"Everything I know I learned in vaudeville." -James Cagney At the turn of the century in America, the Wright Brothers made their first successful flight, Jack London wrote Call of the Wild, Henry Ford started his motor company, and thousands of people escaped small apartments ...
"I never met a man I didn’t like." H.L. Mencken called him "the most dangerous writer alive." Damon Runyan dubbed him "America’s most complete document." And Franklin D. Roosevelt credited him with bringing his fellow Americans "back to a sense of proportion." He was a ...
He was brilliant and prolific, breathing life and passion into such memorable characters as Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski in his critically acclaimed A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. And like them, he was troubled and self-destructive, an abuser of alcohol and drugs. He was awarded four ...
Richard Rodgers' contributions to the musical theatre of his day were extraordinary, and his influence on the musical theatre of today and tomorrow is legendary. His career spanned more than six decades, and his hits ranged from the silver screens of Hollywood to the bright ...
Known for his extended study of Washington Square Park and his distorted nudes of the 1930s, Andre Kertesz was a quiet but important influence on the coming of age of photojournalism and the art of photography. For more than seventy years, his subtle and penetrating ...
"To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination, and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realize that this is all the ...
Robert Sherwood, reviewing cowboy hero Tom Mix: "They say he rides as if he’s part of the horse, but they don’t say which part." Dorothy Parker: "That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ‘no’ in any of them." George S. Kaufman: Once when asked ...
The 1920s began a decade of change in the American arts. Jazz, along with such inventions as the phonograph, radio and sound movies, transformed the music industry. With its concentration of theaters and publishing houses, New York became the center of the music world and ...
In the summer of 1931, three young idealists, Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg, were inspired by a passionate dream of transforming the American theater. They recruited 28 actors to form a permanent ensemble dedicated to dramatizing the life of their times. They ...
For the past fifty years, the Old Labor Stage on 44th street in New York City has been home to some of the most inventive acting, directing, and playwrighting in the country. Its members have included such greats as Marlon Brando, Robert de Niro, Norman ...
