Donald Pippin, a celebrated and prolific musical director for Broadway and New York’s Radio City Music Hall and the last living recipient of the long-discontinued Tony Award for Best Conductor and Musical Director — which he won for 1963’s Oliver! — died June 9 at the age of 95.
His death was confirmed by friends on Facebook, including Broadway director and choreographer Marcia Milgrom Dodge, who wrote, “I met Don when I was the choreographer on The Music Man @ NY City Opera in 1988. He was our Maestro and he was a generous gentleman in the theatre, taking me under his wing with such mastery and kindness…Journey On, dear Don, in beautiful music.”
Hollywood & Media Deaths In 2022: Photo Gallery
An arranger and songwriter as well as conductor and musical director, Pippin, born in Macon, Georgia, and a longtime resident of Brewster, New York, began his Broadway career by composing dance music for...
His death was confirmed by friends on Facebook, including Broadway director and choreographer Marcia Milgrom Dodge, who wrote, “I met Don when I was the choreographer on The Music Man @ NY City Opera in 1988. He was our Maestro and he was a generous gentleman in the theatre, taking me under his wing with such mastery and kindness…Journey On, dear Don, in beautiful music.”
Hollywood & Media Deaths In 2022: Photo Gallery
An arranger and songwriter as well as conductor and musical director, Pippin, born in Macon, Georgia, and a longtime resident of Brewster, New York, began his Broadway career by composing dance music for...
- 6/10/2022
- by Greg Evans
- Deadline Film + TV
The Skin of Our Teeth, Thornton Wilder’s 1943 Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy-drama, will return to Broadway next spring in a Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz.
Blain-Cruz, the Lct’s resident director, will be making her Broadway debut with the production, which will begin previews Thursday, March 31 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, with an official opening on Monday, April 25.
The fantastical Skin of Our Teeth chronicles a New Jersey family as it perseveres through one apocalypse after another, including the Ice Age, the Biblical flood and war.
“The Skin of Our Teeth is a play for right now,” said Blain-Cruz in a statement. “It’s a title that has been in my consciousness for a long time and while searching for the perfect play with which to make my Beaumont debut I re-read it. I was so deeply moved by Thornton Wilder’s story of a family going through apocalypse after apocalypse,...
Blain-Cruz, the Lct’s resident director, will be making her Broadway debut with the production, which will begin previews Thursday, March 31 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, with an official opening on Monday, April 25.
The fantastical Skin of Our Teeth chronicles a New Jersey family as it perseveres through one apocalypse after another, including the Ice Age, the Biblical flood and war.
“The Skin of Our Teeth is a play for right now,” said Blain-Cruz in a statement. “It’s a title that has been in my consciousness for a long time and while searching for the perfect play with which to make my Beaumont debut I re-read it. I was so deeply moved by Thornton Wilder’s story of a family going through apocalypse after apocalypse,...
- 9/27/2021
- by Greg Evans
- Deadline Film + TV
Joan Weldon, stage actress and a Warner Bros. contract player in the 1950s who achieved lasting sci-fi fame in the creature feature giant ant classic Them!, died Feb. 11 at her home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She was 90.
Her death was only recently announced by her family. A cause was not specified, but the family notes that she “passed away peacefully” at home.
“A talented and successful opera singer and actress of theatre, film, musicals and television, she was simply known to many as Joanie,” the family writes, “whose love for light-hearted pranks and practical jokes spread joy wherever she went.”
Born in San Francisco, Weldon began her professional career at age 16 when she became the San Francisco Opera’s youngest contract singer. She would return to the live stage often, appearing on Broadway opposite Alfred Drake in the 1961 musical Kean.
In 1958 she played Marian the Librarian in the national touring...
Her death was only recently announced by her family. A cause was not specified, but the family notes that she “passed away peacefully” at home.
“A talented and successful opera singer and actress of theatre, film, musicals and television, she was simply known to many as Joanie,” the family writes, “whose love for light-hearted pranks and practical jokes spread joy wherever she went.”
Born in San Francisco, Weldon began her professional career at age 16 when she became the San Francisco Opera’s youngest contract singer. She would return to the live stage often, appearing on Broadway opposite Alfred Drake in the 1961 musical Kean.
In 1958 she played Marian the Librarian in the national touring...
- 3/4/2021
- by Greg Evans
- Deadline Film + TV
‘This Picture Kills Fascists’ might be a motto for this bombshell essay documentary. Leo Hurwitz’s film wasn’t made welcome in 1948 and would surely be controversial today, as it’s just too &%#$ truthful and blunt about good old American bigotry and injustice. The passionate, jarring plea for humanist sanity really shakes up viewers, in a constructive way. Hurwitz said that one TV executive compared it to The Sermon on the Mount. It’s still a lightning bolt against fascist ideas flourishing in the Land of the Free.
Strange Victory
Blu-ray
The Milestone Cinematheque
1948 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 64 min. / available through Milestone Films / Street Date August 14, 2018 / 34.95
Narrators: Alfred Drake, Muriel Smith, Gary Merrill, Saul Levitt, Faith Elliott.
Actors: Virgil Richardson, Sophie Maslow, Cathey McGregor, Jack Henderson, Robert P. Donley.
Cinematography: Peter Glushanok, George Jacobsen
Film Editors: Leo Hurwitz, Faith Elliott (Hubley), Mavis Lyons
Original Music: David Diamond
Written by Saul Levitt,...
Strange Victory
Blu-ray
The Milestone Cinematheque
1948 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 64 min. / available through Milestone Films / Street Date August 14, 2018 / 34.95
Narrators: Alfred Drake, Muriel Smith, Gary Merrill, Saul Levitt, Faith Elliott.
Actors: Virgil Richardson, Sophie Maslow, Cathey McGregor, Jack Henderson, Robert P. Donley.
Cinematography: Peter Glushanok, George Jacobsen
Film Editors: Leo Hurwitz, Faith Elliott (Hubley), Mavis Lyons
Original Music: David Diamond
Written by Saul Levitt,...
- 7/17/2018
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Patricia Morison, who starred as shrewish diva Lilli Vanessi in the original 1948 Broadway production of “Kiss Me, Kate” as well as Anna Leonowens in the 1954 run of “The King and I” opposite Yul Brynner, died of natural causes in her Los Angeles home Sunday. She was 103.
Morison was born on March 15, 1915 in New York City, the daughter of playwright and actor William Morison and Selena Fraser, a British Intelligence agent during World War I. After graduating from high school, Morison took acting classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse and made her stage debut at the Provincetown Playhouse in the musical revue “Don’t Mind the Rain.” Her Broadway debut followed shortly, in 1933’s “Growing Pains,” though she never appeared on stage, instead acting as the stand-by for Helen Hayes in the lead role of Victoria Regina.
After catching the eye of talent scouts, Morison signed a contract with Paramount Pictures and...
Morison was born on March 15, 1915 in New York City, the daughter of playwright and actor William Morison and Selena Fraser, a British Intelligence agent during World War I. After graduating from high school, Morison took acting classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse and made her stage debut at the Provincetown Playhouse in the musical revue “Don’t Mind the Rain.” Her Broadway debut followed shortly, in 1933’s “Growing Pains,” though she never appeared on stage, instead acting as the stand-by for Helen Hayes in the lead role of Victoria Regina.
After catching the eye of talent scouts, Morison signed a contract with Paramount Pictures and...
- 5/20/2018
- by Erin Nyren
- Variety Film + TV
Today in 1948, opened at the Shubert Theatre. Kiss Me, Kate is a musical with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. It is structured as a play within a play, where the interior play is a musical version of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. The original production starred Alfred Drake, Patricia Morison, Lisa Kirk and Harold Lang. Kiss Me, Kate was a response to Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma and other integrated musicals, and it proved to be his biggest hit and the only one of his shows to run for more than 1,000 performances on Broadway. It won the first Tony Award presented for Best Musical, in 1949.
- 12/30/2015
- by Stage Tube
- BroadwayWorld.com
Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 actress and pioneering female film producer. Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 actress was pioneering woman producer, politically minded 'femme engagée' Danièle Delorme, who died on Oct. 17, '15, at the age of 89 in Paris, is best remembered as the first actress to incarnate Colette's teenage courtesan-to-be Gigi and for playing Jean Rochefort's about-to-be-cuckolded wife in the international box office hit Pardon Mon Affaire. Yet few are aware that Delorme was featured in nearly 60 films – three of which, including Gigi, directed by France's sole major woman filmmaker of the '40s and '50s – in addition to more than 20 stage plays and a dozen television productions in a show business career spanning seven decades. Even fewer realize that Delorme was also a pioneering woman film producer, working in that capacity for more than half a century. Or that she was what in French is called a femme engagée...
- 12/5/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Happy Birthday, Alfred Drake He is best known for his leading roles in the original Broadway productions of Oklahoma Kiss Me, Kate Kismet and for playing Marshall Blackstone in the original production of Babes in Arms, in which he sang the title song and Hajj in Kismet, for which he received the Tony Award. His 1964 stage performance as Claudius in the Richard Burton Hamlet was filmed live on the stage of the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. His final stage appearance in a musical was in 1973 as Honore Lachaisse in Lerner and Loewe's Gigi. Two years later he starred in a revival of The Skin of Our Teeth.
- 10/7/2015
- by Stage Tube
- BroadwayWorld.com
Mildred Joanne Smith, who portrayed Sidney Poitier’s wife in his film debut, the 1950 drama No Way Out, and then saw her career upended when she was severely injured in a plane crash, has died. She was 94. Smith, who after her lone movie appearance became a magazine editor and a popular English teacher for a junior high school, died July 19, her family announced. In the 1940s, Smith starred in such Broadway productions as Men to the Sea, Mamba’s Daughters, Beggar’s Holiday (as the love interest of Alfred Drake), Forward the Heart and A Long Way From Home. All
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- 7/25/2015
- by Mike Barnes
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Mildred Joanne Smith, who portrayed Sidney Poitier’s wife in his film debut, the 1950 drama No Way Out, and then saw her career upended when she was severely injured in a plane crash, has died. She was 94.
Smith, who after her lone movie appearance became a magazine editor and a popular English teacher for a junior high school, died July 19, her family announced.
In the 1940s, Smith starred in such Broadway productions as Men to the Sea, Mamba’s Daughters, Beggar’s Holiday (as the love interest of Alfred Drake), Forward the Heart and A Long Way From Home. All were short-lived, but she received great ...
Smith, who after her lone movie appearance became a magazine editor and a popular English teacher for a junior high school, died July 19, her family announced.
In the 1940s, Smith starred in such Broadway productions as Men to the Sea, Mamba’s Daughters, Beggar’s Holiday (as the love interest of Alfred Drake), Forward the Heart and A Long Way From Home. All were short-lived, but she received great ...
- 7/24/2015
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Mildred Joanne Smith, who portrayed Sidney Poitier’s wife in his film debut, the 1950 drama No Way Out, and then saw her career upended when she was severely injured in a plane crash, has died. She was 94.
Smith, who after her lone movie appearance became a magazine editor and a popular English teacher for a junior high school, died July 19, her family announced.
In the 1940s, Smith starred in such Broadway productions as Men to the Sea, Mamba’s Daughters, Beggar’s Holiday (as the love interest of Alfred Drake), Forward the Heart and A Long Way From Home. All were short-lived, but she received great ...
Smith, who after her lone movie appearance became a magazine editor and a popular English teacher for a junior high school, died July 19, her family announced.
In the 1940s, Smith starred in such Broadway productions as Men to the Sea, Mamba’s Daughters, Beggar’s Holiday (as the love interest of Alfred Drake), Forward the Heart and A Long Way From Home. All were short-lived, but she received great ...
- 7/24/2015
- The Hollywood Reporter - Film + TV
Today in 1948, opened at the Shubert Theatre. Kiss Me, Kate is a musical with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. It is structured as a play within a play, where the interior play is a musical version of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. The original production starred Alfred Drake, Patricia Morison, Lisa Kirk and Harold Lang. Kiss Me, Kate was a response to Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma and other integrated musicals, and it proved to be his biggest hit and the only one of his shows to run for more than 1,000 performances on Broadway. It won the first Tony Award presented for Best Musical, in 1949.
- 12/30/2014
- by Stage Tube
- BroadwayWorld.com
Today in 1948, opened at the Shubert Theatre. Kiss Me, Kate is a musical with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. It is structured as a play within a play, where the interior play is a musical version of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. The original production starred Alfred Drake, Patricia Morison, Lisa Kirk and Harold Lang. Kiss Me, Kate was a response to Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma and other integrated musicals, and it proved to be his biggest hit and the only one of his shows to run for more than 1,000 performances on Broadway. It won the first Tony Award presented for Best Musical, in 1949.
- 12/30/2013
- by Stage Tube
- BroadwayWorld.com
Today in 1948, opened at the Shubert Theatre. Kiss Me, Kate is a musical with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. It is structured as a play within a play, where the interior play is a musical version of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. The original production starred Alfred Drake, Patricia Morison, Lisa Kirk and Harold Lang. Kiss Me, Kate was a response to Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma and other integrated musicals, and it proved to be his biggest hit and the only one of his shows to run for more than 1,000 performances on Broadway. It won the first Tony Award presented for Best Musical, in 1949.
- 12/30/2012
- by Stage Tube
- BroadwayWorld.com
Happy Birthday, Alfred Drake He is best known for his leading roles in the original Broadway productions of Oklahoma Kiss Me, Kate Kismet and for playing Marshall Blackstone in the original production of Babes in Arms, in which he sang the title song and Hajj in Kismet, for which he received the Tony Award. His 1964 stage performance as Claudius in the Richard Burton Hamlet was filmed live on the stage of the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. His final stage appearance in a musical was in 1973 as Honore Lachaisse in Lerner and Loewe's Gigi. Two years later he starred in a revival of The Skin of Our Teeth.
- 10/7/2012
- by Stage Tube
- BroadwayWorld.com
Today in 1948, opened at the Shubert Theatre. Kiss Me, Kate is a musical with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. It is structured as a play within a play, where the interior play is a musical version of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. The original production starred Alfred Drake, Patricia Morison, Lisa Kirk and Harold Lang. Kiss Me, Kate was a response to Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma and other integrated musicals, and it proved to be his biggest hit and the only one of his shows to run for more than 1,000 performances on Broadway. It won the first Tony Award presented for Best Musical, in 1949.
- 12/30/2011
- by Stage Tube
- BroadwayWorld.com
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