1836 Birthday of satirist William S. Gilbert, later to achieve immortality as the lyricist half of the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta-writing team that produces The Mikado, The Pirates of Penzance, H.M.S. Pinafore, and other staples of the genre.
1919 Irene, the story of a shop girl charming a wealthy young man begins its run. Edith Day and Bobbie Watson star. James Montgomery wrote the book with music by Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy. Irene runs seven months in the 1919–1920 season and an additional 428 performances in the 1920–21 season.
1930 Lili Hatvany says it's Tonight or Never. Her play about a prima donna (played by future Richard Nixon opponent Helen Gahagan) and an opera scout (Melvyn Douglas) runs almost seven months. It is David Belasco's last production before his death.
1930 Marilyn Miller, Fred Astaire, Adele Astaire, and Eddie Foy, Jr., are all Smiles. The Florenz Ziegfeld production, with a score by Vincent Youmans, is based on a Noël Coward story about a French waif brought to America for a taste of the high life.
1933 Bob Hope has his first featured role on Broadway in Jerome Kern's Roberta, also starring Lyda Roberti, Fay Templeton, Tamara, George Murphy, and Sydney Greenstreet.
1941 Patricia Peardon is Junior Miss in the play adapted by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields from Sally Benson's stories. Moss Hart directs the look at teenage sub-debs.
1942 An ice age, a hurricane, and the possible end of the world are visited upon the Antrobus family of New Jersey in The Skin of Our Teeth, Thornton Wilder's surreal parable about the survival of man against all odds. The opening night cast features Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, and Tallulah Bankhead. The play wins the Pulitzer Prize and runs 359 performances.
1945 Birthday of actor and director Walter Bobbie, whose 1996 staging of Chicago becomes Broadway's longest-running American musical.
1946 Ingrid Bergman stars on Broadway as Joan of Arc in Maxwell Anderson's Joan of Lorraine. It runs 199 performances at the Alvin Theatre.
1961 Hoping to follow up her success in The Music Man, Barbara Cook takes the role of Liesl in The Gay Life, Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz's musical version of La Ronde. It runs just 113 performances at the Shubert Theatre.
1964 Alan Alda plays a young writer having an affair with his prostitute neighbor (Diana Sands) in The Owl and the Pussycat by Bill Manhoff, which opens at the ANTA Theatre and runs 428 performances. A 1970 film adaptation stars George Segal and Barbra Streisand.
1999 Broadway brushes up its Shakespeare, as Kiss Me, Kate opens for the first time since 1965. Starring Marin Mazzie and Brian Stokes Mitchell, the production runs 882 performances at the Martin Beck Theatre.
2001 Another notable day for Alan Alda: He opens on Broadway in the (nearly) solo show, QED, in which he impersonates thoughtful physicist Richard Feynman at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater.
2004 After attending the opening night of the drama Democracy, composer Cy Coleman falls ill at the cast party and is rushed to the hospital where he dies of a heart attack at age 75. Coleman won Best Score Tony Awards for his work on The Will Rogers Follies, City of Angels, and On the Twentieth Century. His other scores include Sweet Charity, The Life, Seesaw, Little Me, Wildcat, and Barnum.
2008 Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's Road Show, starring Michael Cerveris and Alexander Gemignani as the eccentric Mizner brothers, opens at the Public Theater. The musical went through several years of development (and a few different titles), before landing Off-Broadway in the John Doyle-helmed production.
2010 The world premiere of John Guare's A Free Man of Color, a globe-spanning work set in New Orleans, Haiti, and France at the turn of the 19th century, opens on Broadway at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. George C. Wolfe stages the sprawling production that is centered in New Orleans following the Haitian slave revolts, when its large population of Free People of Color (or the "Gens de Couleur Libres") inhabited a city that was more European than American in the early 17th century.
More of Today's Birthdays: Imogene Coca (1908-2001). Johnny Mercer (1909-1976). Dorothy Collins (1926-1994). John McMartin (1929-2016). Brenda Vaccaro (b. 1939). Delroy Lindo (b. 1952). Anthony Warlow (b. 1961). Daphne Rubin-Vega (b. 1969). Duncan Sheik (b. 1969). Steven Pasquale (b. 1977).
