1945 Despite reports of bad acting and poor production quality, the new Tennessee Williams and Donald Windham play, You Touched Me, opens tonight at the Booth Theatre, beginning a tepidly-reviewed run of 109 performances. Williams and Windham have written this play based on a D.H. Lawrence story for stars Montgomery Clift, Edmund Gwenn and Marion Stewart.

1961 Frank Fay, the vaudevillian and star of Harvey, died today. The actor, who at one time was married to Barbara Stanwyck, was confined to a hospital last week in Santa Monica and deemed legally incompetent.

1963 John Osborne's Luther, the story of the priest who launched the Protestant Reformation, opens on Broadway, en route to a 211-performance run and the 1964 Tony Award as Best Play.

1963 Also today:Sammy Davis, Jr. is reported today in Variety as having turned down Laurence Olivier's offer to be Iago to his Othello. Davis feels he is just not ready for the dramatic demands of the role.

1979 Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice are the princes of Broadway tonight as their new musical, Evita, opens at the Broadway Theatre. This very successful musical will continue to run for 1,567 performances. Patti LuPone stars as Eva Peron, with Mandy Patinkin as Che Guevara, the quasi-narrator of the musical. Clive Barnes of the New York Post reports that "Evita is a stunning, exhilarating theatrical experience, especially if you don't think about it too much."

1997 Riverdance, the showcase of Irish dance and music that played sold-out engagements in Dublin and London in 1995 comes to New York for a third run starting tonight at Radio City Music Hall. The show, which had two runs in 1996, will return to the Manhattan venue once more in 1998 before finally restaging itself for an official Broadway run March 16, 2000 to Aug. 26, 2001.

2003 By a macabre coincidence, Edward Said, the Palestinian-born Columbia University professor who was the likely model for a character in the play Omnium Gatherum, dies today, the same day the Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros drama opens Off-Broadway. Said was 67, and suffered from leukemia.

2008 "Harry Potter" film star Daniel Radcliffe and Tony and Olivier Award winner Richard Griffiths star in a revival of Equus. Peter Shaffer's Tony winning drama tells the story of a psychiatrist (Griffiths) who becomes absorbed in the strange case of a young man (Radcliffe) who blinds a stable of horses.

More of Today's Birthdays: Charles B. Cochran 1872. Harriet Hoctor 1905. Robert Wright 1914. Mark Hamill 1951. Christopher Reeve 1952.