Today In Theatre History: MARCH 28

By Anne Bradley
March 28, 2008

1939 Philip Barry tells The Philadelphia Story at the Shubert Theatre in New York. Katharine Hepburn, Van Heflin, Shirley Booth, and Joseph Cotten star. Robert Edmond Jones designs the sets and lighting, Robert Sinclair stages. It will run a year.

1939 Philip Barry tells The Philadelphia Story at the Shubert Theatre in New York. Katharine Hepburn, Van Heflin, Shirley Booth, and Joseph Cotten star. Robert Edmond Jones designs the sets and lighting, Robert Sinclair stages. It will run a year.

1956 The Comedy of Errors is presented at London's Art Theatre as a comic operetta. Juilan Slade composes the score.

1967 Sherry!, a musical adaptation of the play The Man Who Came to Dinner opens today to dismissive reviews, and it closes 72 performances later. Cut to 2004 when librettist James Lipton, now host of Bravo's "Actors Studio" series, puts together a dream cast of Bernadette Peters, Nathan Lane, Tommy Tune and Mike Myers finally to record and release a studio cast album.

1968 Michael Hordern plays a would-be inventor who has a chance to Enter a Free Man at London's St. Martin's Theatre. Tom Stoppard's drama will run just 44 performances. Frith Banbury stages.

1971 A man's family, mistress, and doctor run All Over their relationships with him as he awaits death. John Gielgud stages this Edward Albee drama. Jessica Tandy and Colleen Dewhurst lead the cast. It will run 42 times at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York.

1985 Two years and a day later, Eugene Jerome returns to the Neil Simon Theatre in the Neil Simon sequel to Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues. Now 1943, six years after the end of Memoirs, Eugene is on his way to boot camp during World War II. Matthew Broderick once again dons the duds of the character, then hand off the role to Jonathan Silverman, who will go on to star in the third part of the trilogy, Broadway Bound.

1994 Known as the father of Absurd Theatre, he was a man who said "It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind." The penner of Rhinoceros, The Bald Soprano, Exit the King and The Chairs, playwright Eugene Ionesco dies at age 84.

2004 Lisa Kron, the actress-playwright known for her solo shows, includes other actors and characters in her latest work, Well, which opens at New York's Public Theatre.

2004 Also today, Peter Ustinov, the portly, bearded Renaissance Man of British Theatre (and an Oscar-winner in films) dies at age 82. His Broadway plays (as both author and performer) include Romanoff and Juliet, Who's Who in Hell and Beethoven's Tenth, the latter of which had him playing the ghost of Ludwig von Beethoven.

Today's Birthdays: Flora Robson 1902. Paul Whiteman 1890. Irving Paul Lazar 1907. Ken Howard 1944. Dianne Wiest 1948.