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17 unusual facts about Broadway


Bill Osco

In 2007, an Off-Broadway musical based on his Alice in Wonderland was staged at the Kirk Theatre in New York City.

Brett Leigh

Leigh began his career on the Broadway stage, playing the roles of "Riff" and "Action" in the musical West Side Story and "Tommy Djilas" in the The Music Man.

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Additionally, he has appeared on stage in the critically acclaimed Broadway musical West Side Story.

Broadway, San Francisco

The street is home to several notable venues, such as the Showgirls theater, the Broadway Tunnel, Convent of the Sacred Heart High School and the City Lights Bookstore.

Douglass Watson

He was also an acclaimed actor on the New York stage, acting in several Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, including the 1952 Broadway revival of Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O'Neill.

Edwin Austin Abbey

Friendly with other expatriate American artists, he summered at Broadway, Worcestershire, England, where he painted and vacationed alongside John Singer Sargent at the home of Francis Davis Millet.

Jackson Krall

Through the years Jackson's instruments have found their way into the hands of the world's greatest drummers and percussionists, and can be heard on recordings as well as in live performance by many bands, orchestras, and the most popular Broadway and Off-Broadway shows like "Lion King" and "Blue Man Group".

Joe Kodeih

director from the Arab world to perform on an Off-Broadway stage at Lamama ETC in 2003 with a play titled The Middle Beast.

John A. Willis

Theatre World, founded in 1945, covers the complete statistical and photographic Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and regional theatre seasons, major theatrical awards, obituaries, and the longest Broadway and Off-Broadway runs, among other categories.

Kathleen Widdoes

In 2002, she received the Lucille Lortel Award (Featured Actress) for her work in the play Franny's Way Off-Broadway.

Mark Jacoby

He has also performed widely in national tours, regional theatre and Off-Broadway.

Millie the Model

A 1986 Off-Broadway musical, Dial "M" For Model by John Epperson, inspired by Millie, was staged at LaMaMa E.T.C. Not a direct adaptation, it featured, for instance, the female impersonator Lypsinka as Mannequin St. Claire, a character based on Chili.

Nick Basile

His acting credits include roles in the Off-Broadway production of Tony n' Tina's Wedding, H.P. Lovecraft (LoveCracked! The Movie) and has appeared in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing at the Gene Frankel Theatre in NYC.

Part of Your World

The Broadway musical version of the song is sung by Jodi Benson, Sierra Boggess which appears on the Original Broadway Cast album.

Robert Lorick

In 1972, he made his debut as a lyricist with the Off-Broadway musical Hark! at the Mercer-O'Casey Theatre.

Ryan Solle

Solle grew up in Broadway, North Carolina, played club soccer for the Fayetteville Force with whom he won three consecutive North Carolina state championships (1999, 2000 and 2001), and attended Lee County High School in Sanford, North Carolina, where he was selected as a 2003 Parade Magazine High School All American.

Windmill Performing Arts

Internationally, Windmill have performed in many countries, including in the US (including Off-Broadway), New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea.


Alan Furlan

Born Aleardo Furlan in Farla, in the North Friuli region of Italy, Furlan acted in films in Europe and the United States, on Broadway and in commercials.

Antonio Meneses Saillant

Now a filmmaker and innovator he has produced the fantasy thriller, The Ascension, starring Corbin Bernsen and a romantic dark comedy entitled Heterosexuals, starring J. Robert Spencer from Broadway's Musical "Jersey Boys."

Arthur Loesser

Arthur Loesser was the half-brother of Broadway composer Frank Loesser.

Automobile Alley

Automobile Alley Historic District is an upscale Urban neighborhood in Oklahoma City, located roughly along North Broadway Avenue in Downtown Oklahoma City.

Caissie Levy

She later opened the Broadway production reprising her role as Molly Jensen along with Richard Fleeshman, her co-star in the West End production as Sam Wheat.

Carolyn George

She started her professional dance career in 1952 in Broadway musicals and joined New York City Ballet (NYCB) on its European tour that year in George Balanchine's Swan Lake.

Colin Bates

In November 2005 at preliminary auditions for Billy in the U.S., he went to the audition, being 15 when the cut-off age was 14; but director Stephen Daldry, realizing Colin would be too old for the Broadway production but also realizing his potential, brought Bates to London a few weeks later with his family to start rehearsals and debuted on March 13, 2006.

David Rapkin

Rapkin has designed sound on Broadway for Steaming by Nell Dunn, On Golden Pond by Ernest Thompson, The Curse Of An Aching Heart by William Alfred, The Wake Of Jamie Foster by Beth Henley and Off-Broadway for Playwrights Horizons and The Phoenix Theater.

Donna Kane

She has won acclaim for her performances in the 1995 U.S. tour of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat  with Donny Osmond, Les Misérables  on Broadway (1993), and as Maria in West Side Story  in Vienna and Munich (1995).

Florence Mills

Mills became well-known as a result of her role in the successful Broadway musical Shuffle Along (1921) at Daly's 63rd Street Theatre (barely on Broadway), one of the events credited with beginning the Harlem Renaissance, as well acclaimed reviews in London, Paris, Ostend, Liverpool, and other European venues.

Frank McGlynn, Sr.

By 1896 though, he was appearing on stage at the Casino Theatre performing in The Gold Bug, a burlesque musical comedy written by Glen MacDonough with music from Victor Herbert.

Graciela Rivera

In 1945, she was given the role of Adele in the musical "Rosalinda", a Broadway version of Johann Strauss II's Die Fledermaus.

Helen Burns

Burns' Broadway stage credits include The Inspector General, There's One in Every Marriage (1957), The First Gentleman, at the Belasco Theatre in New York City, and Catsplay, for the latter of which, she received a Drama Desk Award nomination.

Henry V. Esmond

For the next Broadway production, Eliza Comes to Stay, Esmond travelled to New York to appear alongside his wife and the popular actor Leslie Banks.

Ida Straus

Alma Cuervo (1997) (Titanic) (Broadway Musical) When Ida decided to stay with her husband, they sang the song "Still."

Ina Balin

She also did summer stock, which led to roles on Broadway, and in 1959, she won the "Theatre World Award" for her performance in the Broadway comedy, A Majority of One, starring Gertrude Berg and Sir Cedric Hardwicke.

Ira Gershwin

With George he wrote more than a dozen Broadway shows, featuring songs such as "I Got Rhythm", "Embraceable You", "The Man I Love" and "Someone to Watch Over Me".

Irwin Chanin

Irwin Salmon Chanin (29 October 1891 – 24 February 1988) was a Jewish American architect and real estate developer, best known for designing several Art Deco towers and Broadway theaters.

Jewel and Blaire Restaneo

Jewel & Blaire also had the great opportunity of working with Erin Brockovich on ABC's Challenge America TV Special with other Broadway kids, Ashley Rose Orr, Danielle Brown, Jennifer Brown, and Shadoe Brandt.

Joe Langworth

From 1990 - 2005, Langworth appeared in a number of major Broadway musicals, including the closing company of the original production of A Chorus Line, the Tony Award-winning production of Ragtime with Audra McDonald, Marin Mazzie and Brian Stokes Mitchell, and the 2001 revival of Stephen Sondheim's Follies.

John B. Snook

Snook's 620 Broadway (1858) – called the "Little Cary Building" for its resemblance to the Cary Building by Gamaliel King and John Kellum (1856) – was fronted with cast iron from Badger's Architectural Iron Works.

John Boulter

Boulter appeared as the male lead - Freddie Flowerdew - in the musical production of "Ask Dad" in the Jeeves and Wooster episode, "Introduction on Broadway."

Karen Ziemba

She will return to Broadway in March 2014 to appear in the new musical adaptation of Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway as the character "Eden Brent", directed by Susan Stroman.

Larry Keith

In the 1961 Broadway production of My Fair Lady, Keith served as an understudy to Michael Allinson and played the role of Higgins some 50 times.

Lester Rawlins

Born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, Rawlins appeared in off-Broadway productions of Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, Winterset, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, and Nightride, for which he won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance.

Liam Aiken

Aiken made his stage debut in the Broadway play A Doll's House at the age of seven and his film debut playing Parker Posey's son in Henry Fool in the same year.

Linda Lee Thomas

A one-woman show about Linda's life with Porter, Love, Linda: The Life Of Mrs. Cole Porter, starring jazz vocalist Stevie Holland, ran Off-Broadway at the York Theatre, in 2013.

Long Wharf Theatre

More than 30 Long Wharf productions have been transferred to Broadway or Off-Broadway, including Durango, Wit, (winner of a Pulitzer Prize), The Shadow Box (Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award/Best Play winner), Hughie, American Buffalo, Requiem for a Heavyweight, Quartermaine's Terms (Obie Award winner for best play), The Gin Game (Pulitzer Prize winner), The Changing Room, The Contractor and Streamers.

Loring Smith

Smith's most memorable Broadway role came nearly three years later when he portrayed Horace Vandergelder in Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, with Ruth Gordon as Dolly, Arthur Hill as Cornelius and Robert Morse as Barnaby.

Mary Boland

For the remainder of her career, Boland combined films and, later television productions, with appearances onstage (including starring in the 1935 Cole Porter musical Jubilee), making her last Broadway appearance in 1954 at the age of seventy-two.

Mary Testa

She returned to Broadway in July, 2007 in the musical-theater remake of the 1980 film Xanadu for which she received a Drama Desk Award nomination.

Maurice Manson

Maurice Manson (January 31, 1913, in Toronto, Canada – September 21, 2002) was a character actor who appeared in several film and Broadway productions.

Ming Cho Lee

Lee's first Broadway play as Scenic Designer was "The Moon Besieged" in 1962; he went on to design the sets for over 20 Broadway shows, including Mother Courage and Her Children, King Lear, The Glass Menagerie, The Shadow Box, and For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.

North Carolina Theatre

Several Broadway veterans are said to have started their careers at North Carolina Theatre, including Clay Aiken, Sharon Lawrence, Lauren Kennedy, and Beth Leavel.

Really Rosie

During its off-Broadway run, the lead role of Rosie was first played by a-then 12-year-old Tisha Campbell-Martin.

Rosie Live

Jennifer Cody appeared in a skit featuring O'Donnell as "Officer Lockstock" and Cody as "Little Sally", a reference to the off-Broadway show Urinetown.

Sakharam Binder

Its most recent performance in English was staged Off-Broadway as a part of the theatre company The Play Company's season starring Adam Alexi-Malle, Sarita Choudhury, Anna George, Sanjiv Jhaveri, Bernard White and directed by Maria Mileaf.

Sanford Friedman

Friedman was also active off-Broadway as a writer and producer, collaborating with actor Howard Da Silva; author Ben Maddow; and playwright Arnold Perl.

Sattler

Sattler's, a regional department store chain headquartered at 998 Broadway, Buffalo, New York

Sitting Pretty

Sitting Pretty (1924 musical), a Broadway musical produced by Guy Bolton and P.G Wodehouse, with music by Jerome Kern

Song of Norway

After successful runs in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the show opened at the Imperial Theatre in New York on August 21, 1944, and ran for 860 performances.

The Great Divorce

In 2007 the Magis Theatre Company of New York City presented their adaptation in an off-Broadway run at Theatre 315 in the Theatre District with music by award-winning composer Elizabeth Swados and puppets by Ralph Lee.

The School for Scandal

John Gielgud played Charles Surface in a legendary season at the Queens Theatre in 1937 and repeated the role under his own direction in a 1963 Broadway production.

Tommy Rall

On Broadway he danced to considerable acclaim as "Johnny" in Marc Blitzstein and Joseph Stein's 1959 musical Juno (based on Sean O'Casey's play Juno and the Paycock).

Tony Azito

Azito's best-known role, however, came in yet a third production for NYSF: as the Sergeant of Police in the 1980 Broadway revival of The Pirates of Penzance, starring Linda Ronstadt and Kevin Kline.

Transcendence Theatre Company

Over 450 people participated in the project from Artistic Directors at the United States' top regional theatres like the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Arena Stage and Steppenwolf Theatre, to Broadway Producers to college students and professors.

Valisia LeKae

Previously, she was a swing and understudy in the Broadway productions of The Book of Mormon (2011), Ragtime (2009), and The Threepenny Opera (2006) and a performer in 110 in the Shade (2007).

Warren Casey

Producers Ken Waissman and Maxine Fox saw the show and suggested to the playwrights that it might work better as a musical, and told them if the creative partners were willing to rework it and they liked the end result, they would produce it off-Broadway.

Wilson Jermaine Heredia

He starred alongside Harvey Fierstein (who won a Tony Award for writing the Book of the musical) as Albin/Zaza and Broadway veteran Christopher Sieber as Georges.

Woodbridge, Connecticut

Maury Yeston, Tony Award-winning Broadway composer and lyricist.