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1962dude420-blog · 3 years

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Today we remember the passing of Gilda Radner who Died: May 20, 1989 in Los Angeles, California

Gilda Susan Radner (June 28, 1946 – May 20, 1989) was an American actress and comedian, who was one of the seven original cast members for the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL). In her routines, Radner specialized in parodies of television stereotypes, such as advice specialists and news anchors. In 1978, she won an Emmy Award for her performances on the show. She also portrayed those characters in her highly successful one-woman show on Broadway in 1979. Radner's SNL work established her as an iconic figure in the history of American comedy.

She died from ovarian cancer in 1989. Her autobiography dealt frankly with her life, work, and personal struggles, including those with the illness. Her widower, Gene Wilder, carried out her personal wish that information about her illness would help other cancer victims, founding and inspiring organizations that emphasize early diagnosis, hereditary factors and support for cancer victims. She was posthumously awarded a Grammy Award in 1990. Radner was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1992; and she posthumously received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003.

Radner was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Jewish parents, Henrietta (née Dworkin), a legal secretary, and Herman Radner, a businessman. Through her mother, Radner was a second cousin of business executive Steve Ballmer. She grew up in Detroit with a nanny, Elizabeth Clementine Gillies, whom she called "Dibby" (and on whom she based her famous character Emily Litella), and an older brother named Michael. She attended the exclusive University Liggett School in Detroit. Toward the end of her life, Radner wrote in her autobiography, It's Always Something, that during her childhood and young adulthood, she battled numerous eating disorders: "I coped with stress by having every possible eating disorder from the time I was nine years old. I have weighed as much as 160 pounds and as little as 93. When I was a kid, I overate constantly. My weight distressed my mother and she took me to a doctor who put me on Dexedrine diet pills when I was ten years old."

Radner was close to her father, who operated Detroit's Seville Hotel, where many nightclub performers and actors stayed while performing in the city. He took her on trips to New York to see Broadway shows. As Radner wrote in It's Always Something, when she was 12, her father developed a brain tumor, and the symptoms began so suddenly that he told people his glasses were too tight. Within days, he was bedridden and unable to communicate, and remained in that condition until his death two years later.

Radner graduated from Liggett and enrolled at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1964. She planned to get an education degree.

In Ann Arbor, Radner dropped out in her senior year to follow her boyfriend, Canadian sculptor Jeffrey Rubinoff, to Toronto, where she made her professional acting debut in the 1972 production of Godspell with future stars Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, Martin Short, and Paul Shaffer. Afterward, Radner joined The Second City comedy troupe in Toronto.

Radner was a featured player on the National Lampoon Radio Hour, a comedy program syndicated to some 600 U.S. radio stations from 1974 to 1975. Fellow cast members included John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Richard Belzer, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Rhonda Coullet.

Radner gained name recognition as one of the original "Not Ready for Prime Time Players", the freshman group on the first (1975) season of Saturday Night Live. She was the first performer cast for the show, co-wrote much of the material that she performed, and collaborated with Alan Zweibel (of the show's writing staff) on sketches that highlighted her recurring characters. Between 1975 and 1980, she created characters such as obnoxious personal advice expert Roseanne Roseannadanna after NY local female reporter Rose Ann Scamardella and "Baba Wawa", a parody of Barbara Walters. After Radner's death, Walters stated in an interview that Radner was the "first person to make fun of news anchors, now it's done all the time."

She also played the character Emily Litella, an elderly, hearing-impaired woman who gave angry and misinformed editorial replies on Weekend Update. Additionally, Radner parodied celebrities such as Lucille Ball, Patti Smith, and Olga Korbut in SNL sketches. She won an Emmy Award in 1978 for her work on SNL. In Rolling Stone's February 2015 appraisal of all 141 SNL cast members to date, Radner was ranked ninth in importance. "She was the most beloved of the original cast," they wrote. "In the years between Mary Tyler Moore and Seinfeld's Elaine, Radner was the prototype for the brainy city girl with a bundle of neuroses."

In 1979, incoming NBC President Fred Silverman offered Radner her own primetime variety show, which she turned down. That year, she was a host of the Music for UNICEF Concert at the United Nations General Assembly.

Alan Zweibel, who co-created the Roseanne Roseannadanna character and co-wrote Roseanne's dialogue, recalled that Radner, one of three original SNL cast members who stayed away from cocaine, chastised him for abusing it.

While in character as Roseanne Roseannadanna, Radner gave the commencement address to the graduating class at the Columbia School of Journalism in 1979.

Radner had mixed emotions about the fans and strangers who recognized her in public. She sometimes became "angry when she was approached by strangers in public, and upset when she wasn't".

After breaking up with Jeffrey Rubinoff, Radner had an on-again-off-again relationship with Martin Short while both were appearing in Godspell. Radner had romantic involvements with several male Saturday Night Live castmates, including Bill Murray (after a previous relationship with his brother Brian Doyle-Murray) and Dan Aykroyd. Radner's friend Judy Levy recounted Radner saying she found Ghostbusters hard to watch since the cast comprised so many of her ex-boyfriends - Aykroyd, Murray, and Harold Ramis. Radner was first married to musician G. E. Smith after they met while working on Gilda Radner – Live from New York; they divorced in 1982.

Radner met actor Gene Wilder on the set of the Sidney Poitier film Hanky Panky (released in 1982), when the two worked together making the film. She described their first meeting as "love at first sight". After meeting Wilder, her marriage to Smith deteriorated. Radner made a second film with Wilder, The Woman in Red (released in 1984), and their relationship deepened. The two were married on September 18, 1984, in Saint-Tropez. They made a third film together, Haunted Honeymoon, in 1986 and remained married until her death in 1989.

Details of Radner's eating disorder were reported in a book about Saturday Night Live by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, which was published and received much media coverage during a period when Radner was consulting various doctors in Los Angeles about symptoms of an illness she was suffering that turned out to be cancer.

In 1985, Radner was experiencing severe fatigue and suffered from pain in her upper legs on the set of Haunted Honeymoon in the United Kingdom. She sought medical treatment, and for a period of 10 months, various doctors, most of them in Los Angeles, gave her several diagnoses that all turned out to be wrong because she continued to experience pain.

Finally, on October 21, 1986, Radner was diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer. She immediately underwent surgery and had a hysterectomy. On October 26, surgeons removed a grapefruit-size tumor from her abdomen. Radner then began chemotherapy and radiation therapy treatment, as she wrote in It's Always Something, and the treatment caused extreme physical and emotional pain.

In September 1988, after tests showed no signs of cancer, Radner went on a maintenance chemotherapy treatment to prolong her remission, but three months later, in December, she learned the cancer had returned. She was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on May 17, 1989, to undergo a CT scan. She was given a sedative and went into a coma during the scan. She did not regain consciousness and died three days later, from ovarian cancer on May 20, 1989; Wilder was at her side.

#May 20 #1989 #SNL #Saturday Night Live #The Not Ready for Prime Time Players #Gilda Radner #R.I.P.

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onesingularsensation · 7 years

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today i learned i have 9 mutual fb friends with michael rubinoff who conceived of and produced come from away. hello sir can you make me famous

#emma speaks

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38-planes · 8 years

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How the couple behind Come From Away created a Canadian musical hit

The Globe and Mail, 17 February 2017

Come from Away creators David Hein and Irene Sankoff struggled as artists, found each other as life and business partners and became the dynamic duo of the Canadian musical

For Valentine’s Day week, here’s a love story, times two.

It’s about how a Prairie dreamer with a guitar and a Toronto realist who always had a backup plan got together as romantic partners – and then, a decade later, saved their relationship and discovered a unique voice that would take them to Broadway by getting together again, as artistic partners.

Come from Away’s creators David Hein and Irene Sankoff, whose Newfoundland-set hit about the 38 planeloads of people stranded in Gander after 9/11 opens in previews on 45th Street on Saturday, told it one morning before departing for New York, in the living room of the two-storey Toronto home they bought in 2006 with the help of their parents, day jobs and a 35-year mortgage no longer offered by banks.

A decade later, they have a three-year-old named Molly, are working as artists full-time – and, financially, the picture looks a heck of a lot different. Best-case scenario, if Come from Away sells out in Manhattan the way it did in Seattle and Toronto, as sole authors of the work, they could pull in $27,000 (U.S.) a week – more every seven days than the average Canadian author or writer earns in a year.

That’s my estimate based on industry standards – but money is the one topic these two children of divorce who both, at times, lived in humble circumstances with their single mothers are sheepish about. “We grew up without a lot of money, so the whole thing makes me really nervous,” Sankoff says.

Hein further cites the statistic that only one in five shows on Broadway makes a profit. “Literally, we’re the fifth show out of five to go to Broadway from Canada – and one of them [2006’s The Drowsy Chaperone] has already made it!”

Falling in love

Their first love story is beautifully conventional: Hein, born in Regina, and Sankoff, from the Toronto suburb of North York, met on the first day of frosh week at York University in the 1990s. “Irene thinks it was a welcome barbecue; I think it was at a welcome pancake breakcast,” Hein says.

“Because it was outside, right?”

“You can eat pancakes outside.”

The aspiring songwriter and aspiring actress both loved theatre – but, musically, were divided. Hein, as a kid, through visits to the Winnipeg Folk Festival with his mother, had developed a taste for bands such as Blue Rodeo and Great Big Sea (a similar sound pervades Come from Away’s score), while Sankoff was a musical-theatre nut who danced all her life and bonded with her mother over old movie musicals. “My mom would come back after working to 11 or whatever on Christmas Eve and we would start watching Top Hat … or those old Gene Kelly musicals,” she recalls. “I was obsessed.”

But Sankoff was also an academic overachiever feeling pressure from the science-focused side of her family – and, while she acted extracurricularly at York, she graduated with a double major in psychology and creative writing.

The young couple’s first major fight was, as only a young couple’s could be, about whether theatre could change the world. They went at it until the sun came up – the dreamer trying to convince the realist.

Hein didn’t win the argument – but, on the verge of applying to do a master’s in speech and language pathology, Sankoff did decide to at least give acting a try professionally.

New York

So, in 1999, Sankoff and Hein moved to New York. Sankoff began studying at the Actors Studio – as seen on TV – and Hein, who has dual citizenship, began work as “assistant everything” at a music studio where The Muppets recorded, borrowing the equipment to record his own songs at night.

The pair lived in a residence called International House in Upper Manhattan along with grad students from 110 countries – and that’s where they were when, on Sept. 11, 2001, planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. That night, windows shut to keep the smell of smoke out, scared students from around the world gathered around a piano in the residence for an impromptu concert – a moving experience Sankoff and Hein would later draw on for Come from Away.

But 9/11 had a more immediate impact on them. A month later, Hein woke up and said, “Hey, why don’t we get married?” They were already engaged – but on Oct. 12, 2001, they headed down to City Hall and secretly eloped.

Playbills from Hein and Sankoff’s New York years still hang on the kitchen wall of the house they share with their daughter and two cats, one named Elphaba (after the Wicked witch) and the other Gambo (after the Newfoundland town).

But it was not always a dream: Savings dwindled, the studio Hein was working at shut down, and Sankoff – who had an agent and was getting gigs – separated a shoulder in a dance class.

Uninsured, she took a trip to Toronto to see a doctor – and it turned into a move back home.

The second love story

Back in Canada, Hein and Sankoff had to build an artistic community from scratch. She landed a role in The Mousetrap; he released an album called North of Nowhere. And so it went for years – pursuing art at night and paying bills through tutoring or graphic design. Soon, they were married homeowners, but they barely got to see each other and grew lonely, especially when Hein was off on tour. Was this living the dream?

And this – in 2009 – is where the second love story begins.

Hein had written a song called My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding – based on his own experience as the son of a woman who came out later in life and remarried – that was popular on tour. More than most of his work, it was influenced by the musical theatre that Sankoff had introduced him to over the course of their relationship. What if, he wondered, they could expand it into an actual musical – and, at the very least, spend some time together?

Marrying their skills, Hein and Sankoff began trying to turn their family’s story into a fictional musical – at first, a conventional “book musical” where an invisible fourth wall descends in front of the audience and scenes and songs alternate to tell a story.

But an epiphany Sankoff had on Valentine’s Day led the pair to a different writing style – one they later refined with Come from Away.

At the gym that day, Sankoff was talking with an enthusiastic friend about Wiccan Wedding – and heard her say, “The best thing about this is that it’s based on a true story.” A light bulb went on.

“I came home to David and said, ‘We’ve got to throw it out. Let’s tell the real story.’”

The new version the couple started working on during an unorthodox Valentine’s date would eventually feature Hein sitting on a stool in his Glass Tiger shirt, singing songs about his mother’s coming out, how he introduced his two moms to Irene at a Hooters and the history of same-sex marriage in Canada, using a troupe of actors that included his wife to tell the stories.

The sweet and direct show became a hit at the Toronto Fringe Festival that summer, then was picked up by producer David Mirvish to play at the city’s 700-seat Panasonic Theatre he had just purchased – and Sankoff and Hein’s career as commercial musical-theatre creators was launched.

When the idea to write a show about what happened in and around Gander, Nfld., in 2001 was proposed to them shortly thereafter by Michael Rubinoff at Sheridan College, it could not have been a more ideal project for them.

They had seen how strangers from around the world bonded, with music, on Sept. 11, and seen how music played a role in bringing them together – and they had found the right aesthetic for such a story, having learned that a musical could be a true story set in our times, told with plenty of direct address, and that authenticity was as important to winning over an audience as craft in lyrics and lines.

Armed with a $12,000 grant from the Canada Council, they headed to Gander for Sept. 11, 2011, to interview locals and “come from aways” returning to commemorate the 10th anniversary.

Hein and Sankoff’s subsequent five-year journey – buzz-creating workshops on both sides of the border, a bidding war by commercial producers at a showcase in New York, record-breaking runs in San Diego, Seattle, Washington and Toronto – has been told in these pages before.

Now, the last chapter is about to be written as final adjustments are made in a preview period ahead of a March 12 opening.

As the statistics show, Come from Away may not make them rich. Canadians who have had what are referred to as “flops” in the harsh language of Broadway – such as Cliff Jones, whose Rockabye Hamlet closed in a week in 1976; and Neil Bartram and Brian Hill, whose The Story of My Life did the same in 2009 – have advised the couple to just enjoy the ride.

In any case, the two have a bigger goal beyond making money, Hein says, “Especially now, it feels important to talk about welcoming refugees off planes, strangers into our communities.”

Yes – he’s finally won the argument about whether theatre can change the world.

Sankoff came around after meeting senior citizens who changed their minds on same-sex marriage after seeing Wiccan Wedding, and receiving letters from Come from Away audience members about how it’s inspired them to be better people.

“I still have my moments where I’m like, ‘It’s a drop in the bucket,’” Sankoff says. “But at least it’s a drop.”

#come from away #musicals #broadway #jenn colella #38 planes #Schoenfeld theatre #sankoff and hein #david hein #irene sankoff #the globe and mail

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trailingrhiannon · 8 years

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Residents of Gander are treated to an early look at “Come From Away,” a Broadway-bound musical about how they welcomed travelers grounded amid the Sept. 11 chaos.

But the idea that the events were the stuff of musical theater seemed, at best, far-fetched to many. Michael Rubinoff, a theater producer who oversees the Canadian Music Theater Project at Sheridan College, just outside Toronto, unsuccessfully suggested the idea to multiple teams of writers before finding a married couple, Irene Sankoff and David Hein, willing to take it on. The pair had written one previous musical, called “My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding,” but they flew to Gander for the 10th anniversary of the attacks and spent a month in town, interviewing anyone and everyone.

#inspiration #folk music

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montetaylor-densley · 7 years

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Michael Rubinoff, the man behind the broadway hit Come From Away, describes his legal experience as invaluable

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atlanticcanada · 1 year

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People flock to Newfoundland in search of the Come From Away kindness -- and find it

Janet Hayward didn't show too much outward excitement Friday night as she walked toward a Gander, N.L., theatre to see the musical that inspired what she calls her "Newfoundland Quest" -- but she did arrive a full hour early.

The 54-year-old high school teacher from Indiana has spent the past three weeks driving all over Newfoundland to capture the essence of its people, culture and landscape, and relay it for her students. She began dreaming of the trip after she saw "Come From Away" over a year ago on Apple TV Plus. The musical tells the story of the town's efforts to care for thousands of people stranded there on planes grounded after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S.

The story gripped her, and she couldn't let it go. So she applied for, and won, a special grant for teachers in Indiana to embark on the journey.

"It's the kindness of the whole thing," Hayward said in an interview. "I really wanted to meet the people behind the kindness."

She is among many, from all over the world, who have come to Gander in search of that kindness. And she was not disappointed.

Thirty-eight planes carrying more than 6,500 people were ordered to land at the Gander airport on Sept. 11, 2001. The town has a population of about 11,800 people and "Come From Away" is about those who opened their homes, community halls and businesses to shelter the "plane people" for the five days they were stranded. Its characters are based on real people in Gander, and the real things they did to dampen the passengers' horror as they learned what had happened.

The musical was a smash on Broadway, running for a record-setting five years at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in New York City. The Gander production is the first fully staged presentation of the musical in its hometown, according to Michael Rubinoff, the play's originating producer. He congratulated Friday night's crowd for snagging "the hottest theatre tickets on the planet."

Barbara Amiel Pearson first saw the musical in 2017, during a particularly dark time in her life. She lives in Florida, and she said she was "despondent" after Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 election. "I had lost hope in this country, I had lost hope in the world, I had lost hope in people," she said in an interview this week. "And then I see this play ... and I felt like I had to go and see if people could really be this good."

She arrived in Gander for the first time in October 2017. "I had one goal: I wanted to meet Newfoundlanders," she said. So she went to the Tim Hortons across from her hotel and started talking to people.

Amiel Pearson, 72, said she met people on that trip she is still friends with today, including Gander resident Diane Davis, who is the inspiration for the character Beulah Davis in the play.

As is a common experience for many Newfoundland visitors, both Pearson and Hayward were invited into strangers' homes for meals, tea and lengthy chats.

Amiel Pearson returned to Gander in 2019, and she'll be arriving again next month; she has front-row tickets for the "Come From Away" performance on Aug. 12. She says her will includes instructions for her two daughters to use part of their inheritance to visit Newfoundland. "It really caused a profound change in my life," she said.

Derm Flynn said he's heard many stories like Hayward's and Amiel Pearson's, but he's still moved by each one. He was mayor of nearby Appleton, N.L., on Sept. 11, 2001. He and his wife, Dianne, took in six passengers.

"We're not used to a big deal being made of the fact that we can invite someone into our home for a cup of tea," he said this week, adding that Newfoundlanders don't want to be seen as "blowing their own horns."

"There are contrary Newfoundlanders, just as there are contrary people all over the world," he added.

The Flynns' story is told through the Derm Flynn character in "Come From Away." About a year after the play opened on Broadway, they began hosting an event for tourists called Meet The Flynns, where they invite people into their home for lunch, tea and a chat. They've entertained guests from the rest of Canada, the United States, Australia and Germany, he said.

They charge for the visit, but it's a way to give people who've seen the play the kind of welcoming experience they're looking for, Flynn said.

Hayward hopes to instil in her students a sense of the kindness she has discovered in Newfoundland. To that end, she plans to start an after-school social club. She'll get students together to talk about themselves and their interests and what they'd like to contribute to their community. And then, together, they'll undertake "one wonderful kind act or service a month," she said.

In the meantime, her husband and both of her sons have joined her for different parts of her Newfoundland adventure, and they've loved it as much as she has, she said.

"We'll definitely be back."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 8, 2023.

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/gvVx86k

#new brunswick #prince edward island #nova scotia #news #politics #canada #CTVAtlantic

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freckle-queen · 3 years

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When David Hein and Michael Rubinoff congratulate you for coming out 🤯❤️

#musicals #come from away #theatre #broadway #Michael Rubinoff #David hein #Irene sankoff #Les mis #waitress #hamilton #the drowsy chaperone #dear evan hansen

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atlanticcanada · 1 year

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'Come From Away' musical comes home to Gander in Newfoundland where it all began

Bringing the hit musical "Come From Away" home to Newfoundland for the first time is a bit like bringing a new romantic partner home to meet your family, says actor Petrina Bromley.

"There's always that fear of, 'Oh gosh, I just hope this goes well, because I love this person, and I love these people, and hopefully they will all love each other," Bromley said in a telephone interview from Gander, N.L., the central Newfoundland town in which the show is set.

Bromley was the musical's sole cast member from Newfoundland during a run of more than five years on Broadway. She said it's "surreal" but incredibly important to her to be bringing a new iteration of the show to Gander for an eight-week run. Every performance is sold out, including the previews beginning Friday.

"On a very basic level, I just think it's so important for the show to be here, and to be seen by the people who inspired it," Bromley said.

"Come From Away" tells the story of how people in Gander dropped everything to care for more than 6,500 passengers aboard 38 planes diverted to the town's airport after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks grounded air traffic. Residents opened their houses, community halls and businesses to the stranded people, offering them food, clothes and comfort during a terrifying time that ultimately changed parts of the world.

The show was a surprise smash. When the curtains closed after its final show at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in New York City last October, it was the 49th longest-running show in Broadway history, and the longest-running production in the theatre's 105-year history. The play hasbeen staged across North America and as far away as Australia and Argentina.

The Gander production adds the tag line "You Are Here" to the title. It will be the first fully staged presentation of the musical in its hometown, though locals have been treated to alternative iterations, said Michael Rubinoff, the play's originating producer. In 2016, the original Broadway cast performed the show for residents in a local hockey rink. Last September, the cast of the Canadian production performed the show's songs, also at the arena.

This time around, the musical will be staged at Gander's Arts and Culture Centre. Tickets sold out within months, particularly after the local Gander cast -- which includes nine Newfoundlanders -- was announced early this year, said officials at the venue.

Rubinoff and his team can see from purchasers' postal and zip codes that ticket-buyers come from all over the world -- the United States, Europe, Japan, Israel and Argentina, he said.

Mounting a full productionof the show in Gander has long been a dream, Rubinoff said. Newfoundlanders are often modest about how they helped the stranded 9/11 passengers. Sometimes they say, "'We don't get why this is a big deal. All we did was make some sandwiches," he recounted. The play shows them exactly what the fuss was about.

"I hope they will see it as a celebration, especially this production. This is Newfoundland's production," he said. "When the actors sing 'You are here' in the score, this is the only place in the world where that will actually be true," he said.

The songs and the script in the Gander production are the same as the Broadway version, which was written by Canadians Irene Sankoff and David Hein. But the way those words and songs are presented on stage is different.

The Broadway version was directed by an American, Christopher Ashley, earning him a Tony Award in 2017. The Gander version is directed by Newfoundlander Jillian Keiley, who is known for innovative stage design and striking visuals that bring a unique depth to her productions.

Under Ashley's direction, the story was seen more through the lens of a "come from away," a term used in Newfoundland and Labrador -- and across Atlantic Canada -- to describe people from outside their provinces.

But in the Gander show, "you're seeing it more from the lens of being the islanders, the Newfoundlanders and Labradorians," Bromley said.

Both Bromley and Rubinoff said the show's commercial success was a shock. Rubinoff described it as being beyond his "wildest of wild dreams." But they understand why this story from a little town on an island in the North Atlantic struck a chord with so many people.

"I think it's because it's a story, a simple story in the end, about people helping people," Bromley said. "I think we watch it, and we all hope in our hearts that if we were in that situation, we would rise to it in the way that the people here did."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 5, 2023.

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/cIzniO6

#new brunswick #prince edward island #nova scotia #news #politics #canada #CTVAtlantic

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