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16 unusual facts about Broadway


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.

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

Dick Gallagher

When Pigs Fly (1996), which was produced internationally after an extended run Off-Broadway, and won the 1996 Outer Critics Circle award for Best Musical Revue, and the Drama Desk Award for Best Off-Broadway musical

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.

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.

Kathleen Widdoes

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

Kirsten Holly Smith

On November 18, 2012, the new version of Smith’s Dusty Springfield bio-musical, now entitled Forever Dusty opened Off-Broadway at New World Stages in New York City.

Lamspringe Abbey

The monks, after a period of dispersal, reformed as a community at Broadway in Worcestershire between 1828 and 1841, after which they were spread among other houses, although the community was never formally disbanded.

Mark Jacoby

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

Part of Your World

Originally recorded by American actress and singer Jodi Benson in her film role as Ariel, "Part of Your World" is a Broadway-style ballad in which the film's heroine, a mermaid, expresses her desire to become human.

Robert Lorick

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

Ruth Sobotka

She appeared in a number of Off-Broadway productions and was a member of the Seattle Repertory Theatre during their first season in 1963, playing Cordelia in King Lear.

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.

Steven Fischer

His international work includes documenting the first Irish National Tour of the critically acclaimed Off-Broadway play Coole Lady, a historical play about the life of Lady Gregory by noted playwright and W. B. Yeats biographer Sam McCready.

Willard Dyson

He is also very active on the local jazz scene in New York City, playing at local clubs as well as in various Broadway and Off-Broadway shows.

Yarbrough and Peoples

More recently, in 2009, they both appeared in the Off-Broadway musical, Blind Lemon Blues, at the York Theatre, New York, where Cavin Yarbrough portrayed Lead Belly.


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.

Alex Hitz

After selling the restaurant and inspired by his step-father’s 1991 Kennedy Center Honor, Hitz moved to New York City and co-produced several Broadway shows, including Triumph of Love (1997) and the revival of The Sound of Music (1998), as well as the revival of On the Town in Central Park with the New York Public Theater.

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."

Arnold Moss

He played Prospero in Margaret Webster's 1945 production of Shakespeare's The Tempest for a combined total of 124 performances, the longest run of the play in Broadway history.

Arthur Loesser

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

Bill Hinnant

He attended the Yale School of Drama, but left after his sophomore year in 1958 to originate the role of the navigator in the Broadway play, No Time for Sergeants.

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.

Cecil Parker

Parker was also the original Charles Condomine in the West End production of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, a role subsequently played on Broadway by Clifton Webb and in the 1945 film by Rex Harrison.

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.

Corcoran, California

Whitley first intended the town be named "Otis", after Harrison Gray Otis of the Los Angeles Times, and streets as Otis, Sherman, Letts (the Broadway store) and Ross (after his son, Ross Whitley) show the connections.

Donald O'Connor

O'Connor appeared in the short-lived Bring Back Birdie on Broadway in 1981, and continued to make film and television appearances into the 1990s, including the Robin Williams film Toys as the president of a toy-making company.

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).

Doug Haining

He has performed professionally since 1974, backing national artists such as Steve Allen, Don Rickles, Bob Hope, and others, and Broadway shows such as West Side Story, Cats, A Chorus Line and many others.

Effie Shannon

They appeared in numerous plays as a team predating by a generation the famous Lunt and Fontanne as a great Broadway romantic team.

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.

Gene Gabriel

The play transferred to Broadway in early 2003 and won three Tony's including best play for Greenberg and best director for Joe Mantello.

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.

Joe DiPietro

2003 The Thing About Men (Off-Broadway) (book, lyrics) (musical version of the German comedy film by Doris Dörrie, Männer... (Men...), from 1985) with music by Jimmy Roberts

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."

Joseph Anthony

From March 1960 through March 1961, Anthony successfully opened the original Broadway productions of four shows which ran simultaneously: The Best Man at the Morosco Theatre, Under the Yum Yum Tree at Henry Miller's Theatre, Rhinoceros at the Longacre Theatre, and Mary, Mary at the Helen Hayes Theatre.

Laurence Mark Wythe

Through the Door had a Broadway reading in 2011 starring Kerry Butler.

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.

Lone Star Love

The musical started pre-Broadway try-outs at the 5th Avenue Theatre, Seattle, on September 8, 2007, and had an official run from September 19 through September 30.

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.

Megan Reinking

She has appeared on Broadway in multiple shows including Dracula, Lestat, the acclaimed revival of Hair, The People in the Picture and most recently Million Dollar Quartet at New World Stages, as well as featuring in the first season of Boardwalk Empire.

Mel Welles

Jonathan Haze, who played Seymour in the original film, attended the opening, and Welles also received a visit from Martin P. Robinson, the designer of the Audrey II plant puppets used in the off-Broadway production (Robinson is also famous for his puppetry on Sesame Street).

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.

Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812

The work received the 2013 Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater, a 2013 Obie Award, and Best New Musical at the 2013 Off-Broadway Alliance Awards, and was nominated for five Drama Desk Awards.

Nottingham Trent University, School of Art and Design

In the field of art and design, NTU has links with a wide range of companies, professional bodies and institutions on an international level, including Apple, Arcadia Group, Broadway, Fashion Institute of Technology, Marks & Spencer, Ralsey Group Limited, Association of Illustrators, Sony, and Sophie Stellar.

Prince of Wales Theatre

The theatre played more musical comedies beginning in 1903, including the Frank Curzon and Isabel Jay hits Miss Hook of Holland (1907, its matinee version, Little Miss Hook of Holland was performed by children for children), King of Cadonia (1908), and The Balkan Princess (1910), and later the World War I hits, Broadway Jones (1914), Carminetta (1917), and Yes, Uncle! (1917).

Pudur, Ambattur

Bus services are there to Poonamallee (62), Avadi (62), Koyambedu, Vallalar Nagar (M248), Vandalur, Broadway, Tambaram (170L) and few private buses to Kanchipuram and Redhills.

Raoul Bhaneja

In January 2006 Bhaneja debuted in Hamlet (solo), a one-man version of William Shakespeare's Hamlet directed by Robert Ross Parker, which has been performed across Canada including an engagement at The National Arts Centre in the fall of 2013, in the United Kingdom at The Assembly Rooms as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art as well as in New York City on a number of occasions, including Off Broadway.

Really Rosie

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

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

Summer Shaw

Summer considered asking him to stay,before a heart-to-heart with Sarah,who asked her "what if you landed a part in a Broadway show?" "I'd ask him to come with me" "For him to drop everything to follow your dreams, when you wouldn't let him follow his?"

The Love of Sunya

She chose to film another adaptation of Max Marcin and Charles Guernon's play as it had been filmed once before in 1919 starring Clara Kimball Young and was a resounding success on Broadway.

The Mary Tyler Moore Hour

Moore announced plans to return in a new sitcom in the fall of 1980, but instead turned to Broadway, where she starred in a revival of Whose Life Is It Anyway? (winning a special 1980 Tony Award for her performance of a role originally played by Tom Conti), and then went back to Hollywood, where she played the emotionally crippled mother in the acclaimed film Ordinary People, directed by Robert Redford.

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.

The Shubert Organization

The company was reorganized in 1973, and as of 2008 owned or operated seventeen Broadway theaters in New York City, an off-Broadway theater — the Little Shubert — and the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia.

The Water Coolers

The actors in the revolving cast have appeared on and off Broadway, in television and radio commercials, in such TV shows as Law & Order, Rescue Me, General Hospital, All My Children, Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien and in major comedy clubs and concert halls across the country.

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.