One of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theater, with an Academy Award, eight Tony Awards, eight Grammy Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize, also wrote 11 episodes of the TV series "Topper" back in 1953-54. What is the name of this award-winning writer/composer/lyricist?
One of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theater, Sondheim has been praised for "[reinventing] the American musical" with shows that tackle "unexpected themes that range far beyond the [genre's] traditional subjects" with "music and lyrics of unprecedented complexity and sophistication". His shows have been praised for addressing "darker, more harrowing elements of the human experience", with songs often tinged with "ambivalence" about various aspects of life. His best-known works as composer and lyricist include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), and Into the Woods (1987). He is also known for writing the lyrics for West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959).
He has received an Academy Award, eight Tony Awards (more than any other composer, including a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre), eight Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, a Laurence Olivier Award, and a 2015 Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2010, the former Henry Miller's Theater on Broadway was renamed the Stephen Sondheim Theatre.
[ ... ] "A few painful years of struggle" followed, when Sondheim auditioned songs, lived in his father's dining room to save money and spent time in Hollywood writing for the television series Topper.
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Topper is an American fantasy sitcom based on the 1937 film Topper, which was based on two novels Topper and Topper Takes a Trip by Thorne Smith. The series was broadcast on CBS from October 9, 1953 to July 15, 1955, and stars Leo G. Carroll in the title role. It finished at #24 in the Nielsen ratings for the 1954-1955 season. Topper also earned an Emmy nomination for Best Situation Comedy in 1954.
Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim wrote eleven episodes for Topper's first season with George Oppenheimer. The show's producer was John W. Loveton, with his agent, Bernard L. Schubert, credited as co-producer.
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Mark. was first, and correct, with:
Stephen Sondheim.
Randall wrote:
Stephen Sondheim
Cal in Vermont said:
Stephen Sondheim.
Alan J answered:
Stephen Sondheim.
Dave replied:
Stephen Sondheim.
Photo: Sondheim with Leonard Bernstein around the time Sondheim wrote lyrics for West Side Story. Not only a lyricist, Sondheim also composed the scores for many Broadway shows and Hollywood films.
zorch responded:
Stephen Sondheim.
Jim from CA, retired to ID, said:
Stephen Sondheim
Barbara, of Peppy Tech fame wrote:
Who would've thunk it? The same guy who wrote 11 episodes of the 1950s TV series "Topper" also wrote lyrics for "West Side Story!"
The answer to the trivia question is Stephen Sondheim.
Kevin K. in Washington, DC, replied:
Stephen Sondheim.
DJ Useo responded:
Stephen Sondheim, I say. I. Who else could it be? I wish I had that Topper show. Never seen it, but I'm a fan of 50s sitcoms.
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• In Beverly Cleary's novel Ramona Quimby, Age 8, the Quimby family eats in a restaurant and an elderly gentleman compliments them by saying that they look like a "happy family," and then without their knowledge he pays for their meal. Something similar happened to Ms. Cleary in real life. She and her family were eating in a Mexican restaurant, and when it was time to pay the bill, they discovered that an elderly gentleman had already paid their bill because they were "such a nice family."
• While making a recording, Enrico Caruso was not satisfied with his singing of "Cujus Amimam" from Rossini's Stabat Mater, so he sang it over and over until he was satisfied. After the recording was finally finished, he removed a pearl stickpin from his tie and gave the stickpin to the exhausted trumpet player, saying, "You merit reward. In the end I thought you also would crack."
• Pope John XXIII was working late one night when he remembered that some guards had been posted outside his door to protect him. He opened his door and sent the guards home, saying, "It would be better for you both to be home in bed. Better to go to sleep. You don't need to watch over me - I'm protected by the Holy Spirit."
Grandparents
• Peg Bracken's grandfather was a kindly man. For one thing, he was a generous tooth fairy, giving 50 cents for a tooth when 50 cents was worth something. He also wrapped the 50-cent piece in a note with invisible writing; the note contained a tooth joke such as this one: "How do you say farewell to a tooth? Bye, Cuspid." He was sympathetic when Peg volunteered to give a speech when she was in the 7th grade, only to discover that she was unable to write and deliver a good speech. In fact, she was so miserable about giving her speech that she vomited in front of him the day before she had to give the speech. He asked her to pray, and the next morning lots of snow had fallen - but not enough to result in her being unable to give the speech. Peg and her grandfather went out to the barn so she could practice her speech, and frost covered everything, including the keyhole. When her grandfather got out his key to unlock the door to the barn, he suggested to Peg that she lick the frost off the keyhole. The frost was pretty, and her family sometimes made delicious ice cream from snow, so Peg tried to lick off the frost, but her tongue froze to the keyhole. Trying to get her tongue loose, she yanked her head back and tore some skin from her tongue. Eventually, with the help of some warm water, she got loose, but her tongue became so swollen that she could not talk and therefore could not give her speech. Peg sometimes wonders if her grandfather knew what would happen when she tried to lick the frost from the keyhole. By the way, many years later Peg was supposed to introduce someone on a public occasion, but because of stage fright she froze at the podium, was unable to speak, and had to be led gently away.
Halloween
• Not everyone understands kids. For example, in Beverly Hills the actor Robert Young, star of the TV series Father Knows Best and Marcus Welby, M.D., used to give trick-or-treating kids on Halloween autographed photographs of himself - and no candy. One of the trick-or-treating kids was Marlo Thomas, future star of TV's That Girl. She says that the kids knew exactly how to respond to being deprived of candy - they soaped Mr. Young's windows.
Inspired by Sunday's Trivia Question of the Day, here is a link to an article about the steps featured in "The Music Box" film starring Laurel and Hardy. The steps are located in the Silver Lake District of Los Angeles.
CBS begins the night with a FRESH'NCIS', followed by a FRESH'FBI', then a FRESH'FBI: Most Wanted'.
On a RERUNStephen Colbert (from 1/22/20) is John Mulaney.
Scheduled on a FRESHJames Corden, OBE, are Justin Bieber, Billy Crystal, and Ben Schwartz.
NBC starts the night with a FRESH'Ellen's Game Of Games', followed by a FRESH'This Is Us', then a FRESH'New Amsterdam'.
On a RERUNJimmy Fallon (from 1/15/20) are Robert Downey Jr., Aidy Bryant, and Little Big Town.
On a RERUNSeth Meyers (from 2/10/20) are Claire Danes, Zach Woods, Gov. Gavin Newsom, and drummer Elijah Wood.
On a RERUNLilly Singh (from 11/19/19) are Rainn Wilson and Matteo Lane.
ABC opens the night with a FRESH'The Conners', followed by a FRESH'Bless This Mess', then a FRESH'mixed-ish', followed by a FRESH'black-ish', then a FRESH'For Life'.
On a RERUNJimmy Kimmel (from 1/30/20) are Renée Zellweger, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, and Caroline Polachek.
The CW offers a FRESH'The Flash', followed by a FRESH'DC's Legends Of Tomorrow'.
Faux has a FRESH'The Resident', followed by a FRESH'Gordon Ramsay's 24 Hours To Hell & Back'.
MY recycles an old 'Chicago PD', followed by another old 'Chicago PD'.
AMC offers the movie 'Saving Private Ryan', followed by the movie 'Captain Phillips'.
BBC -
[6:00AM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - The Assignment
[7:00AM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - Let He Who Is Without Sin...
[8:00AM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - Things Past
[9:00AM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - The Ascent
[10:00AM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - The Rapture
[11:00AM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - The Darkness and the Light
[12:00PM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - The Begotten
[1:00PM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - For the Uniform
[2:00PM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - In Purgatory's Shadow, Part 1
[3:00PM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - By Inferno's Light, Part 2
[4:00PM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - Doctor Bashir, I Presume
[5:00PM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - A Simple Investigation
[6:00PM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - Business as Usual
[7:00PM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - Ties of Blood and Water
[8:00PM] MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996)
[10:30PM] MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II (2000)
[1:30AM] MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III (2006)
[4:30AM] STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE - In Purgatory's Shadow, Part 1
[5:30AM] MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS - Blood, Devastation, Death, War and Horror
[5:45AM] MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS - Salad Days (ALL TIMES EST)
Bravo has 'Vanderpump Rules', followed by a FRESH'Vanderpump Rules', then another FRESH'Vanderpump Rules', 'Summer House', followed by a FRESH'Watch What Happens: Live'.
FX has the movie 'Transformers: The Last Knight', followed by the movie 'Kingsman: The Golden Circle'.
History has 'Washington', followed by a FRESH'Washington', then a FRESH'Project Blue Book'.
IFC -
[6:00A] The Three Stooges - I'm a Monkey's Uncle
[6:05A] The Three Stooges - Dizzy Doctors
[6:30A] The Three Stooges - Dizzy Pilots
[6:55A] The Three Stooges - Dutiful but Dumb
[7:20A] The Three Stooges - False Alarms
[7:45A] Sinister
[10:15A] Redemption
[12:30P] Underworld: Evolution
[3:00P] Underworld
[5:30P] Watchmen
[9:00P] Tropic Thunder
[11:30P] Watchmen
[3:00A] Bangkok Dangerous
[5:15A] The Three Stooges - I'm a Monkey's Uncle
[5:30A] Pee-wee's Playhouse - Dr. Pee-Wee & the Del Rubios (ALL TIMES EST)
Sundance -
[6:05am] The Andy Griffith Show
[6:40am] The Andy Griffith Show
[7:15am] The Andy Griffith Show
[7:50am] The Andy Griffith Show
[8:25am] The Andy Griffith Show
[9:00am] The Andy Griffith Show
[9:30am] The Andy Griffith Show
[10:00am] The Professional
[12:30pm] Face/Off
[3:30pm] Escape From New York
[5:30pm] Total Recall
[8:00pm] Young Guns
[10:30pm] Young Guns II
[1:00am] Sniper
[3:15am] Close Up With The Hollywood Reporter - Executives
[4:15am] The Andy Griffith Show
[4:50am] The Andy Griffith Show
[5:25am] The Andy Griffith Show (ALL TIMES EST)
SyFy has the movie 'The Magnificient Seven', followed by the movie 'Point Break', then the movie 'After Earth'.
TBS:
On a RERUNConan (from 11/11/19) is Kevin Nealon.
John Oliver is now a U.S. citizen, and one of our funniest is casting his vote for Medicare for All.
The HBO "Last Week Tonight" host spent Sunday's show breaking down the many problems of our current healthcare setup - starting with a total lack of coverage for millions.
"Unfortunately, too many people are born in this country with a terrible preexisting condition called Not Being Beyoncé," Oliver said. "Many of us…are Solange."
The Brit, who says he's had good experience with his native country's national healthcare system, got meaner from there.
"You can get f-ed by taking an ambulance, you can get f-ed by going to the wrong hospital, or you can get f-ed by going to the right hospital, but getting the wrong surgeon," Oliver said. "The American healthcare system gives you so many choices as to how you want to get f-ed, it truly is the Kama Sutra of healthcare."
Ozzy Osbourne has cancelled his 2020 North American "No More Tours 2" tour, his rep announced today, "to allow him to continue to recover from various health issues he has faced over the past year."
This decision was made to accommodate fans who've been holding tickets for rescheduled shows and have been asked to change plans, some multiple times. Following promotional obligations for his new album, "Ordinary Man," which comes out on February 21, the singer will head to Europe for additional treatments.
Osbourne, 71, who in April of last year postponed all 2019 concerts, has been suffering from Parkinson's Disease, pneumonia and injuries due to a fall at home.
"I'm so thankful that everyone has been patient because I've had a shit year," he said in a statement. "Unfortunately, I won't be able to get to Switzerland for treatment until April and the treatment takes six-eight weeks.
The Tribeca Film Festival on Monday unveiled plans to kick off its 19th installment with the world premiere of director Mary Wharton's Jimmy Carter Rock & Roll President - a rockumentary-style presidential portrait that shows how popular music helped propel the folksy peanut farmer from rural Georgia to the White House. The film will launch a politically active fest this year with a get-out-the vote effort.
The opening-night announcement came on President's Day during a divisive election season and the festival said a focus is to showcase the power of inspiring change through art, politics and community as it unspools April 15-26.
Concurrently, the festival will provide audiences access to online tools to make voting easy, including text updates, and education on ways to get involved in their local elections. To do that, Tribeca has partnered with Democracy Works and Civic Alliance, a nonpartisan coalition of businesses "working together to build a future where everyone can vote, volunteer and take action," the Festival said in a statement.
Jimmy Carter Rock & Roll President shows how President Carter used the force of music to transcend racial, generational and often party lines. It features intimate interviews with President Carter, filmed in 2018 at the age of 93, and rare archival footage from Willie Nelson, Aretha Franklin, Jimmy Buffett, Paul Simon and others. Live performances by music legend Willie Nelson and Paul Shaffer among others will follow the world premiere at the Beacon Theatre in New York City on April 15.
Thanks to modern technology and some expert detective work, a nearly 400-year-old painting that had long been attributed to an unknown artist in Rembrandt's workshop has now been judged to have been a work of the Dutch master himself.
For decades, the Allentown Art Museum displayed an oil-on-oak panel painting called "Portrait of a Young Woman" and credited it to "Studio of Rembrandt." Two years ago, the painting was sent to New York University for conservation and cleaning.
There, conservators began removing layers of overpainting and dark, thick varnish that had been added over centuries - and they began to suspect Rembrandt himself was responsible for the original, delicate brushwork underneath.
The scientific analysis "showed brushwork, and a liveliness to that brushwork, that is quite consistent with other works by Rembrandt," said Shan Kuang, a conservator at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts who restored "Portrait of a Young Woman."
Outside experts who examined the 1632 painting after the completion of its two-year restoration concurred with the NYU assessment that it's an authentic Rembrandt.
Ted Cruz, the Republican Texas senator, has given an unwitting boost to an Alabama lawmaker's attempt to push back on restrictive abortion laws in her state, by tweeting about her proposal to force men to have vasectomies when they reach the age of 50.
Democratic representative Rolanda Hollis introduced the measure to the state House last week, intending it as protest against a law passed by the Alabama legislature last year to outlaw abortion in almost every case unless the life of the mother was at risk.
"The responsibility is not always on the women. It takes two to tangle," Hollis wrote in a tweet acknowledging that her long-shot House bill, which would also a mandate a vasectomy after the birth of a father's third biological child, was intended to "neutralize the abortion ban bill".
After an initial flare of mostly local publicity, the issue was set to fade back into obscurity - until Cruz waded in with a tweet that placed it firmly before a national audience and his own 3.5 million Twitter followers, exposing his apparent hypocrisy over reproductive legislation at the same time.
"Yikes. A government big enough to give you everything is big enough to take everything… literally!" Cruz wrote, linking to an Alabama news website's account of the story from three days previously.
Barraged by hundreds of sex-abuse lawsuits, the Boy Scouts of America filed for bankruptcy protection Tuesday in hopes of working out a potentially mammoth victim compensation plan that will allow the hallowed, 110-year-old organization to carry on.
The Chapter 11 filing in federal bankruptcy court in Wilmington, Delaware, sets in motion what could be one of the biggest, most complex bankruptcies ever seen. Scores of lawyers are seeking settlements on behalf of several thousand men who say they were molested as scouts by scoutmasters or other leaders decades ago but are only now eligible to sue because of recent changes in their states' statute-of-limitations laws.
By going to bankruptcy court, the Scouts can put those lawsuits on hold for now. But ultimately they could be forced to sell off some of their vast property holdings, including campgrounds and hiking trails, to raise money for a compensation trust fund that could surpass a billion dollars.
The bankruptcy petition listed the Boy Scouts' assets as between $1 billion and $10 billion, and its liabilities at $500 million to $1 billion.
The bankruptcy represents a painful turn for an organization that has been a pillar of American civic life for generations and a training ground for future leaders. Achieving the rank of Eagle Scout has long been a proud accomplishment that politicians, business leaders, astronauts and others put on their resumes and in their official biographies.
Gary Ono has fleeting memories of his time in a Colorado prison camp - seeing snow, jumping into a ditch to avoid a dog, walking across a field with his uncle, watching someone wash photographic prints.
Ono, now 80, was just a toddler when his family was imprisoned at the Granada Relocation Center, one of 10 sites across the country that incarcerated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.
As an adult, he's visited what remains of the camp, more commonly known as Amache, many times. During one visit, Ono and a grandson pitched a tent and spent the night at the site of barrack 6, block 10E, the cramped building that housed his and other families.
"If you went out there, like I have several times, it's just empty of everything, except maybe evidence of foundations and things like that," said Ono, who lives in Los Angeles. "You don't get a sense of the conditions people had to live under."
Today, however, structures are again starting to dot the landscape at Amache, which had been reduced to dirt, weeds and crumbling building foundations after the war. Amache is being pieced back together, bit by bit, by a high school teacher and his students who want to make sure this dark period of American history is not forgotten.
North Korea, whose leader Kim Jong Un was filmed riding through the snow on a white stallion last year, has spent tens of thousands of dollars on 12 purebred horses from Russia, according to Russian customs data.
Accompanied by senior North Korean figures, Kim took two well-publicized rides on the snowy slopes of the sacred Paektu Mountain in October and December.
State media heralded the jaunts as important displays of strength in the face of international pressure and the photos of Kim astride a galloping white steed were seen around the world.
According to customs data reviewed by Reuters, Russia exported 12 horses worth a total of $75,509 to North Korea last year.
It was the biggest buy since 2015, when North Korea spent $192,204 on 61 horses from Russia. Altogether, North Korea has imported at least 138 horses between 2010 and 2019, at a cost of $584,302, according to the Russian data.
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