Joseph Papp: Last News

according to Deadline. “There was a wonderful warmth in the hippie atmosphere, a sense of freedom,” Rado said in a 2008 interview about the musical for which he co-wrote the book and lyrics with partner Gerome Ragni.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor Denzel Washington is paying homage to the late actor James Earl Jones, who died this week at 93. “He’s my hero,” Washington tells Variety. “My college theater career started because of ‘The Emperor Jones’ and ‘Othello’ with James Earl Jones.” Jones starred in the stage adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Emperor Jones” in 1971 and played the titular “Othello” in Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival and later Off-Broadway production in 1964.

Gordon Cox Theater Editor Broadway fans often talk about theater as a spiritual experience — but most of them aren’t thinking of tarot cards when they say it. That could change thanks to a new tarot deck that’s a surprising mashup of Broadway and theater, reimagining the traditional imagery of tarot with the artwork of the famous theater caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below: The Hirschfeld Broadway Tarot is the brainchild of Emily McGill, a former Broadway publicist who worked with the Al Hirschfeld Foundation to create the new deck that’s set to be released Sept.

Ellen Holly, the first Black person to star in a soap opera with her lead role on One Life to Live, died Wednesday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, N.Y. She was 92 and died in her sleep.

New York Times reported.Birney first gained mainstream fame in 1972 opposite his future wife Meredith Baxter in the CBS sitcom “Bridget Loves Bernie.” The show was popular — slotted between ratings juggernauts “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “All in the Family — but short-lived thanks to controversial protests by Jewish groups who disagreed with the “intermarriage” of Birney’s Jewish cabbie character, Bernie Steinberg, and Baxter’s Bridget Fitzgerald, a Catholic grade school teacher from a wealthy family.Both divorced at the time, Birney and the futxure “Family Ties” matriarch, who had two children from her first marriage, got hitched for real in 1974. The pair had three kids of their own before getting divorced in 1989.Baxter later claimed that Birney was emotionally and physically abusive in her bombshell 2011 book “Untied: A Memoir of Family, Fame, and Floundering.” He vehemently denied her claims, deeming them an “appalling abuse of the truth.”The son of an FBI agent, Birney was born on April 23, 1939, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio.

A.D. Amorosi When powerhouse vocalist-actor Meat Loaf eulogized composer-producer Jim Steinman last April in Rolling Stone, the singer – who died Thursday at age 74 – said of his “Bat Out of Hell” partner, “We belonged heart and soul to each other.

By Marc Malkin