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[0:05] Mark Peikert: Good morning, theater lover. I'm Mark Peikert, and you are listening to Today in Theatre History for the week of September 21st through September 27th.

[0:16] Mark Peikert: September 21st, 1938, Reflected Glory begins performances at the Morosco Theater, where it stays for 127 performances. Tallulah Bankhead stars as an actor torn between her desire for a career and her desire for marriage.

[0:34] Mark Peikert: In 1966, following a hit run at the New York State Theater and a national tour, Ethel Merman returns to Broadway as Annie Oakley in a revival of Annie Get Your Gun, playing the same role she originated 20 years earlier. Some wags referred to this production as Granny Get Your Gun. In honor of the revival, composer Irving Berlin writes a new song called Old Fashioned Wedding, and according to the New York Times, it stops the show, with Merman having to do, quote, a minimum of four encores of the song at each performance.

[1:10] Mark Peikert: September 22nd, 1964, Fiddler on the Roof opens on Broadway at the Imperial. Zero Mostel stars as Milkman Tevye, opposite Bea Arthur, Maria Karnilova, and Austin Pendleton. The Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick score includes such memorable songs as Matchmaker, Matchmaker, and Sunrise, Sunset. The production wins nine Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and runs for over 3,000 performances.

[1:52] Mark Peikert: The production goes on to win the Tony Award for Best Play of 1966, along with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It runs 132 performances. In 2005, the Tony Awards Administration Committee establishes guidelines for a new category to be added to the annual awards lineup: Best Performance by an Actor/Actress in a Recreated Role, an award for replacement actors later in a show's run. Some wags refer to this as the Reba McEntire rule. No award is given in the category at the 2006 awards, and it is abolished a few weeks later.

[2:31] Mark Peikert: In 2010, The Divine Sister, the Charles Bush comedy that takes a whack at pop culture nuns, from the singing to the socially conscious, opens off-Broadway at the Soho Playhouse. Directed by Carl Andrus, the play stars Bush, Alison Fraser, Amy Rutberg, Jennifer Van Dyck, Jonathan Walker, and Julie Halston.

[2:53] Mark Peikert: September 23, 1930, Kay Swift provides the first complete hit Broadway musical score composed by a woman with Fine and Dandy. Despite the depression, the show manages a 255 performance run. In 1974, despite a bomb scare from a preview a few nights before, Angela Lansbury opens in a revival of Gypsy at the Winter Garden. Following in the footsteps of the legendary Ethel Merman was probably very frightening, but Lansbury wins over everyone.

[3:27] Mark Peikert: In 2001, Unexpected Drama comes to the stage of the Martin Beck. Kiss Me, Kate, which was supposed to close in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, gets an 11th hour reprieve when the cast agrees to give back part of their salaries to buy tickets for the show, donated to firefighters and relief workers. The cheerful announcement is made from the stage after the final curtain, at which the producer tears up the closing notice. The show goes on to run through the end of the year.

[3:55] Mark Peikert: September 24th, 1974, a revival of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens at the Anta Theater. The play has been updated since its 1956 Broadway production, now including profanity. Elizabeth Ashley stars as Maggie. The revival runs 160 performances.

[4:17] Mark Peikert: In 1976, the long-running revival of Oh! Calcutta! opens at the Edison. Contributors to the show include Jules Feiffer, John Lennon, Sam Shepard, and Kenneth Tynan. Billed as the world's longest-running erotic stage musical, it runs 5,959 performances, briefly becoming the second longest-running show in Broadway history.

[4:42] Mark Peikert: September 25th, 1928, Chi Chi, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's musical about castration in ancient China, opens to searing reviews and goes on to close after just 31 performances, the team's shortest run. In 2008, Harry Potter film star Daniel Radcliffe makes his Broadway debut opposite Tony and Olivier Award winner Richard Griffiths in a revival of Equus. Peter Shaffer's Tony-winning drama tells the story of a psychiatrist who becomes absorbed in the strange case of a young man who blinds a stable of horses.

[6:01] Mark Peikert: September 26th, 1957, it all began tonight at the Winter Garden as West Side Story opens. The Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents musical is based on Romeo and Juliet, but has New York teenage gangs pitted against each other instead of Verona's dueling families. Larry Kurt, Carol Lawrence, and Chita Rivera star, a film version starring Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, and George Chakiris, who was a member of the original London cast, is released in 1961.

[6:34] Mark Peikert: In 1985, Lily Tomlin stars in Jane Wagner's solo play, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, opening at the Plymouth for a 391 performance run. Tomlin's performance earns her the 1986 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. Fifteen years later, Tomlin returned to Broadway in a revival of the play at the Booth Theater.

[6:58] Mark Peikert: In 2013, Cherry Jones, Celia Keenan-Bolger, and Zachary Quinto are a family adrift in a sea of memory, in a Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' acclaimed 1945 drama The Glass Menagerie, opening at the Booth. The critically acclaimed production is directed by John Tiffany.

[7:18] Mark Peikert: September 27th, 2004, Val Kilmer warbles the phrase, Let My People Go, as Moses in The Ten Commandments: The Spectacle Musical, which opens at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles. In 2012, Manhattan Theatre Club's revival of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, directed by Doug Hughes, opens on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman. Boyd Gaines plays the righteous title character with Richard Thomas as his mayor brother.

[7:51] Mark Peikert: And in 2015, Deaf West Theatre's reimagined production of Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater's musical Spring Awakening, performed simultaneously in English and American Sign Language, opens on Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson. For more theater history, visit Playbill.com. And for more great podcasts, visit BroadwayPodcastNetwork.com.