1904 Birthday of Moss Hart, Broadway playwright who writes or cowrites The Man Who Came to Dinner, Once in a Lifetime, As Thousands Cheer, You Can't Take it With You, and Lady in the Dark, to name just a few. He also directs the original Broadway productions of My Fair Lady and Camelot. He lives to 1961, and is survived by his wife, actor and philanthropist Kitty Carlisle Hart.
1910 Fred Terry stars in the title role of The Scarlet Pimpernel, the non-musical original Broadway adaptation of Baroness Orczy's novel.
1935 Mulatto, a new play by poet Langston Hughes, opens at the Vanderbilt Theatre. The play, which follows the trials of a young interracial couple in the Old South, stars Rose McClendon and runs 373 performances.
1951 The Ethel Barrymore Theatre hosts Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn performing together for the first time on a Broadway stage. They star in Jan De Hartog's comedy The Fourposter. José Ferrer stages the show, whose entire action takes place in a bedroom. The show runs for 632 performances, and Tandy and Cronyn are compared to Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne by Daily News critic John Chapman. A musical version of The Fourposter, I Do! I Do!, becomes a hit for Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones.
1963 Fresh from their success with The Fantasticks, songwriters Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt make their Broadway debut with 110 in the Shade based on N. Richard Nash's drama, The Rainmaker. It runs 330 performances at the Broadhurst Theatre.
1974 Peter Shaffer has a hit on Broadway as his Equus opens at the Plymouth Theatre. The story follows a tragic young man's fascination with horses until it ultimately affects his sex life. The entire plot takes place in a psychiatric ward, where Anthony Hopkins portrays the psychiatrist who tries his hardest to help the disturbed young man, played by Peter Firth. Frances Sternhagen and Marian Seldes also star in the Tony and New York Drama Critics Circle Award-winning play. It runs 1,209 performances.
1984 A new entertainer is introduced to Broadway as Whoopi Goldberg opens her self-titled solo show at the Lyceum Theatre. Mike Nichols directs the 156-performance run. Douglas Watt writes in the Daily News: "Long may she whoop."
1991 Irishman Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa opens at the Plymouth Theatre. The story follows five unmarried sisters faced with poverty in rural Ireland. Friel has long been a New York favorite, bringing such works to New York as Faith Healer; Philadelphia, Here I Come!; Wonderful Tennessee; and Translations. Lughnasa runs 421 performances.
1994 Actor Raúl Juliá dies at age 54 after suffering a stroke. Heavily involved in the Public's New York Shakespeare Festival, he starred in The Threepenny Opera and The Cherry Orchard, as well as Broadway's Nine and movies such as The Addams Family. At his funeral, friend Susan Sarandon says he "asked all the big questions and smoked all the big cigars."
2000 Mary-Louise Parker stars as a woman trying to validate the authorship of her late father's groundbreaking proof about prime numbers in David Auburn's Proof, opening today at Broadway's Walter Kerr Theatre. The work will go on to three 2001 Tony Awards, including Best Play, Best Actress in a Play for Parker, and Best Direction of a Play for Daniel Sullivan, along with the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
2002 Adolph Green, the legendary Broadway lyricist-librettist and screenwriter who, with partner Betty Comden, created On the Town, Bells Are Ringing, On the Twentieth Century, Peter Pan, The Will Rogers Follies, Wonderful Town, and Singin' in the Rain, dies of natural causes at his Manhattan home.
2002 Pop songwriter Billy Joel makes his Broadway debut with Movin' Out, consisting of songs from his pop catalog fashioned by director/choreographer Twyla Tharp into an all-dancing narrative about three buddies' experience in the Vietnam War. It wins Tony Awards for both its primary creators: Best Choreography for Tharp, Best Orchestrations for Joel.
2008 Tony Award nominee Milton Katselas, a respected director, acting teacher, author, painter, and founder of the Beverly Hills Playhouse acting school, dies at age 75. Katselas directed over 60 plays including Butterflies Are Free, the original Off-Broadway production of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, and the Broadway production of Private Lives that starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
2013 The world premiere of Sharr White's WWI-set drama The Snow Geese opens on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Mary-Louise Parker stars as a newly widowed woman who must come to terms with the enormous debt left by her husband, and her son's impending deployment overseas. Directed by Daniel Sullivan, the cast also includes Danny Burstein, Victoria Clark, Evan Jonigkeit, and Christopher Innvar.
More of Today's Birthdays: Dame Sybil Thorndike (1882-1976). Tony Walton (b. 1934). F. Murray Abraham (b. 1939). Kevin Kline (b. 1947). B.D. Wong (b. 1960). Christine Pedi (b. 1962). Matthew Warchus (b. 1966). Raúl Esparza (b. 1970).
