Her performance was well received by critics and audiences alike, and earned her an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2013.

Diana Rigg reprised her role in season four of “Game of Thrones” and in July 2014 received another Guest Actress Emmy nomination. In 2015 and 2016, she again reprised the role in seasons five and six in an expanded role from the books. The character was finally killed off in the seventh season, with Rigg’s final performance receiving critical acclaim.

Calendar: May 14

A Year: Day to Day Men: 14th of May

The Soft Shadow of the Sun

On May 14, 1970, Billie Burke, the American actress, died of natural causes at the age of 85.

Billie Burke, born Mary Burke, was an American actress who was famous on Broadway, in early silent films and later in sound films. As a child, she toured the United States and Europe with her father, a singer and a clown for the Barnum and Bailey Circus. At the age of nineteen, Burke began acting on stage, making her debut in London in “The School Girl”. She eventually returned to America to star in Broadway musical comedies.

Burke played leads on Broadway in the plays “Suzanne”, “The Runaway”, and “The Land of Promise” during the years from 1910 to 1913, along with a supporting role in the revival of “The Amazons”. It was during this revival that she caught the eye of producer Florenz Ziegfeld who married her in 1914.

Burke was soon signed for movies and made her debut in the 1915 film “Peggy”. Her success was phenomenal, and she was soon earning what was reputedly the highest salary ever granted to a motion picture actress up to that time. By 1917 she was a favorite with silent movie fans, rivaling Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford. Burke starred primarily in provocative society dramas and comedies. The star’s girlish charm rivaled her acting ability; and as she dressed to the hilt in fashionable gowns, furs and jewelry, she became a fashion trendsetter in the 1920s.

In 1937, Burke appeared in the first of the “Topper” films, about a man haunted by two socialite ghosts, played by Cary Grant and Constance Bennett, in which she played Cosmo Topper’s wife, the twittering and daffy Clara Topper. In 1938 at the age of 54, she was chosen to play Glinda the Good Witch of the North, in the musical film “The Wizard of Oz” directed by Victor Fleming and released in 1939. This became her iconic role among future film viewers.

Billie Burke was 75 when she made her final screen appearance as Cordelia Fosgate in John Ford’s 1960 western “Sergeant Rutledge”. After this film she retired from acting and lived in Los Angeles until her death. For her contributions to the film industry, Billie Burke was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 with a star located at 6617 Hollywood Boulevard. Her fame is also in the stars: a crater near the north pole of the planet Mercury is  named after her.

Calendar: April 19

A Year: Day to Day Men: 19th of April

The Paw Print

April 19, 1946 is the birthdate of English actor and singer, Timothy James Curry.

Tim Curry’s first full-time role was as part of the original London cast of the musical “Hair” in 1968, where he first met Richard O’Brien who went on to write Curry’s next full-time role, that of Dr. Frank-N-Furter in the 1975 play “The Rocky Horror Show”. Originally, Curry rehearsed the character with a German accent and peroxide blond hair, and later, with an American accent. However, he decided to play Dr. Frank-N-Furter with an English accent after deciding that the character should sound like Queen Elizabeth II.

Curry originally thought the character was merely a laboratory doctor dressed in a white lab coat. However, at the suggestion of director Jim Sharman, the character evolved into the diabolical mad scientist and transvestite with an upper-class Belgravia accent. That character carried over to the film “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and made Curry a household name and gave him a cult following. He continued to play the character in London, Los Angeles, and New York City until 1975.

Shortly after the end of the “Rocky Horror Show” run on Broadway, Curry returned to the stage with Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties”, which ran in London and New York from 1975 to 1976. That play was a Broadway hit winning two Tony Awards: Best Performance by an Actor for John Wood, and Best Comedy for the play. “Travesties” also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, and Curry’s performance as the famous dadaist Tristan Tzara received good reviews.

In 2004, Tim Curry began his role of King Arthur in Eric Idle’s “Spamalot” in Chicago. The show successfully moved to Broadway in February 2005. The play brought Curry a third Tony nomination, again for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical. Curry reprised this role in London’s West End at the Palace Theater, where “Spamalot” opened on October 16, 2006. He was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award as the Best Actor in a Musical for the role, and also won the Theatergoers’ Choice Award as Best Actor in a Musical.

One of Tim Curry’s best-known television roles (and best-known roles overall) is as Pennywise the Clown in the 1990 horror miniseries “Steven King’s It”. Aside from one “Fangoria” interview in 1990, Curry never publicly acknowledged his involvement in “It” until an interview with Moviefone in 2015, where he called the role of Pennywise “a wonderful part”.

Calendar: April 9

A Year: Day to Day Men: 9th of April

A Giant Among Men

On April 9, 1928, the play “Diamond Lil”, written by and starring Mae West, opened in New York City.

Mae West began writing began writing her risqué plays using the pen name Jane Mast. Her first starring role on Broadway was in a 1926 play she entitled “Sex”, which she wrote, produced, and directed. Although conservative critics panned the show, ticket sales were strong. The production did not go over well with city officials, who had received complaints from some religious groups, and the theater was raided. West was arrested along with the rest of the cast. She was taken to the Jefferson Market Court House, where she was prosecuted on morals charges, and on April 19, 1927, was sentenced to 10 days for “corrupting the morals of youth”.

Though Mae West could have paid a fine and been left off, she chose the jail sentence for the publicity it would garner. While incarcerated on Welfare Island, she dined with the warden and his wife. West told reporters that she had worn her silk panties while serving time, in lieu of the ‘burlap’ the other girls had to wear. She achieved publicity from this jail stint. West served eight days with two days off for “good behavior”. Media attention surrounding the incident enhanced her career, by crowning her the darling “bad girl” who “had climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong”

West’s next play, “The Drag”, dealt with homosexuality, and was what West called one of her “comedy-dramas of life”. After a series of try-outs in Connecticut and New Jersey, she announced she would open the play in New York. However, “The Drag” never opened on Broadway due to efforts by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to ban any attempt by West to stage it. West explained, “the city fathers begged me not to bring the show to New York because they were not equipped to handle the commotion it would cause.” West was an early supporter of the women’s liberation movement; since the 1920’s she was also an early supporter of gay rights.

Mae West continued to write plays, which included “The Wicked Age”, “Pleasure Man”, and “The Constant Sinner”. Her productions aroused controversy, which ensured that she stayed in the news, which also often resulted in packed houses at her performances. West’s 1928 play, “Diamond Lil”, was about a racy, easygoing, and ultimately very smart lady of the 1890s. It opened on April 9th,  became a Broadway hit, and cemented West’s image in the public’s eye. This show had an enduring popularity and she successfully revived it many times throughout the course of her career.

Calendar: March 26

Year: Day to Day Men: March 26

Light Casts Shadows

The twenty-sixth of March in 1911 marks the birth date of Tennessee Williams, an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of American drama in the twentieth-century. 

Born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi, Tennessee Williams attended the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he studied journalism. Bored by his classes, he began entering his poetry, essays, stories and plays in writing contests. His first two submitted plays were the 1930 “Beauty is the Word” and the 1932 “Hot Milk at Three in the Morning”. For his 1930 play, which discussed rebellion against religious upbringing, he became the first freshman at the university to receive honorable mention in a writing contest.

After studying a year at St. Louis’s Washington University, Williams transferred in the autumn of 1937 to the University of Iowa where he graduated in 1938 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He later studied at The New School’s Dramatic Workshop in New York City. In acknowledgement of his Southern accent and roots, Williams adopted the professional name Tennessee Williams in 1939. After working a series of menial jobs, he was awarded a small grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in recognition for his play “Battle of Angels”. 

Using these funds, Tennessee Williams relocated to New Orleans in 1939 to write for the Works Progress Administration of the government’s New Deal Program. He lived for a time in New Orlean’s French Quarter, specifically at 722 Toulouse Street, the setting for his 1977 play “Vieux Carré”. Due to his receiving the Rockefeller grant, he was given a six-month contract as a writer for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio.

During the winter of 1944-1945, Williams’s memory play “The Glass Menagerie” based on his short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass”, was produced in Chicago to good reviews. The play moved to New York City where it became an instant, long-running hit on Broadway. With this success, he traveled widely with his partner Frank Merlo, often spending summers in Europe. For Williams, the constant traveling to different cities stimulated his writing. 

Between 1948 and 1959, Tennessee Williams had seven of his plays produced on Broadway: “Summer and Smoke” (1948), “The Rose Tattoo” (1951), “Camino Real” (1953), “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1955), “Orpheus Descending” (1957), “Garden District” (1958), and “Sweet Bird of Youth” (1959). For these, he was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award. All of these plays, except for “Camino Real” and “Garden District”, were adapted into motion pictures. Williams’s 1957 one-act play “Suddenly, Last Summer” was adapted by William and Gore Vidal into the 1959 film of the same name. His play “Night of the Iguana”, which premiered on Broadway in 1961, was later adapted by John Huston and Anthony Veiller into the 1964 film of the same name. 

After the successes of the 1940s and 1950s, Williams went through a period of personal turmoil and theatrical failures. Although he continued to write, his work suffered from his increasing alcohol and drug consumption. On the twentieth of September in 1963, Williams’s partner of forty-two years, Frank Merlo, died from inoperable lung cancer. Depressed by the loss as well as the time spent in and out of treatment facilities, he felt increasingly alone despite a short relationship with aspiring writer Robert Carroll. Tennessee Williams was discovered dead at the age of seventy-one in his suite at New York’s Hotel Elysée on the twenty-fifth of February in 1983 from a toxic level of Seconal.

Notes: Beginning in the late 1930s,Tennessee Williams had several short-term relationships with men he met in his travels. In 1948 at the Atlantic House in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he met Italian-American actor Frank Melo who was leaning against the porch railing. According to his memoirs, Williams felt his time with Melo in his Manhattan and Key West homes were some of his happiest and most productive years. However, William’s alcohol, drug use and promiscuity put a strain on their relationship. In 1962 after Melo was diagnosed with lung cancer, Williams move Melo into the Manhattan apartment and stayed by his side until his death in 1963.

Calendar: March 21

Year: Day to Day Men: March 21

Cool and Refreshed

The twenty-first of March in 1867 marks the birth date of Florenz Edward Ziegfeld Jr. who was an American Broadway impresario. 

Born in the Illinois city of Chicago, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. was the son of Roselie de Hez, the Belgian grandniece to General Count Étienne Maurice Gérard, and German-born Florenz Ziegfeld, son of the mayor of Jever, the capital city of the Friesland district, Germany. The father founded Roosevelt University’s Chicago Academy of Music 1n 1867 and later opened the Trocadero nightclub to profit from the 1893 World’s Fair. 

During a trip to London in 1896, Florence Ziegfeld Jr. met the Polish-French singer Anna Held and brought her to the United States as his common-law wife. Held enjoyed several successes on Broadway including the 1901 “Little Duchess” and 1906 “A Parisian Model”. One of Broadway’s celebrated leading ladies, she became both a well-known and wealthy woman. It was Held who presented the idea of an American version of the Parisian Folies Bergère to Ziegfeld. 

Ziegfeld’s stage spectaculars, which became known as the Ziegfeld Follies, began with ‘Follies of 1907’ which opened in July of that year and continued annually until 1931. These productions with their elaborate costumes and sets featured beautiful women, the Ziegfeld Girls, chosen personally by Ziegfeld. The extravaganzas were choreographed to the works of such popular composers as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. The Follies featured many well-known theatrical performers including Fanny Brice, W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, Bert Williams and Ann Pennington.

In 1927, the sixteen-hundred seat Ziegfeld Theater opened on the west side of  Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue between 54th and 55th Streets. Designed by architects Joseph Urban and Thomas W. Lamb, the Art Deco theater’s auditorium was egg-shaped with the stage at the narrow end. A large medieval-styled mural by Lillian Gaertner, “The Joy of Life”, covered the walls and ceiling. To finance the construction cost of of 2.5 million dollars, Ziegfeld borrowed money from newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who took control of the theater after Ziegfeld’s death.

The Ziegfeld Theater’s opening production in February was Ziegfeld’s “Rio Rita” which ran for almost five hundred performances. The second production, “Show Boat” with stage sets by Urban and a score by Jerome Kern, was a success with a run of five hundred seventy-two performances. This musical continues to be revived on Broadway and has won multiple Tony Awards. In May of 1932 during the Depression, Ziegfeld staged a revival of “Show Boat” that ran for six months. In the same year, a production with the Follies’ theatrical stars entitled “The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air” was broadcast on CBS Radio.  

Anna Held divorced Florenz Ziegfeld in January of 1913. In April of 1914, he married stage and screen actress Billie Burke; they had one child, Patricia Burke Ziegfeld. The Ziegfeld family lived at their New York estate in Hastings-on-Hudson and their residence in Palm Beach, Florida. In 1932 after spending a period in a New Mexico sanitarium, Florenz Ziegfeld traveled to Los Angeles, California. A few days later, he died in Hollywood from an existing lung infection, pleurisy, on the twenty-second of July in 1932.

Ziegfeld’s death left Billie Burke with substantial debts, one of the reasons that she steered her career toward film acting. She moved to Beverly Hills and returned to a successful career as an actress with such films as George Cukor’s “Dinner at Eight”, Norman Z. McLeod’s 1937 “Topper”, Victor Fleming’s 1939 “The Wizard of Oz”, and William Keighley’s 1942 “The Man Who Came to Dinner”. In the late 1950s, failing memory led to Burke’s retirement from show business; she died of natural causes at the age of eighty-five in May of 1970. Burke is interred beside Ziegfeld at Kensico Cemetery in Valhall, New York.

Calendar: March 3

Year: Day to Day Men: March 3

Warmth of the Sun

The third of March in 1585 marks the inauguration of the Teatro Olimpico designed by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. Since 1994, the Olympic Theater, along with other Palladian-styled buildings in and around the city of Vicenza, have been listed together as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site.

Born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola in Padua, Republic of Venice in November of 1508, Andrea Palladio was influenced by Roman and Greek architecture and is considered one of those individuals who most influenced the history of architecture. He trained under noted sculptor Bartolomeo Cavazza de Sossano as an apprentice stonecutter for six years. When his contract was finished,  Palladio permanently relocated to Vicenza where his career was unexceptional until 1538. 

Between 1538 and 1539, Palladio rebuilt the Villa Trissino, the Cricoli residence of poet and scholar Gian Giorgio Trissino who  was engaged in a lifetime study of ancient Roman architecture. Due to his work, Palladio received the formal title of architect in 1541. He took several trips, accompanied by Gian Trissino, between 1541 and 1547 to study classical monuments in Rome, Tivoli, Paletrina, and Albano. As a mentor, Trissino introduced Palladio to the history and arts of Rome as well as bestowed on him the name ‘Palladio’ which means the Wise One. 

Throughout his career in Vicenza, Andrea Palladio designed many villas and governmental palaces. His first construction project involving a large town house was the Palazzo Thiene in Vicenza. After the death of its architect Giulio Romano, Palladio finished its construction. He used Romano’s design for the villa’s windows but altered the facade to express a new lightness and grace. Among the villas attributed to Palladio’s architectural designs are the Villa Pisani, his first patrician villa for a Venetian family, and Villa Cornaro, a villa at Piombino Dese that was a mixture of villa rusticate (country house) and suburban villa with a grand salon designed for entertaining.

In 1550, Palladio began construction on the Palazzo del Chiericati, an urban palace built on a city square near Vicenza’s port. It was designed with a two-story facade with a double loggia divided by rows of Doric columns. Paladio’s Palazzo del Capitaniato, the offices of the regional Venetian governor, was a contrasting design of red brick and white stone. The four brick half-columns of its facade formed a strong vertical element that balanced the horizontal balustrades and projecting cornice at the top. Designed in 1565, the Palazzo del Capitaniato was built between 1571 and 1572.

Ranked among his highest masterworks, the Teatro Olimpico was Palladio’s final architectural design and was not completed until after his death. In 1579, the Olympic Academy obtained the rights to build a permanent theater in the old fortress, Castello del Territorio, which had been both a prison and storage depot for gun powder before falling in disuse. Asked to produce a design, Palladio used the space to recreate an academic reconstruction of the Roman theaters he had closely studied. In order to fit a stage and seating area into the building’s wide and shallow space, Palladio had to flatten the semicircular seating area of a Roman theater into an ellipse.

Andrea Palladio died in August of 1580, only six months after the construction on the theater had started. His sketches and drawings were used as a guide; Palladio’s yongest son, Silla Palladio, and Vicenza architect Vincenzo Scamozzi oversaw the final construction work. Scamozzi contributed several rooms to the design and built the rusticated entrance archway that was fitted into the rough, well-worn walls. As Palladio had not left any plans for the onstage scenery, Scamozzi created trompe l’oeil scenery with oil-lamp lighting to give the appearance of long streets receding into the distance. The full Roman-style wood and stucco backscreen is the oldest surviving stage set still in existence. 

The Teatro Olimpico was inaugurated on the third of March in 1585 by a production of Sophocles’s “Oedipus Rex” with music by composer and organist Andrea Gabrieli. After only a few productions, the theater was essentially abandoned. The scenes created for the production were never removed and still exist in place. The original lighting system of glass oil lamps has been used only a few times over the years due to the risk of fire; they were lit in 1997 for a production of “Oedipus Rex”. 

Due to conservation issues, current performances in the Teatro Olimpico are limited to four hundred attendees. As heating and air conditioning could damage the delicate wooden structure of the stage sets, performances are held only in the spring and autumn. The theater was a film location for the 1979 film “Don Giovanni” and the 2005 “Casanova”.

Calendar: February 11

Year: Day to Day Men: February 11

The City’s Pier

The eleventh of February in 1938 marks the first televised broadcast of a science fiction program. The British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, adapted Karel Čapek’s seminal play, “R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)” into a thirty-five minute production which aired at 3:30 in the afternoon. 

Born in January of 1890, Karel Čapek was a Czech writer, playwright and journalist. He became best known for his science fiction works, most notably the 1936 “War with the Newts”, a satirical work of exploitation and human flaws, and his “R.U.R.”, a three-act play with prologue that introduced the word robot to the English language. Although nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Čapek never received the award. Several awards, however, commemorate his name among which is the Karel Čapek Prize that is awarded to those who contribute to the reinforcement and maintenance of democratic and humanist values in society. 

The robots in Čapek’s 1920 “R.U.R.” are not robots in the popularly understood sense of an automaton or a mechanical device. They were artificially biological organisms that were similar to humans. These robots more closely resembled more modern conceptions such as replicants ( 1982 Blade Runner ) or android hosts ( 2016 Westworld television series ). Their skin and brains were produced in vats, their bones in factories, and their nerve fibers, arteries and intestines were spun on factory bobbins. The robots, themselves living biological beings, were finally assembled on factory lines as opposed to grown or born.

“R.U.R.” had its first theatrical premiere on the twenty-fifth of January in 1921 at Prague’s National Theater. English writer Paul Selver translated the play into English and sold it to St. Martin’s Theater in London. The translation was adapted for British theater by actor Sir Nigel Ross Playfair in 1922. Performance rights for the United States and Canada were sold in the same year to the New York Theater Guild. The American premiere of “R.U.R.” took place in October of 1922 at New York City’s Garrick Theater on 35th Street in Manhattan where it ran for one hundred and eighty-four performances. 

In April of 1923, actor and director Basil Dean produced “R.U.R.” in Britain for the Reandean Company at London’s St. Martin’s Theater. This version was based on Playfair’s adaptation and included several revisions from the New York Theater Guild. During the 1920s, the play was performed in several British and American theaters. In June of 1923, Karel Čapek sent a letter to translator Edward March with the play’s final lines that had been omitted from previous translations. A copy of this final and complete translation of Čapek’s play later appeared in the 2001 journal of “Science Fiction Studies”.

The BBC airing of Čapek’s “R.U.R.” occurred just two years after England launched the broadcasting service; it is unclear whether any recordings of the event survived. The play’s effects, though very rudimentary by today’s standards, made it very suitable for showing on the new television medium. Although its popularity peaked in the 1920s, Čapek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” became the foundation of many of science fiction’s modern franchises, both film and television.