1850 (175 years ago)
Robinson and Evrard’s Dramatic Museum opened in San Francisco with the premiere of Dr. David G. Robinson’s play Seeing the Elephant. Robinson came to San Francisco in 1847 after growing up in New England and graduating from Yale University as a physician. His partner, James Evrard, was a comedian and former manager at the National Theater. Seeing the Elephant was a comedic sketch show about the California Gold Rush and was a favorite amongst the miners in the area. The Dramatic Museum was sadly short-lived; it burned down in the San Francisco Fire of 1851.
1895 (130 years ago)
Oscar Hammerstein II was born in Harlem in New York City. His father was a theatre producer and manager who discouraged Hammerstein from pursuing a life in the arts. However, though Hammerstein attended Columbia University Law School, he quit before graduating to focus on his theatrical career. His first musical, Always You, opened on Broadway in 1920. Hammerstein had multiple successful collaborations over his career, most famously with Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers. He and Kern adapted Edna Ferber’s bestselling novel Show Boat into a stage production that was hugely successful and has been credited with changing the landscape of the American musical. Hammerstein’s partnership with composer Richard Rodgers made them arguably the most famous writing team in American theatre history. Together they created 10 stage musicals, including classics such as Oklahoma!, Carousel, and The Sound of Music. Their productions received 34 Tonys, 15 Academy Awards, two Grammys, and two Pulitzer Prizes.
1970 (55 years ago)
Audra Mcdonald was born in West Berlin, West Germany, where her father was stationed in the U.S. Army. She grew up in Fresno, California, and went on to graduate from Juilliard in 1993. She made her Broadway debut in 1992 as a replacement for Aya in The Secret Garden and received her first Tony award in 1994 for playing Carrie Pipperidge in Carousel. Since then she has garnered 11 Tony nominations and six wins (both the most by any performer), and is currently performing in the lead role of Gypsy on Broadway. She has won two Grammys and a Primetime Emmy award. In 2016 she received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama, and in 2017 she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. In 2020 she joined a coalition of Black theatre artists to create Black Theatre United, with a mission to “tell our stories, preserve our history, and ensure the legacy of Black theatre as American culture.”
1980 (45 years ago)
The American Players Theatre opened its first production: William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Spring Green, Wisconsin. American Players Theatre was founded three years prior in Washington, D.C., by Charles Bright, Randall Duk Kim, and Anne Occhiogrosso. In 1985, the company was nominated for a Regional Theatre Tony Award. Though it started out producing only Shakespeare, the theatre broadened its scope in the following decades. From 1990 until 2007 the company toured around Wisconsin at the end of each summer, and in 2007 they started their Actors Apprentice Program, which is still operating. In 2009 they built the Touchstone Theatre, a 200-seat indoor performance venue to accompany the original 1,075 seat amphitheatre. Today they produce nine plays in rotating repertory from June through November. According to their website, they have an annual attendance of around 100,000 people and are the “country’s second largest outdoor theatre devoted to the classics.”
2000 (25 years ago)
Kate Burton starred as Hedda Tesman in Williamstown Theatre Festival’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, as adapted by Jon Robin Baitz. The production eventually transferred to Broadway, where Ben Brantley praised Burton’s performance, writing, “She has scaled a titanic figure down to accessible human dimensions without trivializing her.” Burton was nominated for a Tony for Best Actress in a Play for the role. Interestingly, she was also nominated for Best Featured Actress in a Play that year for her performance as Pinhead/Mrs. Kendal in the revival of The Elephant Man. She is one of only six actors to be nominated for two Tonys in the same year.
