1.
New York City
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The City of New York, often called New York City or simply New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2015 population of 8,550,405 distributed over an area of about 302.6 square miles. Located at the tip of the state of New York. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has described as the cultural and financial capital of the world. Situated on one of the worlds largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, the five boroughs – Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898. In 2013, the MSA produced a gross metropolitan product of nearly US$1.39 trillion, in 2012, the CSA generated a GMP of over US$1.55 trillion. NYCs MSA and CSA GDP are higher than all but 11 and 12 countries, New York City traces its origin to its 1624 founding in Lower Manhattan as a trading post by colonists of the Dutch Republic and was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. It has been the countrys largest city since 1790, the Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a symbol of the United States and its democracy. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world, the names of many of the citys bridges, tapered skyscrapers, and parks are known around the world. Manhattans real estate market is among the most expensive in the world, Manhattans Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is one of the most extensive metro systems worldwide, with 472 stations in operation. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, and Rockefeller University, during the Wisconsinan glaciation, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth. The ice sheet scraped away large amounts of soil, leaving the bedrock that serves as the foundation for much of New York City today. Later on, movement of the ice sheet would contribute to the separation of what are now Long Island and Staten Island. The first documented visit by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown and he claimed the area for France and named it Nouvelle Angoulême. Heavy ice kept him from further exploration, and he returned to Spain in August and he proceeded to sail up what the Dutch would name the North River, named first by Hudson as the Mauritius after Maurice, Prince of Orange
2.
Los Angeles
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Los Angeles, officially the City of Los Angeles and often known by its initials L. A. is the cultural, financial, and commercial center of Southern California. With a census-estimated 2015 population of 3,971,883, it is the second-most populous city in the United States, Los Angeles is also the seat of Los Angeles County, the most populated county in the United States. The citys inhabitants are referred to as Angelenos, historically home to the Chumash and Tongva, Los Angeles was claimed by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo for Spain in 1542 along with the rest of what would become Alta California. The city was founded on September 4,1781, by Spanish governor Felipe de Neve. It became a part of Mexico in 1821 following the Mexican War of Independence, in 1848, at the end of the Mexican–American War, Los Angeles and the rest of California were purchased as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, thereby becoming part of the United States. Los Angeles was incorporated as a municipality on April 4,1850, the discovery of oil in the 1890s brought rapid growth to the city. The completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, delivering water from Eastern California, nicknamed the City of Angels, Los Angeles is known for its Mediterranean climate, ethnic diversity, and sprawling metropolis. Los Angeles also has an economy in culture, media, fashion, science, sports, technology, education, medicine. A global city, it has been ranked 6th in the Global Cities Index, the city is home to renowned institutions covering a broad range of professional and cultural fields, and is one of the most substantial economic engines within the United States. The Los Angeles combined statistical area has a gross metropolitan product of $831 billion, making it the third-largest in the world, after the Greater Tokyo and New York metropolitan areas. The city has hosted the Summer Olympic Games in 1932 and 1984 and is bidding to host the 2024 Summer Olympics and thus become the second city after London to have hosted the Games three times. The Los Angeles area also hosted the 1994 FIFA mens World Cup final match as well as the 1999 FIFA womens World Cup final match, the mens event was watched on television by over 700 million people worldwide. The Los Angeles coastal area was first settled by the Tongva, a Gabrielino settlement in the area was called iyáangẚ, meaning poison oak place. Gaspar de Portolà and Franciscan missionary Juan Crespí, reached the present site of Los Angeles on August 2,1769, in 1771, Franciscan friar Junípero Serra directed the building of the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, the first mission in the area. The Queen of the Angels is an honorific of the Virgin Mary, two-thirds of the settlers were mestizo or mulatto with a mixture of African, indigenous and European ancestry. The settlement remained a small town for decades, but by 1820. Today, the pueblo is commemorated in the district of Los Angeles Pueblo Plaza and Olvera Street. New Spain achieved its independence from the Spanish Empire in 1821, during Mexican rule, Governor Pío Pico made Los Angeles Alta Californias regional capital
3.
Songwriters Hall of Fame
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It not only celebrates these established songwriters, but is also involved on the development of new songwriting talent through workshops, showcases and scholarships. There are many programs designed to teach and discover new songwriters, the Hall of Fame only existed as an online virtual collection until 2010, when it was first put on display as a physical gallery inside The Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. With an under-construction basement installation at the Brill Building in New York, the Hall doesnt have a permanent place, through 2010,383 individuals had been inducted into the SHOF. The British rock band Queen was the first band to be inducted in 2003, the American singer Lady Gaga was the first artist ever to win the award. 2015 – Lady Gaga The Hal David Starlight Award honors young artists who have made an impression on the music industry. It goes to writers already inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame for having established a history of outstanding creative works and he was later director of ASCAP, and a founder of the Songwriters Hall of Fame which, in 1983, named the Abe Olman Publisher Award. In his honor, the Abe Olman Scholarship is given out each year by his family in the interest of encouraging and supporting the careers of young songwriters, the Holly Prize is administered and juried by the SongHall
4.
Vaudeville
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Vaudeville is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment. It was especially popular in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s, a typical vaudeville performance is made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill. A vaudeville performer is often referred to as a vaudevillian, Vaudeville developed from many sources, including the concert saloon, minstrelsy, freak shows, dime museums, and literary American burlesque. Called the heart of American show business, vaudeville was one of the most popular types of entertainment in North America for several decades, the origin of this term is obscure, but is often explained as being derived from the French expression voix de ville. A second speculation is that it comes from the songs on satire by poet Olivier Basselin. Some, however, preferred the term variety to what manager Tony Pastor called its sissy. Thus, vaudeville was marketed as variety well into the 20th century, with its first subtle appearances within the early 1860s, vaudeville was not initially a common form of entertainment. The form gradually evolved from the saloon and variety hall into its mature form throughout the 1870s and 1880s. This more gentle form was known as Polite Vaudeville, in the years before the American Civil War, entertainment existed on a different scale. Certainly, variety theatre existed before 1860 in Europe and elsewhere, in the US, as early as the first decades of the 19th century, theatregoers could enjoy a performance consisting of Shakespeare plays, acrobatics, singing, dancing, and comedy. As the years progressed, people seeking diversified amusement found a number of ways to be entertained. Vaudeville was characterized by traveling companies touring through cities and towns, a significant influence also came from Dutch minstrels and comedians. Vaudeville incorporated these various itinerant amusements into a stable, institutionalized form centered in Americas growing urban hubs, pastors experiment proved successful, and other managers soon followed suit. B. F. Keith took the step, starting in Boston. Later, E. F. Albee, adoptive grandfather of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, circuits such as those managed by Keith-Albee provided vaudevilles greatest economic innovation and the principal source of its industrial strength. They enabled a chain of allied vaudeville houses that remedied the chaos of the booking system by contracting acts for regional and national tours. These could easily be lengthened from a few weeks to two years, Albee also gave national prominence to vaudevilles trumpeting polite entertainment, a commitment to entertainment equally inoffensive to men, women and children. Acts that violated this ethos were admonished and threatened with expulsion from the remaining performances or were canceled altogether
5.
Eva Puck
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Eva Puck was an American entertainer, a vaudeville headliner who later found success performing in Broadway musical comedies and film. She was born in New York City, the middle of three children raised by Abraham and Lena Puck, there is some question about the family surname being Puck or Salmon, both were used in early press articles. Little is known of her mother who came to America from Poland in 1874 or her English father who immigrated in 1882 and they married in 1887 and by 1899 had Eva and her older brother Harry performing in a vaudeville song and dance act known as the Two Little Pucks. They were charged with a violation of Section 289 of the Penal Code in unlawfully consenting to the employment, the investigators were concerned over the hours that Eva and her brother were keeping and also found the Trocadero an unsuitable environment for children with patrons smoking and consuming alcohol. The three were brought to trial in the Court of Special Sessions, and found guilty. Now, this sort of business cannot be continued or permitted, and if these defendants come before this Court again the punishment will be more drastic. ”Her father was fined $100, or thirty days jail time, and her mother $25, or fifteen days in the City Prison. For the next few years the Two Little Pucks continued to perform at venues outside New York and later, as they entered their teens, toured as Eva and Harry Puck until disbanding sometime around 1918. Harry went on to be a choreographer, composer, songwriter and music publisher while Eva remained in vaudeville soon teaming up with her future husband, song. Their younger brother, Laurence Larry Puck, became a radio and television producer and he later married Mable Withee, a singer and dancer active on Broadway over the 1920s. Eva Puck became a member of the comedy act Clayton and White that, after Lew Clayton’s departure around 1920, became known as Puck. One of their popular vaudeville sketches portrayed White as a music teacher. The couple married in 1922. and together appeared in Broadway shows such as the Greenwich Village Follies, Rodgers and Hart musical The Girl Friend, Puck also appeared as Helen Cheston in the original Broadway run of the musical Irene from November 1919 to June 1921. The two played in the original 1927 Broadway stage version of Show Boat, in the musical, White played the role of comic dancer Frank Schultz, and Puck played the role of Ellie May Chipley, who eventually marries Frank. In 1932, the two reprised their roles in the first Broadway revival of the show. However, by the time Universal Pictures released the 1936 film version, Puck and White appeared in a short film made by Lee De Forest in his Phonofilm sound-on-film process, which premiered at the Rivoli Theater in New York City on 15 April 1923. The film shows Puck and White performing their comic routine entitled Opera vs. Jazz, in the mid 1930s Eva Puck married Robert Groves, a California merchant, and retired from the stage. Eva Puck died in 1979, aged 86, at the Granada Hills Community Hospital in Los Angeles and she had a daughter, Lauretta Puck, born in New York in 1912. Nothing is known here about her father except that he was born in Hungary and she appeared in the short Leon Errol film Should Wives Work. and had previously toured with the Arthur Ashley Players
6.
Harry Ruby
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Harry Ruby was a Jewish American composer and screenwriter, who was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970. Ruby was born in New York City, Ruby died in Woodland Hills, California and was interred at the Chapel of the Pines in Los Angeles. A good friend of Groucho Marx, Ruby appeared several times on his television program, in his 1972 concert at Carnegie Hall, Marx gave the following introduction before performing a song of Rubys, I have a friend in Hollywood. I think I do, Im not so sure and his name is Harry Ruby and he wrote a lot of songs that Ive sung over the years. 16 men in that orchestra, nine of them are illegitimate children, nine and a half including the director. The tie that you got Didnt cost such a lot And well give you the same tie next year. You tell us it was nice of us to bother But it really was a pleasure to fuss For they say, and you are the one for us. Songs My Mother Never Sang Random House B002B9VFCA The Four Marx Brothers in Monkey Business and Duck Soup Simon & Schuster 978-0671212735 S. J
7.
Belle Baker
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Belle Baker was an American singer and actress. Popular throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Baker introduced a number of ragtime and torch songs including Irving Berlins Blue Skies and she performed in the Ziegfeld Follies and introduced a number of Irving Berlins songs. An early adapter to radio, Baker hosted her own show during the 1930s. Eddie Cantor called her “Dinah Shore, Patti Page, Peggy Lee, Baker started performing at the Lower East Sides Cannon Street Music Hall at age 11, where she was discovered by the Yiddish Theatre manager Jacob Adler. She was managed in vaudeville by Lew Leslie, who would become Bakers first husband and she made her vaudeville debut in Scranton, Pennsylvania at the age of 15. She performed in Oscar Hammerstein Is Victoria Theatre in 1911, although her performance was panned, by age 17, she was a headliner. One of her earliest hits was, Cohen Owes Me $97, by 1917, she was a top headliner in New York. In the early 1920s, when she was known as The Ragtime Singer, Baker took part in a Baltimore song competition with Catherine Calvert, Pearl and Violet Hamilton. She was the first artist to record All of Me, one of the most recorded songs of its era, and she was also the first person in the United States to do a radio broadcast from a moving train. Baker became known for her ragtime and torch songs including, Hard Hearted Hannah, My Sin, My Kid, When the Black Sheep Returns to the Fold and she made a handful of recordings, including Hard Hearted Hannah in 1924. As Bakers fame rose as a vocalist, she became known for her Yiddish themed torch songs, in 1925, fellow vaudevillian Sophie Tucker gave Baker a song that had been sent to her for consideration. My Yiddishe Mama was a blatant tearjerker, but it was immensely popular, similar songs Baker recorded included, My Man, My Kid, Baby Your Mother and My Sin. In 1926, Baker had the role in Broadways Betsy. She introduced Irving Berlins Blue Skies in the Florenz Ziegfeld production, with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart, the musical comedy had a book by Irving Caesar and David Freedman. Victor Baravelle was the musical director, Irving Berlins Blue Skies was a last-minute addition to the show, Bakers performance of it went over so well that the audience demanded more than twenty encores of the tune. Baker had a film career as silent film gave way to lavish technicolor musical talkies. She made her debut starring in the 1929 talkie Song of Love. The film survives and has screened at film festivals but not released on DVD
8.
Marx Brothers
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The Marx Brothers were an American family comedy act that was successful in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in motion pictures from 1905 to 1949. Five of the Marx Brothers thirteen feature films were selected by the American Film Institute as among the top 100 comedy films and they are widely considered by critics, scholars, and fans to be among the greatest and most influential comedians of the 20th century. The brothers were included in AFIs 100 Years.100 Stars list of the 25 greatest male stars of Classic Hollywood cinema, the group are almost universally known today by their stage names, Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo, and Zeppo Marx. The core of the act was the three brothers, Chico, Harpo, and Groucho. Each developed a highly distinctive stage persona, Harpo and Chico more or less retired after 1949, while Groucho went on to begin a second career in television. The two younger brothers, Gummo and Zeppo, did not develop their characters to the same extent. The two eventually left the act to pursue careers at which they were successful, as well as a large theatrical agency for a time. Gummo was not in any of the movies, Zeppo appeared in the first five films in relatively straight roles, the performing lives of the brothers were brought about by their mother Minnie Marx, who also acted as their manager. The Marx Brothers were five brothers born to U. S. immigrants Miene Minnie Schoenberg, the brothers are best known by their stage names, Another brother, Manfred, the first-born son of Sam and Minnie, was born in 1886 and died in infancy. Family lore told privately of the son, Manny, born in 1886. Even some members of the Marx family wondered if he was pure myth. A death certificate of the Borough of Manhattan reveals that he died, aged seven months, on 17 July 1886, of enterocolitis, with asthenia contributing, i. e. probably a victim of influenza. He is buried at New Yorks Washington Cemetery, beside his grandmother, Fanny Sophie Schönberg, the Marx Brothers also had an older sister, actually a cousin, born in January 1885 who had been adopted by Minnie and Frenchie. Her name was Pauline, or Polly, Groucho talked about her in his 1972 Carnegie Hall concert. Minnie Marx came from a family of performers and her mother was a yodeling harpist and her father a ventriloquist, both were funfair entertainers. Around 1880, the family emigrated to New York City, where Minnie married Sam in 1884, Minnie also acted as the brothers manager, using the name Minnie Palmer so that agents did not realize that she was also their mother. Gummo and Zeppo both became successful businessmen, Gummo gained success through his activities and a raincoat business. The Marx Brothers were born in New York City, the sons of Jewish immigrants from Germany and their mother Minnie Schönberg was from Dornum in East Frisia, and their father Simon Marx was a native of Alsace and worked as a tailor
9.
Animal Crackers (musical)
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Animal Crackers is a musical with music and lyrics by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby and a book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. The musical starred the Marx Brothers, Animal Crackers opened on Broadway on October 23,1928 at the 44th Street Theatre, and closed April 6,1929, running for 191 performances. The musical was produced by Sam H. Harris, staged by Oscar Eagle, hermes Pan appeared as a chorus boy. The musical was filmed in 1930 with most of the principal leads repeating their roles from the stage production, the musical was revived in 1982 at the Arena Stage, Washington, D. C. directed by Douglas C. Wager and choreographed by Baayork Lee and it was also revived in 1992 by Goodspeed Musicals, Connecticut and in 1993 at the Paper Mill Playhouse, New Jersey. It was produced in the U. K. by the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre and it was then revived at that theatre’s Swan Street Studio from 12 March to the 14th April 1998. Starring were Ben Keaton, Toby Sedgwick, Joseph Alessi, Animal Crackers was produced to open the 2009-2010 season at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, opening September 18,2009, and closing on November 1. The revival starred Joey Slotnick, Molly Brennan, Jonathan Brody, in addition, with a cast of only nine, several of the roles were doubled up by actors. Animal Crackers also ran from May 6,2011 to June 4,2011 at The Lyric Stage Company of Boston, Animal Crackers opened the 2013 season at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, running from June 26,2013 to July 13,2013. After The Cocoanuts ran for almost three years at the Lyric Theatre, the anarchic Animal Crackers became the third and last Broadway show for the Marx Brothers and it would be their last stage show, after which they focused on film. Vaudevilles heyday was finishing, as talking movies were beginning to become popular, while the Marx Brothers performed in Animal Crackers in the evenings, they were busy during the day filming The Cocoanuts at Paramounts Astoria Studios in Astoria, Queens. Three Little Words † ‡ Oh By Jingo, **Character not in the film adaptation
