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It's Showtime Podcasts

Diamond Girl: How Mae West Brought ‘Sex’ and Scandal to Broadway

PODCAST Mae West (star of I’m No Angel and She Done Him Wrong) would come to revolutionize the idea of American sexuality, challenging and lampooning ideas of femininity while wielding a suggestive and vicious wit. But before she was America’s diamond girl, she was the pride of Brooklyn! In this podcast, we bring you the origin… Read More

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My debut on the Travel Channel, chatting about the Astor Place Riot

This past week I made my debut on the Travel Channel as a guest on Mysteries At The Museum hosted by Don Wildman.   The show explores history via actual objects is various museums throughout the United States.  The subject this time around was the Astor Place Riot.  The object in focus: A copy of Macbeth… Read More

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Happy 100th birthday Billie Holiday! Five ways to celebrate a century of music

                The great Billie Holiday was born 100 years ago today. This requires spending some of your day listening to a greatest hits album, I hope. But here are five other ways you can celebrate this icon’s life this week: 1) Watch Diana Ross in Lady Sings The… Read More

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Billie Holiday’s New York: Here’s to Swing Street, Harlem’s 133rd Street and other landmarks of jazz

PODCAST Grab your fedora and take a trip with the Bowery Boys into the heart of New York City’s jazz scene — late nights, smoky bars, neon signs — through the eyes of one of the greatest American vocalists who ever lived here — Billie Holiday. Eleanora Fagan walked out of Pennsylvania Station in 1929… Read More

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Maude Adams: Fashion icon and America’s first Peter Pan

Tonight NBC’s unveils its live theatrical experiment Peter Pan with Girls star Alison Williams in the cross-dressing role of the boy who never grows up. We can all have our debates about who’s been the greatest stage Peter Pan in history.  Most will say Mary Martin, a sizable minority will claim Sandy Duncan, and a… Read More

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Rudolph Valentino, the seductive, tragic idol of the Jazz Age

  PODCAST  Rudolph Valentino was an star from the early years of Hollywood, but his elegant, randy years in New York City should not be forgotten.  They helped make him a premier dancer and a glamorous actor. And on August 23, 1926, this is where the silent film icon died.   Valentino arrived in Ellis Island in 1913, one of… Read More

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Amusements and Thrills It's Showtime

New York’s amusement palace Niblo’s Garden returns (sort of)

It’s the return of Niblo’s Garden, the 19th century pleasure garden and entertainment palace once on Broadway and Prince Street!  Except this time around, it’s in a cemetery. Niblo’s is perhaps most famous as being the site of the first Broadway musical (at least, some form of it).  The venue’s impresario William Niblo is buried… Read More

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It's Showtime Podcasts

Another Podcast Extra from our Broadway Musical show, plus an interactive treat for theater fans

Frequent collaborators PG Wodehouse, Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern (Pic courtesy Broadway Scene) — Here’s another ‘deleted scene’ from our last podcast, Episode #159 The Broadway Musical: Setting the Stage.  In this excerpt, I’m talking about the unique challenge that was faced by young songwriter Jerome Kern when he began working at the Princess Theatre… Read More

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Podcast Extra! The Hippodrome and its famous ice ballet

Our show on the Broadway musical was quite epic, and we ended up cutting out some interesting stories to make the show a reasonable length.  However I’ll leak out a couple of these ‘deleted scenes’ over the next couple weeks. For instance, here’s a segment about another great Broadway theater. In fact, one of the… Read More

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Harlem on a high note: The grand Harlem Opera House

A ton of people on-stage at the Harlem Opera House in 1907. During this period, it was owned by vaudeville impresario Keith Proctor and called Proctor’s Harlem Opera House. Pictures courtesy the Museum of the City of New York   The Hotel Theresa, subject of this week’s podcast, had a rather unusual neighbor in its early… Read More

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Edwin Booth, American Hamlet, born 180 years ago today

Edwin Booth, the Gilded Age’s most famous American actor, was born 180 years ago today.  Here’s a few past blog posts on Mr. Booth (and his infamous brother John Wilkes Booth) to commemorate the great thespian’s contribution to New York City history: — Booth owned a theater at 6th Avenue and 23rd Street that nearly… Read More

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The Evangelist of Kitsch: Liberace’s final performances, with the Rockettes, at Radio City Music Hall 1986

Liberace is the embodiment of a certain California flamboyance, but New Yorkers were as susceptible to his allure as anyone. In fact, for this brightly-painted musical showman, Radio City Music Hall was a second home.  He continued to smash box office records here year after year as late as the 1980s, well past his prime… Read More

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Sigourney Weaver boards an off-Broadway ‘Titanic’ in 1976

Queen of the world: Weaver sets an uncharted course on a small SoHo stage. Perhaps you are as confused as I am by the picture above, one that appears to put the lovely young Sigourney Weaver‘s face upon the body of a child. Ah, the magic of the theater! The future film star was in her… Read More

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Marilyn Monroe’s surprising link to a few Broadway classics

Monroe on the New York set of ‘The Seven Year Itch’, the film version of a Broadway box office success. The heavily-hyped ‘Smash‘ debuted last night on NBC, a glossy musical-drama unspooling the backstage tribulations of a new Broadway musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Although Monroe was once married to one of… Read More

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D.W. Griffith turns Central Park into a silent screen star

In honor of the grand re-opening of the Museum of the Moving Image this Saturday, we’re going all New York film and media here on the blog, posting some new stuff and re-printing some older ones pertinent to the city’s filmmaking history. Above, you can watch ‘Father Gets In The Game’, a cheeky short from… Read More