11,518 stories by "Trav S.D."
When I was in my late teens, going through an extended patch of misery that lasted several years, a birthday gift from my sister made everything worse. It was kindly intended, of course, by …
The visage of Lionel Belmore (1867-1953) is one you have surely seen in supporting roles in dozens of classic Hollywood films. Today we are apt to associate him with horror, although that wa…
When I see a name like Allen McQuhae (Charles Allen McQuhae, 1890-1960), I discern with amusement the inadequacy of the Latin Alphabet in attempting to service Gaelic consonants and vowels. …
Recently cloistered in a sick bed, I found myself binging the first couple of seasons of Saturday Night Live and was delighted to discover that I didn't know them nearly as well as I thought…
I'm fairly certain that I first learned about Frank Garcia (1927-1993) from either Torkova or Richard Cohn during our recent conversations about old time NYC magic shops for my Chelsea Commu…
I had intended to blog about the Astor Place Riot today, it being the 173rd anniversary of that looney event, when nativist supporters of actor Edwin Forrest did battle in the streets of New…
Briefest of posts this morning on a notable though forgotten supporting actor of the silent era, Malcolm Waite (1892-1949). I've not yet stumbled upon what Waite's pre-movie experience was, …
We don't mean to pigeonhole the three estimable McCutcheon Brothers with the title of this post (although they are closely identified with their region), but to separate them from two other …
When I was down in Nashville 20 years ago covering the local scene for American Theatre magazine, I came across a surprising monument: a plaque near the Tennessee statehouse commemorating th…
Of course, to remember Richard "Dick" Schaal (1928-2014) you'd have to register who he was. I recall him well from the MTM shows of the '70s, a comic actor with rugged good looks, marvelous …
Today we treat of the great character actor Howard Da Silva (Howard Greenblatt, 1909-1986), whose stout visage and booming voice were so memorable as the bartender in Lost Weekend (1945), Be…
So authentic did Beulah Bondi (1889-1981) seem in her often unsophisticated, homely, and rustic characters that it might surprise you to learn that she possessed a master's degree! Granted, …
There are three fairly discrete phases to the show biz career of multi-talented Lorenzo Music (Gerald Music, 1937-2001): variety/entertainment phase; sit-com phase; and voice-over phase, all…
Happy May Day! In America, May 1 is at best a proto-holiday, identified with two things: 1) International Workers Day, with all of its leftist associations; and 2) the traditional English Pa…
The 60 year professional career of character actor Dick Elliott (1886-1961) may be neatly divided into two distinct halves: 1) the first three decades, about which very little is known, but …
In the days before the internet, when I was kid poring away at my Beatle-ology studies, I had an unfortunate and incorrect tendency to regard Badfinger as a one-hit-wonder, a footnote in the…
Today marks a true cause for celebration " the 200th birthday of the famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903). It probably hasn't escaped your attention that landscape arc…
We are so sorry that the title of this post is not also the name of an act. It's just our way of telling you that the article treats also of our touchstone's significant others. We learned o…
Jazz piano player and singer Rose Murphy (1913-1989) came along just a shade too late for the major vaudeville circuits, but she was there just afterward, in the late 1930s as an opening and…
There is no reason to suspect that, had she lived until the age of sound, Mary Thurman (Mary Christiansen, 1895-1925) wouldn't have continued to have been at the very least a well-known supp…
There were two performing characters name of Doc Roberts traversing Southern highways and byways back about a century ago. The parallel names seems to have been a coincidence, rather than an…
It is interesting to speculate whether the French comedy team Foottit and Chocolat could have worked with popular success in American vaudeville. The "Master and Man" aspects of their stage …
Contemporary lovers of classic cinema have likely seen Basil Sydney (1894-1968) in supporting roles in any number of films: Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), Olivier's Hamlet (1948), Disney's Tre…
Inevitably I'll do a post I think about Downton Abbey and the broader oeuvre of Julian Fellowes, for a I have good and bad things to say on the subject! But at present there's more to be sai…
Be bop legend Charlie Mingus (1922-79) would have been 100 years old today. I love be bop, but being a theatre person primarily, I first learned about Mingus through a theatrical connection.…
