Archive for the ‘Theatre’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Obit watch: August 21, 2023.

Monday, August 21st, 2023

Ron Cephas Jones, actor. THR. Other credits include “Law & Order: Criminal Intent”, “Law & Order: Organized Crime”, and “NYPD Blue”.

Chris Peluso, theater actor.

Randy Minniear, former running back for the New York Football Giants.

After playing fullback at Purdue, he was selected by the Giants in the 20th round of the 1966 NFL Draft and would first play in 1967, when Earl Morrall was the quarterback.
“They rate him as the greatest backup quarterback of all time,” Minniear told the Thursday Night Tailgate podcast in 2021. “And that’s one of the things they say about me. I was the greatest benchwarmer of all time. I will tell you this, while I was down there on the end of the bench by the water bucket not one was stolen in five years.”

“The Peripheral” and “A League Of Their Own” at Amazon Prime. Both of these shows had been renewed for a second season (though “ALOTO” had only been given a four-episode run) but Amazon is apparently re-evaluating their plans in light of the strike.

I don’t care much about the baseball show. I was slightly interested in “The Peripheral” because Big Bill Gibson. But I haven’t watched any of the episodes, and am kind of thinking maybe I should read the book first.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 5, 2023.

Saturday, August 5th, 2023

Still on the road with limited time to spare.

For the record: Mark Margolis.

Clifton Oliver.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 31, 2023.

Monday, July 31st, 2023

As I write this, I am seeing reports from two sources that Paul Reubens, aka “Pee-Wee Herman”, has passed at 70. Here’s THR‘s very short preliminary story: expect an obit watch tomorrow.

Inga Swenson, actress.

…the Nebraska native — no, she was not born in Germany — was cast in 1963 as the spinster Lizzy in 110 in the Shade, based on N. Richard Nash’s play The Rainmaker. She received a Tony nomination for best actress in a musical for that performance, then landed another for her turn as Sherlock Holmes foe Irene Adler in the Hal Prince-directed Baker Street a year later.

Other credits include “Barnaby Jones”, “The Rookies”, “Earth II”, and “Vega$”.

Magnus White, cyclist.

White was a rising multidisciplinary star, winning a junior national championship in cyclocross in 2021 and earning a place on the U.S. national team. He competed with the team in Europe ahead of last year’s cyclocross world championships, and he was picked to represent the U.S. again at this year’s cyclocross worlds in the Netherlands.

He was 17, and died after being struck by a car on a training ride.

Devyn Reiley and Zach Colliemoreno were killed over the weekend in a plane crash at Oshkosh’s AirVenture 2023. Ms. Reiley was 30, Mr. Colliemoreno was 20. She was co-founder of the Texas Warbird Museum, and the daughter of former NFL player Bruce Collie.

Two other people, Mark Peterson and Thomas Volz, were killed in a second accident at AirVenture: their passing is also noted in the AVWeb article above.

Posted in 1970s, Cycling, Movies, Obits, Planes, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 28, 2023.

Friday, July 28th, 2023

Randy Meisner, formerly of the Eagles. (The NYT obit is still labeled as “A full obituary will appear shortly.”) THR.

Edited to add 7/29: full NYT obit (archived).

He left the band around the time “Hotel California” was released. Mr. Meisner also played with Poco, and later played “with the likes of Joe Walsh, Dan Fogelberg, Richard Marx, Bob Welch and James Taylor.”

“I was always kind of shy,” he said in a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone, noting that his bandmates had wanted him to stand center stage to sing “Take It to the Limit,” but that he preferred to be “out of the spotlight.” Then, one night in Knoxville, he said, he caught the flu. “We did two or three encores, and Glenn wanted another one,” he said, referring to his bandmate, the singer-songwriter who died in 2016.
“I told them I couldn’t do it, and we got into a spat,” Mr. Meisner told the magazine. “That was the end.”

Bo Goldman, screenwriter.

Goldman was one of the handful of screenwriters — Paddy Chayefsky, Francis Ford Coppola, Horton Foote, William Goldman, Billy Wilder and Joel and Ethan Coen among them — to win Academy Awards for both original and adapted screenplay.

IMDB.

Jerome Coopersmith, theater and television writer.

Coopersmith wrote 30 regular installments and two feature-length episodes of CBS’ Hawaii Five-O from 1968-76. Among those was the notable 1975 eighth-season installment Retire in Sunny Hawaii … Forever, which featured Helen Hayes in an Emmy-nominated guest-starring stint as the aunt of her real-life son, James MacArthur.

“Retire In Sunny Hawaii…Forever” from “The Hawaii Five-O Home Page”. My memory is that this was a pretty solid episode, and I’m glad Mike Quigley agrees.

The dramatist adapted stories from Arthur Conan Doyle to write the book for 1965’s Baker Street, which was directed by Hal Prince and featured lyrics and music from Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick. Starring Fritz Weaver as Sherlock Holmes and Peter Sallis as Dr. Watson, it ran for more than 300 performances on Broadway.

IMDB.

Lelia Goldoni, actress. Other credits include “Theatre of Death”, “The Lloyd Bridges Show”, and “Johnny Staccato”.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 25, 2023.

Tuesday, July 25th, 2023

Pamela Blair, actress. Other credits include John Huston’s film of “Annie”, “The Cosby Mysteries”, and “Law and Order”.

Reeves Callaway. He made cars go fast.

Mr. Callaway and his company were well known in the world of high-performance automobiles custom-made for deep-pocketed clients. He began by modifying cars out of his garage, then established his company in Old Lyme, Conn., with the goal of challenging European manufacturers like Porsche and Ferrari, which were then making the world’s fastest vehicles.

…

“They came to us,” he told the Truck Show Podcast in 2021, “and they said, ‘Look, could you, within one year’s time, develop an Alfa twin-turbo system for us that we could use to compete against the Maserati?’”
He did, making about three dozen modified vehicles, but then Alfa Romeo lost interest in the project. Yet somehow one of those modified Alfas found its way to General Motors’ Black Lake testing ground in Michigan, and soon GM was asking if Mr. Callaway could do the same thing to its Chevrolet Corvette.
“This was a huge opportunity, to become associated with Corvette,” he said. “So we saluted and said, ‘Yes, sir; immediately, sir; may I have another, sir?’”

…

In late 1988, he and his engineers tweaked the Corvette some more, taking aim at 250 miles per hour with a version of the car that they called the Sledgehammer.
“We basically decided that 250 m.p.h. was a reachable goal,” Mr. Callaway told the McClatchy News Service. “But if it was to have any meaning, the car had to be docile at low speeds as well. It had to retain all the things that make a car usable on the street, such as air-conditioning.”
To prove the point, his team drove the car from Connecticut to a seven-and-a-half-mile oval track in Ohio. (It got 16 miles per gallon, they said.) At the track, it hit 210 m.p.h. on its first run, 223 on its second. After more tweaking, it reached 254.76 on its third attempt, a record for a car made for normal driving. Mr. Callaway’s company, in its announcement of his death, said the record stood for more than 20 years.

The Santa Barbara News-Press.

Ampersand Publishing LLC, the entity that owns the paper, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, or liquidation, on Friday, with estimated assets of up to $50,000 and liabilities between $1,000,001 and $10 million, according to court records. The bankruptcy was approved by the LLC on May 1, with Wendy McCaw, who has owned the paper since 2000, as the authorized agent.

…

The News-Press has published for more than 150 years, but it has undergone years of turbulence since McCaw bought it from The New York Times Co. In 2006, six editors and a columnist resigned in protest of interference from McCaw in the editorial process. The was followed by an exodus of dozens of additional staffers, as well as a vote by remaining newsroom employees to unionize with the Teamsters.

Ron Sexton, comedian and regular on ‘The Bob & Tom Show’.

Posted in Cars, Media, Obits, Radio, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 30, 2023.

Friday, June 30th, 2023

Alan Arkin. NYT (archived).

Arkin played guitar, piano, fife and vibraphone, and from 1957-59 he performed and toured throughout Europe with the folk-singing group The Tarriers, who had a hit “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),” later made more famous by Harry Belafonte. (Arkin and the group sang it and another song in the 1957 film Calypso Heat Wave).

…

He tried his hand at starring in a sitcom, Harry, but the ABC show about a hospital wheeler-dealer lasted just seven episodes in 1987. In 2001-02, he played a judge who was soft on criminals on the A&E series 100 Centre Street.

He also played “Jerry Singleton” on three episodes of “St. Elsewhere”, and voiced “J.D. Salinger” on four episodes of “Bojack Horseman”. IMDB.

Unfortunately, I can’t find the bit from “The In-Laws” I really want to use, so how about this one?

And, of course…

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 15, 2023.

Thursday, June 15th, 2023

Glenda Jackson. NYT (archived).

Other credits include “T.Bag’s Christmas Ding Dong”, “The Patricia Neal Story” (she played Patricia Neal), and “The Nelson Affair”.

Robert Gottlieb, noted editor.

Mr. Gottlieb edited novels by, among many others, John le Carré, Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing and Chaim Potok; science fiction by Michael Crichton and Ray Bradbury; histories by Antonia Fraser and Barbara Tuchman; memoirs by former President Bill Clinton and Katharine Graham, the former publisher of The Washington Post; and works by Jessica Mitford and Anthony Burgess.

…

Then, in 1987, in an abrupt career change from the relative anonymity and serenity of book publishing, Mr. Gottlieb was named the third editor in the 62-year history of The New Yorker, one of American journalism’s highest-profile jobs. He replaced William Shawn, the magazine’s legendary editor for 35 years, who had succeeded the founding editor, Harold Ross.

…

His memoir offered a highlight reel of snarky critiques of authors — the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul (“a snob”), Ms. Tuchman (“her sense of entitlement was sometimes hard to deal with”), William Gaddis (“unrelentingly disgruntled”), Roald Dahl (“erratic and churlish”).
“He wasn’t just an editor, he was the editor,” Mr. le Carré told The Times. “I never had an editor to touch him, in any country — nobody who could compare with him.” He noted that Mr. Gottlieb, using No. 2 pencils to mark up manuscripts, often signaled changes with hieroglyphics in the margins: a wavy line for language too florid, ellipses or question marks advising a writer to “think harder and try again.”

…

Mr. Gottlieb joined Knopf in 1968 as vice president and editor in chief. He edited Robert Caro’s Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker” (1974), cutting 400,000 words from a million-word manuscript with the author fuming at his elbow. Despite the brutal cuts, their collaboration endured for five decades and became the subject of a 2022 documentary, “Turn Every Page,” directed by Lizzie Gottlieb, Mr. Gottlieb’s daughter.
“I have never encountered a publisher or editor with a greater understanding of what a writer was trying to do — and how to help him do it,” Mr. Caro said in a statement on Mr. Gottlieb’s death.
Flashing his range, Mr. Gottlieb also edited “Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life” (1981), by Henry Beard, ghosting for the Muppets starlet, and Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” (1988), which prompted the outraged Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa urging Muslims to kill the author.

LeAnn Mueller, co-owner of the highly regarded Austin barbecue restaurant la Barbecue and member of the prominent Mueller barbecue family. She was 51.

I have not seen any updates on the criminal case against the la Barbecue owners. The only obit I’ve found that even mentions it is from the Austin Chronicle.

Jim Turner, former kicker for the Jets.

Turner played professional football for 16 years, with the Jets from 1964 to 1970 and the Broncos from 1971 to 1979. In the 1968-69 season, he kicked 34 field goals and scored 145 points, setting records that stood until 1983, when the New York Giants kicker Ali Haji-Sheikh broke the first and the Washington Redskins kicker Mark Moseley broke the second.

…

The most memorable game of Turner’s career was the Jets’s face-off against the Baltimore Colts on the afternoon of Jan. 12, 1969.
The Colts belonged to the older and better established National Football League, while the Jets were part of its upstart competitor, the American Football League. The Super Bowl, held for the first time in 1967, then pitted the best team from each league against the other.
The Colts, led by quarterback Johnny Unitas and coach Don Shula, had beaten the powerhouse Green Bay Packers, winners of the previous two Super Bowls, en route to qualifying for the 1969 championship.
While Unitas and Shula epitomized the stoic masculinity that many fans associated with football, Namath, the Jets’ quarterback, nicknamed Broadway Joe, was a figure of loudmouth swagger, and none of his public comments had ever seemed less creditable than his guarantee that the Jets would become the first A.F.L. team to win the Super Bowl by beating the Colts.
Namath played well — completing 17 of 28 passes for 206 yards, earning him the Most Valuable Player Award — but it was Turner, a decidedly Off Off Broadway figure, who was the decisive player. He provided the Jets with their margin of victory and alone scored more points than the Colts did.

…

Namath’s prediction came true, and the Jets won, 16-7.

Homer Jones, wide receiver for the New York Football Giants.

Jones was a member of the Giants from 1964-1969, where he was named to the Pro Bowl in 1967 and 1968.
“Homer Jones had a unique combination of speed and power and was a threat to score whenever he touched the ball,” said John Mara, the Giants president and chief executive officer.
“He was one of the first players (if not the first) to spike the ball in the end zone after scoring a touchdown and he quickly became a fan favorite. I remember him as an easygoing, friendly individual who was well liked by his teammates and coaches.”

…

Jones, who played six seasons with Big Blue, ranks sixth all-time among Giants receivers with 4,845 receiving yards and 35 touchdowns.

Not quite an obit, but Nautilus reran a nice article about Cormac McCarthy at the Santa Fe Institute by one of his co-workers.

The entrance to SFI also serves as a mail room. When I first entered the building there was behind the front desk a permanent massif of book boxes. It was clear that the boxes were constantly cleared and just as quickly replenished. In this way the boxes achieved a dynamical equilibrium. In the study of complex systems this is called self-organized criticality and was made famous as an explanation for the constant gradient of sand piles and the faces of sand dunes.
The agent of this critical state was Cormac, who busied himself digging—like Kobo Abe’s entomologist in Women in the Dunes—to ensure balance at SFI and the growth of his library.

Posted in Beef, Books, Food, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 6, 2023.

Tuesday, June 6th, 2023

Astrud Gilberto, of “The Girl From Ipanema” fame.

Jim Hines. He set a world record by running the 100 meter dash in 9.95 seconds at the 1968 Olympics: that record stood for 15 years.

Roger Craig, noted split-fingered fastball pitcher.

Bobby Bolin, former pitcher for the Giants (also the Brewers and the Red Sox).

Bolin made his MLB debut in 1961 and was on the 1962 pennant-winning Giants, appearing in two games in the World Series against the Yankees, a series San Francisco would lose in seven games.
The sidearmer went a career-best 14-6 in 1965.
The following season he set career-highs with 10 complete games and four shutouts despite a pedestrian 11-10 record.

Mike the Musicologist sent over an obit for Kaija Saariaho, composer. He says some of her late works are appealing: I am unfamiliar with them myself.

George Riddle, actor. Other credits include “Arthur” and “The Trial of Standing Bear”.

Burning in Hell watch: Robert Hanssen, notorious spy.

Posted in Cops, FBI, Law, Movies, Music, Sports, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 27, 2023.

Saturday, May 27th, 2023

Ed Ames. THR.

People of a certain age may remember him from the “Daniel Boone” TV show, or as a singer with the Ames Brothers, or for theater work (including “Chief Bromden” in the 1963 Broadway “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”).

People of my age remember him from a single clip from the Johnny Carson show, which I haven’t seen anyone actually reproduce anywhere, so here it is:

Gary Kent, knock-around guy. He was a stunt man (and stunt coordinator), acted some, and even directed a bit. Acting credits include “The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant”, “The New Adam-12”, and “Sex Terrorists on Wheels”.

Marlene Clark. Other credits include “The Rookies”, “McCloud”, and “Mod Squad”.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 4, 2023.

Thursday, May 4th, 2023

Barbara Bryne. She was in the original Broadway productions of “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Into the Woods”. Other credits include “Amadeus”, “Love, Sidney”, and “Best of the West”.

Eileen Saki. Other credits include “Meteor”, “History of the World: Part 1”, and “Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story”.

Another obit for Bart Skelton, this one from American Handgunner.

• All the world loves you if you have a song to sing, or a story to write: Unless that narrative is a warrant, then expect you will piss some people off, and they will hate you.

I ordered a copy of Down on the Border: A Western Lawman’s Journal (affiliate link) and am about four chapters into it. I’ll let you know when I’ve finished it.

Posted in Books, Guns, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 25, 2023.

Tuesday, April 25th, 2023

Harry Belafonte. THR.

Ron Faber. The THR obit concentrates on his stage career, but he did do a few movies and TV shows, including “The Exorcist”, “Law and Order”, and “Romeo Is Bleeding”.

Ginnie Newhart, Bob’s wife.

Ginnie and Bob were set up on a blind date by comedian Buddy Hackett (Ginnie was baby-sitting Hackett’s kids at the time).
“Buddy came back one day and said in his own inimitable way, ‘I met this young guy and his name is Bobby Newhart, and he’s a comic and he’s Catholic and you’re Catholic and I think maybe you should marry each other,’ ” she recalled in a 2013 interview.
They played pool at Buddy and his wife’s home the first time they met.
“It was just silly,” she said in 2005. “I was 20, 21, 21, and I think Bob was 32. And every time somebody would sink a ball in the pocket or whatever you’re supposed to do, [we’d] run around the table with our cue stick singing ‘Bridge on the River Kwai.’

They were married for 60 years.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 19, 2023.

Wednesday, April 19th, 2023

Tiger McKee, noted firearms trainer. American Handgunner.

I never had the pleasure of taking a course from Mr. McKee, but I did read his AH columns and The Book of Two Guns: The Martial Art of the 1911 Pistol and AR Carbine. (Amazon says I bought that in 2008. Wow.) And I think I knew that he was doing custom Smith and Wessons, but those were probably out of my price range.

This is a bad loss. And 61 seems a lot closer these days.

(Hattip to pigpen51 on this.)

Carol Locatell, actress. Other credits include “M*A*S*H”, “The Pretender”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”…

…and “Mannix” (“Desert Run”, season 7, episode 6.)

Almost a month ago, I posted an obit Lawrence sent me for Gloria Dea. Yesterday, the paper of record ran their own obit.

One of Ms. Dea’s last movie credits was in Ed Wood’s notoriously bad “Plan 9 From Outer Space” in 1957. She later sold insurance and then cars before settling back in Las Vegas.

IMDB. She’s credited as “Girl”.

Freddie Scappaticci.

During the Troubles (that is, the conflict in Northern Ireland), the British Army had a deep cover mole known as “Stakeknife”.

Stakeknife had penetrated the heart of the I.R.A.’s internal security unit, known as the Nutting Squad, a macabre sobriquet evoking the unit’s standard operating procedure — the execution of accused informers with two bullets to the “nut,” or head. Bodies were usually then dumped.

Mr. Scappaticci led that unit.

He was accused of overseeing the torture and killing of more than 30 suspected informers. If, at the same time, he was the British mole called Stakeknife, then he was a paid British agent killing fellow British agents.

There are a lot of people who believe he was Stakeknife. He consistently denied it.

Mr. Scappaticci may well have taken some of his secrets to his grave, shielding government intelligence and military handlers from one of the central moral conundrums of the case: Did the British state collude in the killings in order to protect Stakeknife’s identity?
British officials have described Stakeknife as the “golden egg” and “the jewel in the crown” of their infiltration of the I.R.A. They have said that intelligence he delivered alerted them to myriad I.R.A. operations, saving hundreds of lives.

…

In 2003, several British newspapers identified Stakeknife as Mr. Scappaticci. He denied the accusations publicly but then dropped out of sight. Several news reports said the British authorities had spirited him away, first to the Italian town of Cassino and then to a witness protection program in Britain.

There is an inquiry going on into Stakeknife. It’s been going on since 2016.

Mr. Boutcher, the head of the Stakeknife inquiry, promised on April 11 that investigators would publish an interim report on their findings this year. But families of victims greeted the news with skepticism.

Wikipedia entry. Why am I reminded of Whitey Bulger?

Posted in 1911, 1970s, Books, Guns, History, Law, Magic, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Smith and Wesson, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »