Portal:Theatre

Flower Drum Song was the eighth stage musical by the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II (pictured). It was based on the 1957 novel, The Flower Drum Song, by Chinese-American author C. Y. Lee. Rodgers and Hammerstein had experienced back-to-back Broadway flops and hoped for a new commercial hit. Set in San Francisco's Chinatown, the story illustrates the conflict between the traditional older generation of immigrants and the younger generation, struggling to assimilate into American culture. The piece opened in 1958 on Broadway and was a success, afterwards being presented in the West End and on tour. It was subsequently made into a 1961 musical film. After the release of the film version, the musical was rarely produced, as it presented casting issues and fears that Asian-Americans would take offense at how they are portrayed. The piece did not return to Broadway until 2002, when a version with a plot by playwright David Henry Hwang was presented after a successful Los Angeles run. It received mostly poor reviews in New York and closed after six months, but had a short national tour and has since been produced regionally.

• 3 December 1947 – Premiere of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948
• 6 December 1718 – Birth of Nicholas Rowe, an English playwright and poet who was the first editor of the works of William Shakespeare
• 7 December 1948 – Birth of Pearl Cleage, an African-American novelist, playwright, and drama teacher
• 14 December 1925 – Premiere of the modern opera Wozzeck by Alban Berg
• 16 December 1972 – Premiere of Vijay Tendulkar's Ghashiram Kotwal, a classic of modern Indian theatre
• 26 December 1606 – First known performance of the play King Lear, a tragedy by William Shakespeare based on the legendary King Lear of the Britons
• 27 December 1927 – Broadway premiere of Show Boat by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, called "the greatest step forward in musical theatre"
• 28 December 1598 – The Theatre was disassembled and rebuilt as the Globe Theatre (pictured) in London

John Millington Synge was an Irish dramatist, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore. He was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival and was one of the cofounders of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for the play The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey. Although he came from a middle-class Protestant background, Synge's writings are mainly concerned with the world of the Roman Catholic peasants of rural Ireland and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view. Synge suffered from Hodgkin's disease, a form of cancer that was untreatable at the time. He died just weeks short of his 38th birthday and was at the time trying to complete his last play Deirdre of the Sorrows.

• ... that when Wilson Starbuck's play Sea Dogs was staged in 1939 it "contained some of the foulest language heard on Broadway" at that point in history?
• ... that Mark Smith was a fourth-generation actor who performed in 70 theaters in New York City and on more than 2,000 radio programs?
• ... that Rachelle Ann Go debuted in the West End and Broadway revivals of Miss Saigon portraying the role of a bargirl?
• ... that the Academy of Music was the name of three different theaters located on the same property on the Atlantic City Boardwalk which were all destroyed by fires?
• ... that the 1966 production of Peter Handke's Offending the Audience, directed by Claus Peymann at the Theater am Turm, has been described as "the beginning of modern theatre"?
• ... that the theatre which premiered a play about sex offenders had to hire additional security for its run?

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