282 stories by "Trav S. D."
The guys from Silent Clowns, New York’s premiere interpreters of silent film comedy are launching their fall season today at 2:30pm with a bill of spook comedies in observation of the …
Opens at Coney Island’s Luna Park Tonight!
I’d been scheduled to perform in Poor Baby Bree’s monthly show at Bowery Poetry Club tonight, but in light of this week’s sad events I asked for a rain check, and I hope sh…
This is one of the great rebound stories in Off-Off Broadway history. In a matter of months the Ohio Theatre took us on a little roller coaster ride from eviction and feared demise…to …
Blackthorn opens in New York and L.A. tomorrow. The below is adapted from my review in the Villager during Tribeca Film Festival in April. Blackthorn may well be the most Southerly western i…
Frank Bush (1860-1930) was a character monologist from the very earliest days of vaudeville/ last days of variety. He got his start in the saloons of New York’s Five Points section, do…
Aaron Baker (right) With Cara Moretto in “Spacemen from Space” The promised excursions to Last Rites Gallery and Gotham Burlesque ended up not happening yesterday, and for a reas…
One of my heroes interviews another of them. Today is Groucho’s Birthday. For my squib on the Marx Brothers go here. To find out more about these variety artists and the history of vau…
Dorothy Parker Day returns to the city of her birth today in Long Branch, New Jersey. Kicking off at 10:00 a.m. with a program of readings and performance inside the Community Room of the Lo…
Premieres tonight at 8Â PM on PBS PROHIBITION is a three-part, five-and-a-half-hour documentary film series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that tells the story of the rise, rule, an…
Charles T. Aldrich was the father of well-known character comedian Gale Gordon (1905-1995), best-known (to this correspondent) as Mr. Mooney on Here’s Lucy, but he also tons of other f…
I’m one of the very few people on earth who prefers Bud Abbott to Lou Costello. Today is his birthday, so I attach one of my favorite of the team’s routines, from their TV show i…
This awesome looking exhibition opens tonight, along with “The Internal Clock” by Tin. We’re checking it out and we’ll let you know how it is! For more info go here.
In celebration of Ted Healy’s birthday, below is a very rare early (color) clip of himself and company when the Three Stooges were still his Stooges. And for the full skinny on THAT go…
This is a killer line-up. Dare I say the best ever? We’ll let you know for sure as the Countess and I are going to check it out tonight (following my talk at the Hudson Opera House and…
I was privileged to attend a workshop of Young Jean’s Lee’s new piece at the Baryshnikov Center last Saturday, and my admiration for her work remains undiminished. I won’t …
Adolph Behrend (a.k.a. “Salerno”, b. this day in 1869) is known for several things: * He was one of the originators of the style known as “gentleman juggling”, in whi…
Here’s what I like and here’s what I’m giving you — plenty of notice! Old-timey songwriter Al Duvall will be the special guest on Michael Haar’s Ragged Phonogra…
It’s that time again. The NY Burlesque Festival opens tonight with a “teaser party” at the Bell House hosted by the World Famous Bob, and culminates this sunday with The Go…
Philosophers are kind of, by definition, gloomy. Just listing them makes me depressed: Nietzche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Heidegger. Leibnitz is the single one who springs to mind who used reaso…
The Countess called my attention to this recent Canadian documentary The Book of Vaudeville made by Winnipeg’s Farpoint Films. The story goes that in 1950, a local boy found a scra…
Frank “Slivers” Oakley (b. either 1871 or 1885, I’ve seen both) has been called the greatest circus clown of his generation. In a 1960 interview, Buster Keaton placed him a…
We mentioned here the other day that Ed Sullivan was a former boxer. Today is his birthday, so we share with you a clip wherein Sullivan demonstrates his enthusiasm for the Sweet Science by …
The Countess and I caught Terra Nova on Fox last night and were not precisely disappointed (not having had any expectations, after all) but were certainly reaffirmed in our low opinion of th…
An illusion by Harry Blackstone, Sr, one of the last of the old school magicians. His birthday is today; for my bio of Blackstone, go here. To find out more about the history of vaudevil…
