1903 Mam'selle Napoleon is Anna Held in the musical at the Knickerbocker Theatre. Produced by Held's husband Florenz Ziegfeld, with a score by Gustav Luders, the show has a 43-performance run.
1911 Birthday of actor Lee J. Cobb, who creates many memorable roles in the 1930s to 1950s, most notably Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman.
1925 "Why a duck?" The ineffable question is first asked on Broadway at the opening night of the George S. Kaufman/Irving Berlin musical The Cocoanuts at the Lyric Theatre with four young stars who overshadow even the august writing team: The Marx Brothers, Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo. The anarchic nonsense about the Florida land rush runs 377 performances and is made into a classic film (minus most of the songs).
1925 Birthday of entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., who begins in small clubs and rises to become a Las Vegas headliner, film star, and member of the "Rat Pack" of 1950s swingers. His Broadway work includes starring roles in the musicals Mr. Wonderful and Golden Boy.
1930 Cole Porter scandalizes Broadway with the streetwalker's lament, "Love For Sale," in the musical The New Yorkers, which opens at B.S. Moss' Broadway Theatre for a run of 168 performances. Included in the huge cast are Jimmy Durante and Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians.
1937 It's a short Siege at the Longacre Theatre. The Irwin Shaw drama about a group of Spanish Loyalists lasts only five performances.
1943 John Van Druten's romantic comedy The Voice of the Turtle opens at the Morosco Theatre, and goes on to a remarkable 1,557-performance run.
1948 Rex Harrison is Henry VIII and Joyce Redman is Anne of the Thousand Days in the play by Maxwell Anderson. The drama dealing with the King's betrothal and marriage to Anne Boleyn runs 286 performances.
1949 Carol Channing blinks her big round eyes and warbles "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" on the opening night of the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at the Ziegfeld Theatre. It runs 740 performances and makes Channing into an icon.
1965 Lauren Bacall and Barry Nelson star in Cactus Flower. Abe Burrows directs and also adapted the work from Fleur de Cactus by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy. It runs 1,234 performances.
1979 Today's Saturday matinee of Grease is the 3,243 performance, making it the longest-running show in Broadway history to that point. Grease passes Fiddler on the Roof, which had overtaken Life With Father in 1972, when Grease was 128 performances into its pre-Broadway run. The long-run title is now held by Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera.
1991 Nick & Nora opens at the Marquis Theatre—and closes 9 performances later, despite a book by Arthur Laurents, a score by Charles Strouse and Richard Maltby, Jr., and performances by Joanna Gleason, Barry Bostwick, and Faith Prince.
1994 Faith Prince opens on Broadway playing a dead housewife who returns to life in Donald Margulies' What's Wrong With This Picture? It runs 12 performances at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre.
1996 The epic musical Ragtime, with a book by Terrence McNally and a score by Lynn Ahrens & Stephen Flaherty, has its world premiere in Toronto. Reviews are strong for the show's subsequent Broadway mounting, but the show's high cost, coupled with other financial woes, eventually wreck its producing organization, Livent, Inc. SFX Productions buys what remains of the company, only to be taken over itself by Clear Channel.
1999 Liza Minnelli opens her new show, Minnelli on Minnelli, at the site of her mother's triumphant stage appearance decades earlier: The Palace Theatre. Minnelli on Minnelli is a musical tribute to Vincente Minnelli, featuring songs from movies that had been directed by Minnelli, sung by his daughter, Liza, such as "The Boy Next Door" from Meet Me in St. Louis and "I Got Rhythm" from An American in Paris.
2002 Baz Luhrmann's staging of the opera La Bohème opens on Broadway, with a directorial concept that makes it resemble a Broadway musical. The show runs 228 performances and wins a special Tony honor for its three rotating casts of leads.
2011 The LeVay family of Lydia R. Diamond's Stick Fly gather at their plush Martha's Vineyard home for a summer weekend of scrabble and secrets. Tony winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Dulé Hill, Mekhi Phifer, and Tracie Thoms star in the comedy that opens on Broadway at the Cort Theatre.
2016 The world premiere of Itamar Moses and David Yazbek’s musical The Band's Visit, based on the award-winning film of the same name, opens Off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company. David Cromer directs a cast that includes John Cariani, Katrina Lenk, and Tony Shalhoub. The production transfers to Broadway the following year, and wins 10 Tony Awards, including Best Musical.
More of Today's Birthdays: Georges Feydeau (1862-1921). James Thurber (1894-1961). Maximilian Schell (1930-2014). Herb Gardner (1934-2003). David Carradine (1936-2009). Graciela Daniele (b. 1939). John Rubinstein (b. 1946). Bob Martin (b. 1962). Ingrid Michaelson (b. 1979).
Katrina Lenk, Tony Shalhoub, and Andrew Polk in The Band's Visit
