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George Michael Cohan
George Michael Cohan , 1878-1942, American showman, b. Providence, R.I. As a child he appeared in vaudeville as one of "The Four Cohans" with his father, mother, and sister, Josephine. He eventually wrote the act and was the business manager. The Governor's Son (1901) was his first attempt at ...
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David Merrick
David Merrick 1912-2000, American theatrical producer, b. St. Louis, Mo., as David Margulois. Merrick began his remarkably successful series of theatrical productions in 1954 with Fanny, his first Broadway musical. Thereafter he presented more than 80 plays and musicals, including Gypsy (1959),...
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Tommy Tune
Tommy Tune 1939-, American dancer, choreographer, and director, b. Wichita Falls, Tex. An unusually lanky 6 ft 6 in., Tune began his Broadway dancing career in the chorus of several mid-1960s musicals, then performed as a tap dancer in musical films, including Hello Dolly! (1969) and The Boy Fri...
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Jack Beeson
Jack Beeson 1921-, American composer, b. Muncie, Ind. Beeson studied at the Eastman School of Music and privately in New York with Béla Bartók. Beginning to teach at Columbia Univ. in 1945, he was named MacDowell Professor of Music in 1967; he retired in 1988 but returned as a member ...
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Gene Kelly
Gene Kelly 1912-96, American dancer, choreographer, movie actor, and director, b. Pittsburgh. Kelly started dancing on Broadway in 1938 and first gained fame in the title role of the Broadway musical Pal Joey (1940). He moved to Hollywood in 1941 and soon starred in his first film, For Me and My...
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Barbra Streisand
Barbra Streisand 1942-, American singer and actress, b. New York City. Streisand first gained critical and public acclaim for her supporting role in the Broadway musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962). She cemented her fame with her show-stopping portrayal of Fanny Brice in another music...
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lesbianism
lesbianism Term for female homosexuality...
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Thornton Niven Wilder
Thornton Niven Wilder 1897-1975, American playwright and novelist, b. Madison, Wis., grad. Yale (B.A., 1920) and Princeton (M.A., 1925). He received most of his early education in China, where his father was in the U.S. consular service. Wilder taught in colleges and universities in the United Stat...
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homosexuality
homosexuality a term created by 19th cent. theorists to describe a sexual and emotional interest in members of one's own sex. Today a person is often said to have a homosexual or a heterosexual orientation, a description intended to defuse some of the long-standing sentiment among many Westerners t...
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Norman Douglas
Norman Douglas (George Norman Douglas), 1868-1952, British novelist and essayist, b. Scotland. He spent the years from 1894 to 1896 in diplomatic service in Russia but resigned from the foreign service in 1896. His masterpiece, South Wind (1917), which is set on Nepenthe, an invented Mediterranea...
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