Archive for the ‘Theatre’ Category

Obit watch: September 26, 2022.

Monday, September 26th, 2022

Dale McRaven. He co-created “Mork & Mindy” (with Garry Marshall) and created “Perfect Strangers”.

…McRaven wrote and produced The Partridge Family while also producing albums from the “band” made up of castmates Shirley Jones, David Cassidy, Danny Bonaduce and Susan Dey.

Zack Estrin.

Estrin had a successful career in TV, starting with credits on Charmed, Dawson’s Creek and Tru Calling, before rising through the ranks to serve as co-executive producer of Fox’s Prison Break.
Estrin was showrunner and executive producer of two ABC paranormal thrillers, The River and The Whispers, as well as co-creator and executive producer of ABC’s Once Upon a Time in Wonderland.

He was only 51.

Rita Gardner.

In 1960, Gardner, who had recently appeared Off Broadway in the Jerry Herman musical review Nightcap, was cast in what would be her signature role: Luisa, or “The Girl,” in the Harvey Schmidt-Tom Jones musical The Fantasticks. Based loosely on Edmond Rostand’s 1894 play The Romancers, the musical told the allegorical story of two fathers who trick their children – The Girl, Luisa, and The Boy, Matt – into falling in love by pretending to oppose the union.
The production, at a tiny Off Broadway venue in Greenwich Village called the Sullivan Street Playhouse, became a huge success, spawning a hit song (“Try To Remember”), running 42 years and boosting the careers of Gardner and other cast members (including Kenneth Nelson, who went on to star in The Boys in the Band, and, most notably, Jerry Orbach, the Law & Order star who enjoyed a long career on stage, film and television).

She did a considerable amount of theater work, both on and off Broadway. She also did some TV, including three of the shows in the “Law and Order” franchise.

Jim Florio. former governor of New Jersey, “who then pushed through a record increase shortly after taking office, incurring public wrath that led to his defeat in his bid for a second term“.

Nancy Hiller, woodworker. (Alt link.)

…she steadily built a quiet but forceful reputation as one of the best woodworkers in the country, turning out custom, precisely built cabinets, side tables and whole kitchens for clients as far as New York and Chicago. The actor Nick Offerman, himself an accomplished woodworker and a member of Ms. Hiller’s legion of admirers, called her an “Obi-Wan Kenobi level master.”

There was nothing fancy about her work. She resisted the label “artist,” though people tried to pin it on her. And she deliberately charged less than her peers, not to undercut them, but to make her work affordable to middle-class clients who appreciated good design and hard work.
“She didn’t want to do work that was only accessible to a few people,” Megan Fitzpatrick, a woodworker and editor, said in an interview. “She wanted work that was accessible to everybody.”

Just Jaeckin, director. His most famous film was probably the 1974 soft-core porn film “Emmanuelle”. Other credits include “The Story of O”, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, and “The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak”.

Obit watch: September 20, 2022.

Tuesday, September 20th, 2022

Marva Hicks, actress.

Other credits include “Mad About You”, “Babylon 5”, and one of the spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series.

This pushes the boundary of obits a bit, but: two decomposed bodies were found yesterday in the home of the former mayor of Woonsocket, Rhode Island. As far as I can tell, the bodies have not been identified yet, but the police also apparently do not suspect criminal activity.

The pilot who died on Sunday at the Reno Air Races has been identified as Aaron Hogue. He was flying a L-29 in the Jet Gold race.

Mr. Hogue was also one of the owners of Hogue Inc., which makes various firearms accessories (including grips) and knives. (I touched on them briefly in my NRAAM coverage.)

Obit watch: July 31, 2022.

Sunday, July 31st, 2022

Burt Metcalfe. In addition to his producing credits on “M*A*S*H”, he did some acting. Credits include “The Twilight Zone” (“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”), “Perry Mason”, “The Bridges at Toko-Ri”, “The Outer Limits”, and the “12 O’Clock High” series. Producing credits also include “AfterMASH”.

Stuart Woods, another one of those big-shot thriller authors.

Mr. Woods, who was also a swashbuckling licensed private jet plane pilot and trans-Atlantic sailor with homes in New York, Maine and Florida, tacked into his career as a novelist somewhat haphazardly.

He later moved to Ireland, where he began to write his first novel. But he was soon diverted when he became enamored with sailing and began racing. In 1976, in a race from Plymouth, England, to Newport, R.I., that took him 45 days, he finished about in the middle of the field.
He then wrote a nonfiction account of the race, “Blue Water, Green Skipper,” and, after returning to Georgia, sold the American rights to W.W. Norton & Company. It also agreed to publish “Chiefs,” the thriller that Mr. Woods had begun eight years earlier.

He was another one of those guys whose books I saw all the time on the rack at the grocery store, but I’ve never actually read any of them. Chiefs sounds like it might be a good place to start…

Mary Alice, actress. She won a Tony for “Fences”, an Emmy for ““I’ll Fly Away”, and appeared in “The Matrix Revolutions” among other credits.

Obit watch: July 27, 2022.

Thursday, July 28th, 2022

Tony Dow is really most sincerely dead. NYT again. My thanks to the many people (including Borepatch) who tipped me off to this.

Faye Marlowe. She had a short career: “Hangover Square” seems to be her best known film.

Jered Barclay. He did a fair number of Westerns, “Hawaiian Eye”, “Surfside 6”, “Coronet Blue”, and other credits. He was also in vaudeville and theater, and did a lot of voiceovers.

Bernard Cribbins. Credits other than “Doctor Who” include “Frenzy”, the 1967 “Casino Royale”, “Space: 1999”, and “Coronation Street”. (Edited to add: NYT.)

Lourdes Grobet, photographer. One of her specialties was photographing luchadores, and some of those photos are reproduced in the obit (including one of her dancing with El Santo).

U Phyo Zeya Thaw, Burmese rapper. He was 41.

His execution, and those of three other political prisoners, were announced in the junta-controlled news media on Monday. His mother, Daw Khin Win May, confirmed his death.
The four men were convicted of terrorism charges in trials widely denounced as a sham. The four executions, including that of the veteran democracy activist U Kyaw Min Yu, popularly known as Ko Jimmy, were the first to be carried out in decades in Myanmar.

Obit watch: July 22, 2022.

Friday, July 22nd, 2022

Great and good friend of the blog Joe D. let us know about the death of Al Evans.

Al was one of the old time Austin BBS people, and a personal friend of mine from back then. The Facebook post is a nice tribute to someone who was a good person, and whose passing leaves a hole in the world.

Taurean Blacque. Beyond “Hill Street Blues”, it seems like he had a pretty active theater career, and other credits including “The Bob Newhart Show”, “Taxi”, and “DeepStar Six”.

In 1982, Blacque received a supporting actor Emmy nomination for his work as the toothpick-dependent Washington on Hill Street but lost out to co-star Michael Conrad. Amazingly, the other three nominees — Charles Haid, Michael Warren and Bruce Weitz — also came from the 1981-87 series, created by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll.

Nostalgia is a moron, but man, wasn’t that a heck of a show?

Shonka Dukureh passed on at 44. She was a musician, and also plays “Big Mama Thornton” in the current “Elvis” film.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Alan Grant, comic writer (“Batman”, “Judge Dredd”).

Werner Reich. He survived Auschwitz and Mauthausen (and the “35-mile death march in snow and ice” between the two). He also learned a card trick from another prisoner, Herbert Levin (aka “Nivelli the magician”) while he was in Auschwitz.

Mr. Reich, who became an engineer after his immigration to the United States, never lost his love of magic, performing close-up tricks with cards and coins for small groups of other magicians, at temples and at his sons’ birthday parties.

Mr. Levin’s card trick stayed with Mr. Reich the rest of his life.
“We loved anything that could take us away from Auschwitz for even a moment, that could take our minds off our memories and the horror around us,” he said in the 2017 interview.In England, he immersed himself in magic. He bought a deck of cards, then some magic tricks and books, and still more tricks and books.
“There’s a very, very thin line between a hobby and insanity,” he joked during his TEDx Talk.
Mr. Reich never saw Mr. Levin after Auschwitz and did not know that he had also emigrated to the United States, resumed his magic career and lived in Rego Park, Queens.
Mr. Levin died in 1977, but Mr. Reich did not learn of the death until nearly 30 years later, when he read an article in The Linking Ring, the monthly magazine of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, to which Mr. Reich belonged.

Obit watch: July 4, 2022.

Monday, July 4th, 2022

Peter Brook, noted theater director.

Mr. Brook was called many other things: a maverick, a romantic, a classicist. But he was never easily pigeonholed. British by nationality but based in Paris since 1970, he spent years in commercial theater, winning Tony Awards in 1966 and 1971 for the Broadway transfers of highly original productions of Peter Weiss’s “Marat/Sade” and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” He staged crowd-pleasers like the musical “Irma la Douce” and Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.”

But he was also an experimenter and a risk-taker. He brought a stunning nine-hour adaptation of the Sanskrit epic “The Mahabharata” from France to New York in 1987. In 1995, he followed the same route with “The Man Who,” a stark staging of Oliver Sacks’s neurological case studies. In 2011, when he was 86, he brought an almost equally pared-down production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” (he called it “A Magic Flute”) to the Lincoln Center Festival.

Joe Turkel. He was the rare Kubrick repeater (the bartender in “The Shining”, one of the executed soldiers in “Paths of Glory”, and a thug in “The Killing”) Other credits include “The Sand Pebbles”, “Blade Runner”, and “Ironside”.

Bruno ‘Pop N Taco’ Falcon. Credits include “Breakin'”, “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”, “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey”, and “Captain EO”.

Obit watch: June 23, 2022.

Thursday, June 23rd, 2022

Tony Siragusa. 55. Damn.

Siragusa, nicknamed Goose, played in the N.F.L. for 12 seasons, seven of them for the Colts, who acquired him as an undrafted free agent in 1990. He joined the Baltimore Ravens in 1997 and retired after the 2001 season, one year after playing a key defensive role as the franchise won its first Super Bowl.

Siragusa, known for his imposing heft at 330 pounds during his playing days, was a key member of the Ravens’ championship team in the 2000 season. While that season was one of his worst statistically — he recorded only 27 tackles without any sacks — he contributed to one of the N.F.L.’s most fearsome defenses, absorbing blockers to allow the star linebacker Ray Lewis, defensive back Rod Woodson, lineman Sam Adams and others to succeed in their roles. That unit set N.F.L. records for the fewest points allowed (165) and rushing yards allowed (970) in a 16-game regular season.

James Rado. He was one of the creators of “Hair”.

Obit watch: May 19, 2022.

Thursday, May 19th, 2022

Vangelis (Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou).

Yeah, yeah, yeah, “Chariots of Fire”, “Blade Runner”…

…in the late ’60s, he found success as a member of the Greek rock band Forminx and then with the progressive group Aphrodite’s Child, which had hits with the single “Rain and Tears” in 1968 and the influential album 666 in 1972.
He enjoyed a partnership with Yes lead singer Jon Anderson, and they released four albums as Jon & Vangelis from 1980 through 1991. (He had been asked to join Anderson’s prog rock band in the wake of keyboardist Rick Wakeman’s departure but declined.)

His other big-screen work included Costa-Gavras’ Missing (1982), the Japanese film Antarctica (1983), Roger Donaldson’s The Bounty (1984), Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon (1992) and Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004).

How about a musical interlude?

Ray Scott, pioneer of bass fishing as sport.

The idea for a bass fishing tour came to Mr. Scott, then an insurance salesman, when rain cut short a fishing outing with a friend in Jackson, Miss., in 1967. Stuck in his hotel room watching sports on television, he had an epiphany: Why not start the equivalent of the PGA Tour for bass fishing?
He held his first tournament at Beaver Lake, in Arkansas, where 106 anglers paid $100 each to compete over three days for $5,000 in prizes. A second tournament followed that year; in 1968 he formed a membership organization, the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, or BASS.
In 1971, Mr. Scott started what has become known as the Super Bowl of bass fishing: the Bassmaster Classic, his organization’s annual championship tournament, which he paired with a merchandising expo for manufacturers of bass fishing boats and gear.

Mr. Scott was the showman of BASS, the umbrella company for tournaments, magazines and television shows. Easily recognized in his cowboy hat and fringed jackets, Mr. Scott memorably served as the M.C. for tournament weigh-ins, entertaining thousands of fans with his exuberant patter as anglers pulled flopping fish out of holding tanks.
“Now, ain’t that a truly wonderful fish?” he asked one tournament crowd. “How many of you want to see more fish like that? C’mon, let’s hear it for that fish!”

NYT obits for Rosmarie Trapp and Sgt. Maj. John L. Canley.

John Aylward, actor. Other credits include “Stargate SG-1”, “The X-Files”, and “3rd Rock from the Sun”. He also did some theater:

He appeared in stage roles at the Kennedy Center with Kentucky Cycle, and at Lincoln Center with the play City of Conversation. A classically trained actor, Aylward performed everything from Shakespearean roles to farce with plays by Alan Ayckborne, and dramas by David Mamet, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.
His standout roles included playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Richard III, Scrooge in Inspecting Carol and Shelley Levine in Glengarry Glen Ross, a role he played twice.

Marnie Schulenburg, actress. (“One Life to Live”, “As the World Turns”) She was only 37, and died from cancer.

Obit watch: May 13, 2022.

Friday, May 13th, 2022

Fred Ward. Damn.

Credits include the titular character in “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins”, “Sgt. Hoke Moseley” in “Miami Blues”, “Quincy M.E.”, “Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann”, “Tremors”, “The Right Stuff”, and “Det. Harry Philip Lovecraft” in “Cast A Deadly Spell”.

Bruce MacVittie. Other credits include “Waterfront”, “Homicide: Life on the Street”, “Spenser: For Hire” and “The Equalizer”.

Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, head of state of the U.A.E. As always, don’t look to me for geo-political takes, as I know nothing.

I have not found a good obit yet, but Randy Weaver apparently passed away. Here’s Reason‘s take.

…an FBI sniper opened fire as Randy was entering the cabin. The shot missed Randy and struck Vicki as she was holding their newest daughter, 10-month-old Elisheba. Vicki was killed instantly.

That sniper was Lon Horiuchi. Lon Horiuchi murdered Vicki Weaver.

The RRTF report to the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) of June 1994 stated unequivocally in conclusion (in its executive summary) that the rules that allowed the second shot to have been made did not satisfy constitutional standards for legal use of deadly force. The 1996 report of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Government Information, Arlen Specter [R-PA], chair, concurred, with Senator Dianne Feinstein [D-CA] dissenting. The RRTF report said that the lack of a request by the marshals to the Weavers to surrender was “inexcusable.” Harris and the two Weavers were not believed to be an imminent threat (since they were reported as running for cover without returning fire).
The later Justice task force criticized Horiuchi for firing through the door, when he did not know if anyone was on the other side of it. While there is a dispute as to who approved the rules of engagement which Horiuchi followed, the task force condemned the rules of engagement that allowed shots to be fired without a request for surrender.

Obit watch: May 10, 2022.

Tuesday, May 10th, 2022

Lawrence sent over an obit for James R. Olson. He passed away on April 17th, but I haven’t seen anybody else cover this. (THR put up a story literally as I was writing this.) Which is odd, because he had a pretty interesting career before he retired in 1990.

After serving in the U.S. Army, Olson moved to New York to study in Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio. He subsequently starred in several Broadway productions in the 1950s and 1960s, including J.B. (1958), Romulus (1962), The Three Sisters (1964), and Of Love and Remembrance (1967). He also appeared in numerous touring productions throughout North America.

He also did a lot of TV and movie work. He was another one of those actors who hit the NBC Mystery Movie trifecta: appearances on all three of the original series (“McCloud”, “Columbo”, “McMillan and Wife”). Other credits include “Moon Zero Two”, “The Andromeda Strain”, “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”, “Lancer”, “Ironside”, “The Rookies”, “Police Story”, “The F.B.I.”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Game Plan“, season 8, episode 2. “Odds Against Donald Jordan“, season 2, episode 21.)

Jack Kehler. Other credits include “Karen Sisco”, “NYPD Blue”, “NCIS: Original Recipe”, “NCIS: Los Angeles”, and something called “The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards”.

Midge Decter.

Ms. Decter was in the forefront of an ideologically evolving generation of public intellectuals. Cutting their teeth on leftist politics in the 1930s and ’40s, they settled into anti-communist liberalism in the 1950s and early ’60s. Jolted by the turbulence of the student and women’s movements, they later broke from liberals to embrace a new form of conservatism — championing traditional social values, limited free-market economics and muscular American foreign policies — that reached its zenith in the early 21st century in the administration of President George W. Bush.
Ms. Decter wielded her influence as editor of Harper’s and other magazines, as an author and book editor, and as a political organizer and frequent speaker.

Ms. Decter’s ideological shift in the late ’60s stemmed from a rising concern that she expressed in her 2001 memoir, “An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War.” Liberalism, she said, rather than speaking to the common man and woman as it had in the past, was veering off the tracks into “a general assault in the culture against the way ordinary Americans had come to live.”
She and her husband, the writer and fellow former liberal Norman Podhoretz, worried about the effect the new thinking, particularly that of the counterculture, might have on their children and succeeding generations.

Also by way of Lawrence: Adreian Payne, basketball star at Michigan State.

More things I did not know.

Friday, May 6th, 2022

I was reading an article on Damn Interesting the other night, and it set me on a wiki wander.

1. The Damon Runyon Cancer Fund still exists, but it is now known as the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. And it has a four star Charity Navigator rating.

2. You can buy Broadway tickets through the foundation.

How it works: Tickets go on sale on the first business day of each month for performances taking place the following month (for example, our June tickets go on sale May 1). The ticket price is typically twice the box office price, half of which is a tax-deductible donation. You will receive an email voucher to present at the theater box office on the day of the performance.

3. “Runyon died in New York City from throat cancer in late 1946, at age 66. His body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered from a DC-3 airplane over Broadway in Manhattan by Eddie Rickenbacker on December 18, 1946. This was an infringement of the law, but widely approved.

I like the way they put that: “an infringement of the law, but widely approved”. (Also: Eddie Rickenbacker for the win.)

4. Jackie Chan’s “Miracles” is an adaptation of “Lady for a Day” and “Pocketful of Miracles” (both directed by Frank Capra), which in turn were based on Runyon’s story “Madame La Gimp”. According to Wikipedia, Chan added “several of his trademark stunt sequences”.

5. I don’t remember the 1980 remake of “Little Miss Marker”, and if I did, it probably would have made me gag when it came out. But: Walter Matthau, Tony Curtis, Julie Andrews, and Bob Newhart?

6. We should probably watch both “A Slight Case of Murder” (Edward G. Robinson!) and “Stop, You’re Killing Me” (the remake with Broderick Crawford and Margaret Dumont).

Three things I’m kind of looking forward to.

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022

1. The Bunk lies down on Broadway.

Wendell Pierce is ready for another run as Willy Loman.
The American actor, best known for his work in “The Wire,” first took on the titanic title role in “Death of a Salesman” in London in 2019, and even then he hungered to bring the performance to New York.

Rod Dreher and his family saw the London production, and he raved about it. This might actually be enough to get me to go to NYC. (Also, Mike the Musicologist and Andrew the Colossus of Roads were talking about Peter Luger on Saturday, and I’d like to take a shot at that.)

2.

(The Last Dangerous Visions explained, for those of my readers who are not SF fans.)

3. There’s a movie tentatively scheduled for February 2023. It sounds like trash, but fun trash.

Cocaine Bear follows an oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists and teens converging in a Georgia forest where a 500-pound apex predator has ingested a staggering amount of the white powder and goes on a coke-fueled rampage seeking more blow — and blood.

That’s right, a movie inspired by the true story of Cocaine Bear. How can you not be entertained?