Word: broadway
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week, Boxing Tsar Mike Jacobs, Theatrical Producer Lee Shubert and Jai-Alai Promoter Richard Berenson pooled their backgrounds and bank accounts to introduce the Cuban national game to Broadway. With all the éclat of a Hollywood première, Promoters Jacobs, Shubert & Berenson transformed the famed old Hippodrome into a jai-alai fronton (at a cost of $100,000), exhibited 30 of the world's top-notch jai-alaiers in a demonstration of what has been called the "fastest game in the world...
...kinds of people give Hollywood the air, but seldom cinemactors. Once in a while a Frances Farmer or Sylvia Sidney has sneaked away to Broadway, without shutting the studio door behind her. But last week Cinemactor Franchot Tone (Three Comrades, They Gave Him a Gun) loudly announced that he was through with "the long hours, the boredom and all the rest" of Hollywood, was going back to Broadway...
Manhattan's only free theatre, which a Broadway wisecracker once termed "the flophouse of the drama," came billowing out of the imagination of a frankly stage-struck playwright named Butler Davenport, who looks like Edwin Booth (see cut). Taking over the building in 1915 left Davenport $3.17. But $3.17 floated plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Molière and Butler Davenport, with unpaid casts made up of starry-eyed young amateurs, sad-faced old professionals, milliners' assistants, postmen, stenographers, clerks. Now & then there might be a familiar Broadway name like Mary Shaw in the cast, or future Broadway names...
...Davenport Theatre was last week performing Zunguru by an African playwright-composer, Asadata Dafora Horton, whose Kykunkor got rave notices from Broadway critics in 1934. Primitive in plot, Zunguru was a kind of savage vaudeville, with three blacks pounding African drums, brown girls strutting their stuff, a witch doctor gabbling and shrieking, a fire-eater munching lighted torches-all of it "background" for Boy Meets Girl in Senegal...
Died. Gustav A. Weidhaas, 62, Broadway's No. 1 creator of stage "props" and trick effects; of heart disease; in Bronxville, N. Y. Sometime master handyman for Belasco, Ziegfeld, Joe Cook and Billy Rose, Weidhaas manufactured such varied marvels as the dragon for the Metropolitan Opera's Siegfried, jellied lobster (which would bounce) for Dinner at Eight, pet snakes for You Can't Take It With...