1903 Maude Adams is The Pretty Sister of Jose in this production of Frances Hodgson Burnett's play.

1942 The year 1942 finds Katherine Hepburn and Elliott Nugent Without Love. The Theatre Guild presents this Philip Barry play, which will tour and then run 113 performances on Broadway.

1960 Barbara Baxley, Robert Webber, James Daly, and Rosemary Murphy work through a Period of Adjustment. The Helen Hayes Theatre is home for the 132 performances of this Tennessee Williams play.

1964 Critics wanted a whole lot more from Something More!, a musical that ran only 15 performances at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. What they got was a well-received Barbara Cook but an otherwise apparently undistinguished show by composer Sammy Fain, lyricists Alan & Marilyn Bergman and librettist Nate Monaster. Jule Styne directed.

1965 Long before Driving Miss Daisy came the Broadway play-with-music, The Zulu and the Zayde, whose plot -- according to Best Plays annual -- may be summed up as, "the family of a frisky Jewish granddad hires a Zulu as a companion for him." The show, starring Menashe Skulnik, Ossie Davis and Louis Gossett, was supposed to open Nov. 9, but the East Coast black-out postponed the opening by 24 hours. Gentle reviews and Skulnik's lasting appeal from his Yiddish theatre days, carried the show to 179 performances. 1985 The first day of advance ticket sales for the Dec. 5 opening of Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind, with a star-studded cast, sets a new one-day mark for Off Broadway of $41, 210.

1997 An array of wondrous props and puppets didn't help the Gip Hoppe satire, Jackie, bring in the crowds. A London mounting also had difficulty finding a mainstream audience for this carnival-like look at the life of Jackie Onassis.

-- By Anne Bradley, David Lefkowitz and Steve Luber