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Charles Playhouse
The Charles Playhouse is a theater at 74 Warrenton Street Boston in the Boston Theater District. The venue comprises an approximately 500-seat mainstage, which hosts the long-running Blue Man Group, and a 200-seat second stage that hosted ''Shear Madness'' until March 2020. History In 1957, the Charles Playhouse opened at 54 Charles Street. In 1958, the company moved to the current Warrenton Street location. The Warrenton Street building was originally built in 1839, as the Fifth Universalist Church from a design by architect Asher Benjamin. In 1864, it became the second home of Congregation Ohabei Shalom, the first synagogue in Boston.Blowen, Michael. "Curtain to rise on a new Charles." Boston Globe, 22 Sep 1995: 58. It was later transformed into a speakeasy called The Lido Venice, which became the Southland ballroom and cafe- featuring prominent jazz artists such as Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Jimmie Lunceford, and many others during the Jazz Age. In 1958, the Ch ...
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Shear Madness
''Shear Madness'' is an interactive whodunit play, and is one of the longest-running nonmusical plays in the world.STAGE REVIEW: Shear Madness - Consistently Different
''The Tech''
On January 29, 2020, the cast celebrated its 40th anniversary (the show's 12,580th performance) at The Charles Playhouse Stage II. The show's Boston instantiation closed on March 15, 2020.


Plot

The play is set in a in the city in which it pla ...
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Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- most populous city in the country. The city boundaries encompass an area of about and a population of 675,647 as of 2020. It is the seat of Suffolk County (although the county government was disbanded on July 1, 1999). The city is the economic and cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston, a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) home to a census-estimated 4.8 million people in 2016 and ranking as the tenth-largest MSA in the country. A broader combined statistical area (CSA), generally corresponding to the commuting area and including Providence, Rhode Island, is home to approximately 8.2 million people, making it the sixth most populous in the United States. Boston is one of the oldest ...
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Cab Calloway
Cabell Calloway III (December 25, 1907 – November 18, 1994) was an American singer, songwriter, bandleader, conductor and dancer. He was associated with the Cotton Club in Harlem, where he was a regular performer and became a popular vocalist of the swing era. His niche of mixing jazz and vaudeville won him acclaim during a career that spanned over 65 years. Calloway was a master of energetic scat singing and led one of the most popular dance bands in the United States from the early 1930s to the late 1940s. His band included trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie, Jonah Jones, and Adolphus "Doc" Cheatham, saxophonists Ben Webster and Leon "Chu" Berry, guitarist Danny Barker, bassist Milt Hinton, and drummer Cozy Cole. Calloway had several hit records in the 1930s and 1940s, becoming known as the "Hi-de-ho" man of jazz for his most famous song, "Minnie the Moocher", originally recorded in 1931. He reached the '' Billboard'' charts in five consecutive decades (1930s–1970s). Calloway ...
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Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the " Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. He remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna Hall, Susanna, and twins Hamnet Shakespeare, Hamnet and Judith Quiney, Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, ...
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Eugène Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco (; born Eugen Ionescu, ; 26 November 1909 – 28 March 1994) was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and was one of the foremost figures of the French avant-garde theatre in the 20th century. Ionesco instigated a revolution in ideas and techniques of drama, beginning with his "anti play", ''The Bald Soprano'' which contributed to the beginnings of what is known as the Theatre of the Absurd, which includes a number of plays that, following the ideas of the philosopher Albert Camus, explore concepts of absurdism. He was made a member of the Académie française in 1970, and was awarded the 1970 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 1973 Jerusalem Prize. Biography Ionesco was born in Slatina, Romania, to a Romanian father belonging to the Orthodox Christian church and a mother of French and Romanian heritage, whose faith was Protestant (the faith into which her father was born and to which her originally Greek Orthodox Christ ...
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Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. It became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English. During the Second World War, Beckett was a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH (Réseau Gloria). Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". He ...
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Brecht
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote ''The Threepenny Opera'' with Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic ''Lehrstücke'' and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theatre") and the . During the Nazi Germany period, Brecht fled his home country, first to Scandinavia, and during World War II to the United States, where he was surveilled by the FBI. After the war he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Returning to East Berlin after the war, he established the theatre company Berliner Ensemble with his wife and long-time collaborator ...
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John Cazale
John Holland Cazale (; August 12, 1935 – March 13, 1978) was an American actor. He appeared in five films over seven years, all of which were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture: ''The Godfather'' (1972), ''The Conversation'' (1974), ''The Godfather Part II'' (1974), ''Dog Day Afternoon'' (1975), and ''The Deer Hunter'' (1978), with the two ''Godfather'' films and ''The Deer Hunter'' winning. Cazale started as a theater actor in New York City, ranging from regional, to off-Broadway, to Broadway acting alongside Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Sam Waterston. Cazale soon became one of Hollywood's premier character actors, starting with his role as the doomed, weak-minded Fredo Corleone opposite longtime friend Al Pacino in Francis Ford Coppola's film ''The Godfather'' and its 1974 sequel, as well as Sidney Lumet's ''Dog Day Afternoon''. In 1977, Cazale was diagnosed with lung cancer, but he chose to complete his role in ''The Deer Hunter''. He died shortly after, in New ...
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Ned Beatty
Ned Thomas Beatty (July 6, 1937 – June 13, 2021) was an American actor and comedian. In a career that spanned five decades, he appeared in more than 160 films. Throughout his career, Beatty gained a reputation for being "the busiest actor in Hollywood". His film appearances included ''Deliverance'' (1972), ''White Lightning (1973 film), White Lightning'' (1973), ''All the President's Men (film), All the President's Men'' (1976), ''Network (1976 film), Network'' (1976), ''Superman (1978 film), Superman'' (1978), ''Superman II'' (1980), ''Back to School'' (1986), ''Rudy (film), Rudy'' (1993), ''Shooter (2007 film), Shooter'' (2007), and ''Toy Story 3'' (2010). Beatty was nominated for an Academy Awards, Academy Award, two Emmy Awards, an MTV Movie Award for Best Villain, and a Golden Globe Award; he also won a Drama Desk Award. Early life Beatty was born on July 6, 1937, in Louisville, Kentucky, to Margaret (''née'' Fortney) and Charles William Beatty. He had an older sister, M ...
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Jane Alexander
Jane Alexander (née Quigley; born October 28, 1939) is an American actress and author. She is the recipient of two Primetime Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, and nominations for four Academy Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards. From 1993 to 1997, Alexander served as the chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Alexander won the 1969 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her performance in the Broadway production of ''The Great White Hope''. Other Broadway credits include '' 6 Rms Riv Vu'' (1972), ''The Night of the Iguana'' (1988), ''The Sisters Rosensweig'' (1993) and ''Honour'' (1998). She has received a total of eight Tony Award nominations and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1994. Her film breakthrough came with the romantic drama ''The Great White Hope'' (1970), which earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Her subsequent Oscar nominations were for her roles in ''All the President's Men'' (1976), ''Kramer ...
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Jill Clayburgh
Jill Clayburgh (April 30, 1944 – November 5, 2010) was an American actress known for her work in theater, television, and cinema. She received the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her breakthrough role in Paul Mazursky's comedy drama ''An Unmarried Woman'' (1978). She also received a second consecutive Academy Award nomination for '' Starting Over'' (1979) as well as four Golden Globe nominations for her film performances. Early life Clayburgh was born in New York City, the daughter of Julia Louise (née Dorr), an actress and theatrical production secretary for producer David Merrick, and Albert Henry "Bill" Clayburgh, a manufacturing executive. Her paternal grandmother was concert and opera singer Alma Lachenbruch Clayburgh. Her brother, Jim Clayburgh, is a scenic designer. Her mother was Protestant and her father was Jewish, though she reportedly never talked about her religious background and was rais ...
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Olympia Dukakis
Olympia Dukakis (June 20, 1931 – May 1, 2021) was an American actress. She performed in more than 130 stage productions, more than 60 films and in 50 television series. Best known as a screen actress, she started her career in theater. Not long after her arrival in New York City, she won an Obie Award for Best Actress in 1963 for her off-Broadway performance in Bertolt Brecht's ''Man Equals Man''. She later moved to film acting and won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe, among other accolades, for her performance in ''Moonstruck'' (1987). She received another Golden Globe nomination for ''Sinatra'' (1992) and Emmy Award nominations for ''Lucky Day'' (1991), '' More Tales of the City'' (1998) and ''Joan of Arc'' (1999). Dukakis's autobiography, ''Ask Me Again Tomorrow: A Life in Progress'', was published in 2003. In 2018, a feature-length documentary about her life, titled ''Olympia'', was released theatrically in the United States. Early life and education Olympia Dukakis ( e ...
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