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[0:05] Mark Peikert: Good morning, theater lover, and happy June.

[0:08] Mark Peikert: I'm Mark Peikert, editor-in-chief of Playbill, and you are listening to Today in Theatre History for the week of June 8th through June 14th.

[0:17] Mark Peikert: Peter Hedges' Baby Anger opened June 8, 1997 at Playwright's Horizons. The play was directed by Michael Mayer and starred Kristen Johnston and John Pankow as the stressed parents of a boy who gets cast in an award-winning commercial as a girl.

[0:33] Mark Peikert: Fade In on a Girl. In 2015, Bombshell, the fictional musical from the television series Smash, with a score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman, was presented in a one-night-only concert to benefit the Actors Fund.

[0:46] Mark Peikert: The event reunited cast members from the series, including Christian Borle, Will Chase, Megan Hilty, Catherine McPhee, and Deborah Messing.

[0:56] Mark Peikert: Tony Award-winning actor and Seinfeld star Jason Alexander returned to Broadway June 9, 2015, after a 25-year absence to replace Larry David in David's hit comedy Fish in the Dark.

[1:15] Mark Peikert: Her Broadway experience consisted of three concert shows: Judy Garland, Palace to a Day in 1951, Judy Garland in 1956, and 1967's Judy Garland, At Home at the Palace.

[1:28] Mark Peikert: In 1952, she received a special Tony Award for an important contribution to the revival of Vaudeville through her recent stint at the Palace Theater.

[1:39] Mark Peikert: Neil Simon's California Suite opened June 10th, 1976 at the Eugene O'Neill. The play, about couples and their troubles with each other and others, starred Tammy Grimes, George Grizzard, Jack Weston, Leslie Easterbrook, and Barbara Barrie.

[1:55] Mark Peikert: Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy opened on Broadway June 10th, 1982, at the Little Theater. The play won him Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Actor in a Play, and also in the cast, a pre-Golden Girls Estelle Getty.

[2:08] Mark Peikert: The play ran 1,222 performances. The first Broadway revival of She Loves Me opened June 10th, 1993, at the Roundabout Theatre Company's Criterion Center Stage Right.

[2:22] Mark Peikert: Boyd Gaines, Judy Kuhn, Sally Mayes, and Howard McGillan starred, and Gaines won a Tony Award for his performance. The production later transferred to the Brooks Atkinson Theater and ran a total of 354 performances.

[2:37] Mark Peikert: In 1999, Harry Groner and Twiggy starred as Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence in Sheridan Morley's If Love Were All, opening June 10th at the Lucille Lortel Theater.

[2:47] Mark Peikert: The musical revue, which focused on the relationship between actor Lawrence and her friend and frequent co-star, playwright Coward, was directed by Lee Lawson.

[2:58] Mark Peikert: Neil Simon's The Odd Couple got a revised and reversed revival at the Broadhurst, where it opened June 11, 1985. Jean Sachs directed Rita Moreno as Olive Madison and Sally Struthers as Florence Unger in the play that was originally written for men.

[3:14] Mark Peikert: Rita Moreno and Sally Struthers had already co-starred together for 12 performances on Broadway in Wally's Cafe at the Brooks Atkinson, which opened June 12, 1981, starring James Coco and Moreno as a New Jersey couple who opened a roadside cafe in the California Desert, with Struthers as an aspiring actor hired as their waitress.

[3:36] Mark Peikert: The world of pornography entered the theater when Ronnie Larson's Making Porn opened June 12, 1996 at the Actors' Playhouse. The erotic comedy-drama, in which a straight man becomes a porn star in the gay adult video industry, starred Rex Chandler.

[3:50] Mark Peikert: Larson also directed and co-starred in the production, which ran 395 performances. A Wanted Woman goes on an epic adventure through the Wild West in Kirsten Child's musical Bella, an American Tale, which opened in 2017 at Playwright's Horizons.

[4:08] Mark Peikert: Robert O'Hara directed a cast that included Ashley D. Kelly, Kenita R. Miller, Paolo Montaubon, and Natasha Yvette Williams.

[4:18] Mark Peikert: Fairview, the future Pulitzer Prize winner, made its world premiere in 2018 at Soho Rep. Jackie Sibblies Drury's Trojan Horse Play begins as something like a family sitcom about a model African-American family before things get weird.

[4:31] Mark Peikert: It returned to Off-Broadway the following year. Following a rocky out-of-town tryout, during which its director and two of its stars were replaced, the musical Shangri-La opened June 13, 1956 on Broadway.

[4:46] Mark Peikert: 42nd Street composer Harry Warren provided the music, and James Hilton, Jerome Lawrence, and Robert E. Lee, the lyrics and book for the show, based on Hilton's novel Lost Horizon.

[4:56] Mark Peikert: Dennis King and Shirley Yamaguchi starred, and the supporting cast included Jack Cassidy, Alice Gosley, Harold Lang, and Carol Lawrence.

[5:04] Mark Peikert: Running just 21 performances at the Winter Garden, it was subsequently performed in 1960 as an installment of Hallmark Hall of Fame.

[5:14] Mark Peikert: Audiences couldn't help but laugh when The Kitchen opened in 1966 at the 81st Street Theater in New York. The raucous comedy, set in the kitchen of a popular restaurant at dinner time, featured Rip Torn, Constance Clarke, and Sylvia Miles.

[5:30] Mark Peikert: Phyllis Newman played a successful actor, seeking to balance her career with her life as a wife and mother in the 1979 semi-autobiographical musical comedy, The Mad Woman of Central Park West. Directed and co-written by Arthur Lawrence, it ran 85 performances.

[5:47] Mark Peikert: Five years after the untimely death of its composer, the world premiere of Tick, Tick... Boom!, the autobiographical musical by Rent author Jonathan Larson, opened off-Broadway at the Jane Street Theater June 13, 2001.

[6:00] Mark Peikert: Rylas Barza starred as Jonathan, opposite Amy Spanger and Jerry Dixon. After 97 preview performances, Jackie Mason and Mike Mortman's A Teaspoon Every Four Hours opened, and closed, on Broadway, June 14, 1969.

[6:17] Mark Peikert: The play's unusually long preview period gave it the record for the most previews of a Broadway show before its opening night. After 182 previews, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark officially opened at Broadway's Foxwoods Theater, breaking the record for longest preview periods set 42 years previously by A Teaspoon Every Four Hours.

[6:39] Mark Peikert: Reeve Carney starred as the superhero with the powers of a spider. A revival of Mary Chase's 1944 Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy Harvey opened in 2012 at Studio 54.

[6:52] Mark Peikert: The Roundabout Theater Company production starred Jim Parsons as Elwood P. Dowd, a man whose best friend is an invisible six-foot-tall rabbit.

[7:01] Mark Peikert: For more theater history, visit Playbill.com. And for more great podcasts, visit BroadwayPodcastNetwork.com.