Harry Tierney Moss Hart Lily Pons Irving Berlin 1935 Original Theatre Photograph

Description

ITEM: This is a vintage and original photograph dated on verso November 29, 1935 and featuring a dapper, glamorous publicity portrait of theatre heavyweights Harry Tierney (musical theatre composer), Moss Hart (playwright and theatre director), Lily Pons (operatic soprano and actress), and Irving Berlin (composer and lyricist). The group of Broadway bigwigs look beautiful for what is clearly a night out on the town.
Photograph measures 10" x 8" on a glossy single weight paper stock. Brown Brothers ink stamps and handwritten notations on verso.
Guaranteed to be 100% vintage and original from Grapefruit Moon Gallery.
More about Harry Tierney:
Harry Austin Tierney (May 21, 1890 – March 22, 1965) was a successful American composer of musical theatre, best known for long-running hits such as Irene (1919), Broadway's longest-running show of the era (620 performances), Kid Boots (1923) and Rio Rita (1927), one of the first musicals to be turned into a talking picture (and later remade starring Abbott and Costello).
Born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, he was most active between about 1910 and 1930, often collaborating with the lyricist Joseph McCarthy. His mother was a pianist, his father a trumpeter, and he himself toured as a concert pianist in his early years. After a brief spell working in London for a music publisher, he returned to the United States in 1916. Over the next couple of decades many of his songs were used in the famous Ziegfeld Follies, and were performed by the premier singers of the day, such as Eddie Cantor, Anna Held and Edith Day.
The year 1919 saw his greatest Broadway hit, the show Irene, which contained perhaps his most well-known song, "Alice Blue Gown", as well as "Castle of Dreams," an adaptation of Chopin's Minute Waltz. This same show was made into a film in 1926, then remade in 1940 with Anna Neagle and Ray Milland, and again for the stage in 1973 with Debbie Reynolds. The original show broke the then record for the longest running show, at 620 performances.
Other shows followed with varying success, in particular, Rio Rita (collaborating with Joseph McCarthy, and one of RKO's first forays in converting a musical to the silver screen), and Kid Boots, Dixiana (1929) and Half Shot at Sunrise (1930) were also made into films. Tierney's successes after this period were sketchy (apart from the film remakes of Irene), but he was elected into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame.
Harry Tierney is interred at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in New Rochelle, New York.
Biography From Wikipedia
More about Moss Hart:
Moss Hart (October 24, 1904 – December 20, 1961) was an American playwright and theater director.
Hart was born in New York City, the son of Lillian (Solomon) and Barnett Hart, a cigar maker. He had a younger brother, Bernard. He grew up in relative poverty with his English-born Jewish immigrant parents in the Bronx and in Sea Gate, Brooklyn. He was the great-grandson of the Jewish bare-knuckle pugilist Barney Aaron.
Early on he had a strong relationship with his Aunt Kate, with whom he later lost contact due to a falling out between her and his parents, and Kate's weakening mental state. She piqued his interest in the theater and took him to see performances often. Hart even went so far as to create an "alternate ending" to her life in his book Act One. He writes that she died while he was working on out-of-town tryouts for The Beloved Bandit. Later, Kate became eccentric and then disturbed, vandalizing Hart's home, writing threatening letters and setting fires backstage during rehearsals for Jubilee. But his relationship with her was formative. He learned that the theater made possible "the art of being somebody else … not a scrawny boy with bad teeth, a funny name … and a mother who was a distant drudge."
After working several years as a director of amateur theatrical groups and an entertainment director at summer resorts, he scored his first Broadway hit with Once in a Lifetime (1930), a farce about the arrival of the sound era in Hollywood. The play was written in collaboration with Broadway veteran George S. Kaufman, who regularly wrote with others, notably Marc Connelly and Edna Ferber. (Kaufman also performed in the play's original Broadway cast in the role of a frustrated playwright hired by Hollywood.) During the next decade, Kaufman and Hart teamed on a string of successes, including You Can't Take It with You (1936) and The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939). Though Kaufman had hits with others, Hart is generally conceded to be his most important collaborator.
You Can't Take It With You, the story of an eccentric family and how they live during the Depression, won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for drama. It is Hart's most-revived play. When director Frank Capra and writer Robert Riskin adapted it for the screen in 1938, the film won the Best Picture Oscar and Capra won for Best Director.
The Man Who Came To Dinner is about the caustic Sheridan Whiteside who, after injuring himself slipping on ice, must stay in a Midwestern family's house. The character was based on Kaufman and Hart's friend, critic Alexander Woollcott. Other characters in the play are based on Noël Coward, Harpo Marx and Gertrude Lawrence.
Throughout the 1930s, Hart worked both with and without Kaufman on several musicals and revues, including Face the Music (1932); As Thousands Cheer (1933), with songs by Irving Berlin; Jubilee (musical) (1935), with songs by Cole Porter; and I'd Rather Be Right (1937), with songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. (Lorenz Hart and Moss Hart were not related.) After George Washington Slept Here (1940), Kaufman and Hart called it quits. Hart continued to write plays after parting with Kaufman, such as Christopher Blake (1946) and Light Up the Sky (1948), as well as the book for the musical Lady In The Dark (1941), with songs by Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin. However, he became best known during this period as a director. Among the Broadway hits he staged were Junior Miss (1941), Dear Ruth (1944) and Anniversary Waltz (1954). By far his biggest hit was the musical My Fair Lady (1956), adapted from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe. The show ran over six years and won a Tony Award for Best Musical. Hart picked up the Tony for Best Director.
Hart also wrote some screenplays, including Gentleman's Agreement (1947) – for which he received an Oscar nomination – Hans Christian Andersen (1952) and A Star Is Born (1954). He wrote a memoir, Act One: An Autobiography by Moss Hart, which was released in 1959. It was adapted to film in 1963, with George Hamilton portraying Hart. The last show Hart directed was the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot (1960). During a troubled out-of-town tryout, Hart had a heart attack. The show opened before he fully recovered, but he and Lerner reworked it after the opening. That, along with huge pre-sales and a cast performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, helped ensure the expensive production was a hit.
Hart was the tenth president of the Dramatists Guild of America, from 1947 until 1956, when Oscar Hammerstein II became his successor.
Hart married Kitty Carlisle on August 10, 1946; they had two children.
Moss Hart died of a heart attack at the age of 57 on December 20, 1961, at his winter home in Palm Springs, California. He was entombed in a crypt at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.
Biography From Wikipedia
More about Lily Pons:
Alice Joséphine Pons (April 12, 1898 – February 13, 1976), known professionally as Lily Pons, was a French-American operatic soprano and actress who had an active career from the late 1920s through the early 1970s. As an opera singer, she specialized in the coloratura soprano repertoire and was particularly associated with the title roles in Lakmé and Lucia di Lammermoor. In addition to appearing as a guest artist with many opera houses internationally, Pons enjoyed a long association with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, where she performed nearly 300 times between 1931 and 1960.
She also had a successful and lucrative career as a concert singer, which continued until her retirement from performance in 1973. From 1935 to 1937, she made three musical films for RKO Pictures. She also made numerous appearances on radio and on television, performing on variety programs such as The Ed Sullivan Show, The Colgate Comedy Hour, and The Dave Garroway Show. In 1955, she topped the bill for the first broadcast of what became an iconic television series, Sunday Night at the London Palladium. She made dozens of records, recording both classical and popular music. She was awarded the Croix de Lorraine and the Légion d'honneur by the government of France.
Pons was also adept at making herself into a marketable cultural icon. Her opinions on fashion and home decorating were frequently reported in women's magazines, and she appeared as the face for Lockheed airplanes, Knox gelatin, and Libby's tomato juice advertisements. A town in Maryland named itself after her, and thereafter the singer contrived to have all her Christmas cards posted from Lilypons, Maryland. Opera News wrote in 2011, "Pons promoted herself with a kind of marketing savvy that no singer ever had shown before, and very few have since; only Luciano Pavarotti was quite so successful at exploiting the mass media."
Pons was born in Draguignan near Cannes, to a French father, Léonard Louis Auguste Antoine Pons, and an Italian-born mother, Maria (née Naso), later known as Marie Pétronille Pons. She first studied piano at the Paris Conservatory, winning the first prize at the age of 15. At the onset of World War I in 1914, she moved with her mother and younger sister Juliette (born December 22, 1902 – died 1995) to Cannes, where she played piano and sang for soldiers at receptions given in support of the French troops and at the famous Hotel Carlton that had been transformed into a hospital, and where her mother worked as a volunteer nurse orderly.
In 1925, encouraged by soprano Dyna Beumer  and August Mesritz, a successful publisher who agreed to fund her singing career, she started taking singing lessons in Paris with Alberto de Gorostiaga. She later studied singing with Alice Zeppilli in New York. On October 15, 1930, Pons married her first husband, Mesritz, and spent the next several years as a housewife. The marriage ended in divorce on December 7, 1933.
Pons successfully made her operatic debut in the title role of Léo Delibes' Lakmé at Mulhouse in 1928 under Reynaldo Hahn's baton, and went on to sing several coloratura roles in French provincial opera houses. She was discovered by the dramatic tenor/impresario Giovanni Zenatello, who took her to New York, where she auditioned for Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. The Met needed a star coloratura after the retirement of Amelita Galli-Curci in January, 1930. Gatti-Casazza engaged Pons immediately, and she also signed a recording contract with RCA Victor.
On January 3, 1931, Pons, unknown in the U.S., made an unheralded Met debut as Lucia in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, and on that occasion the spelling of her first name was changed to "Lily". Her performance received tremendous acclaim. She became a star and inherited most of Galli-Curci's important coloratura roles. Her career after this point was primarily in the United States. She became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1940. From 1938 to 1958, she was married to conductor Andre Kostelanetz. In 1955, they built a home in Palm Springs, California.
Pons was a principal soprano at the Met for 30 years, appearing 300 times in 10 roles from 1931 until 1960. Her most frequent performances were as Lucia (93 performances), Lakmé (50 performances), Gilda in Verdi's Rigoletto (49 performances), and Rosina in Rossini's The Barber of Seville (33 performances). She drew a record crowd of over 300,000 to Chicago's Grant Park Music Festival in 1939 for a free concert.
In 1944, during World War II, Pons cancelled her fall and winter season in New York and instead toured with the USO, entertaining troops with her singing. Her husband Andre Kostelanetz directed a band composed of American soldiers as accompaniment to her voice. The pair performed at military bases in North Africa, Italy, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, India, and Burma in 1944. In places, the heat of the sun at the outdoor performances was so overbearing that Pons, always wearing a strapless evening gown, held wet towels to her head between numbers.
In 1945, the tour continued through China, Belgium, France, and Germany in a performance near the front lines. Returning home, she toured the U.S., breaking attendance records in cities such as Milwaukee at which 30,000 attended her performance on July 20, 1945. That same month, she also played Mexico City, directed by Gaetano Merola.
Other roles in her repertoire included Olympia in Jacques Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann, Philine in Ambroise Thomas's Mignon, Amina in Vincenzo Bellini's La sonnambula, Marie in Donizetti's The Daughter of the Regiment, the title role in Delibes's Lakmé, the Queen in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Golden Cockerel, and the title role in Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix, (a role she sang in the opera's Met premiere on March 1, 1934). The last major new role Pons performed (she learned the role during her first season at the Met) was Violetta in La traviata, which she sang at the San Francisco Opera. Another role Pons learned, but decided not to sing, was Melisande in Debussy's opera Pelléas et Melisande; the reason, as she confided in a later interview, was twofold: first, because she felt soprano Bidu Sayão owned the role; and secondly, because the tessitura lay mainly in the middle register of the soprano voice rather than in the higher register. In her last performance at the Met, on December 14, 1960, she sang "Caro nome" from Rigoletto as part of a gala performance.
She also made guest appearances at the Opéra Garnier in Paris, Royal Opera House in London, La Monnaie in Brussels, Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, and the Chicago Opera. Her final opera appearance was as Lucia to the Edgardo of 21-year-old Plácido Domingo in 1962 at the Fort Worth Opera. On February 11, 1960, Pons appeared on NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford.
Although Pons continued to sing concerts after she retired, her greatest acclaim occurred in May 1972, when the news media announced that she would emerge from retirement to sing a concert at Lincoln Center under the baton of Andre Kostelanetz, her former husband. All tickets to the concert were sold within an hour of their availability. The program of the historic concert, which took place on Wednesday evening, May 31, 1972, did not include any of the coloratura arias which Pons sang in her prime, but did include ones more suited to her range at age 74. As she often did in earlier concerts, she included “Estrellita” among the songs in her program, and received a prolonged ovation after the concluding note.
She starred in three RKO films: I Dream Too Much (1935) with Henry Fonda, That Girl from Paris (1936), and Hitting a New High (1937). She also performed an aria in the 1947 film Carnegie Hall.
She died of pancreatic cancer in Dallas, Texas, at the age of 77. Her remains were brought back to her birthplace to be interred in the Cimetière du Grand Jas in Cannes. Her only direct living relative, her nephew, John de Bry (son of her sister, Juliette Pons), is an archaeologist living in Florida.
Biography From Wikipedia
More about Irving Berlin:
With a life that spanned more than 100 years and a catalogue that boasted over 1,000 songs, Irving Berlin epitomized Jerome Kern's famous maxim that "Irving Berlin has no place in American music - he is American music."
Irving Berlin was born Israel Beilin on May 11, 1888. One of eight children, his exact place of birth is unknown, although his family had been living in Tolochin, Byelorussia, when they immigrated to New York in 1893. When his father died, Berlin, just turned 13, took to the streets in various odd jobs, working as a busker singing for pennies, then as a singing waiter in a Chinatown Cafe. In 1907 he published his first song, "Marie from Sunny Italy," and by 1911 he had his first major international hit "Alexander's Ragtime Band."
Over the next five decades, Irving Berlin produced an outpouring of ballads, dance numbers, novelty tunes and love songs that defined American popular song for much of the century. A sampling of just some of the Irving Berlin standards includes "How Deep Is The Ocean," "Blue Skies," "White Christmas," "Always," "Anything You Can Do," "There's No Business Like Show Business," "Cheek To Cheek," "Puttin' On The Ritz," "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody," "Heat Wave," "Oh! How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning," "Easter Parade" and "Let's Face The Music And Dance." In a class by itself is his beloved paean to his beloved country, "God Bless America."
He was equally at home writing for Broadway and Hollywood. He wrote seventeen complete scores for Broadway musicals and revues, and contributed material to six more. Among the shows featuring all-Berlin scores were The Cocoanuts, As Thousands Cheer, Louisiana Purchase, This Is The Army, Miss Liberty, Mr. President, Call Me Madam and the phenomenally successful Annie Get Your Gun. Recent musicals culled from his screen work include Irving Berlin's White Christmas (Broadway, across the USA, Canada and Great Britain), and Top Hat,  winner of the 2013 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical.
Among the Hollywood movie musical classics with scores by Irving Berlin are Top Hat, Follow The Fleet, On The Avenue, Alexander's Ragtime Band, Holiday Inn, Blue Skies, Easter Parade, White Christmas and There's No Business Like Show Business.
His songs have provided memorable moments in dozens of other films as wide apart in space and time as The Jazz Singer (1927), Home Alone (1991) and Titanic (1997) to The Simpsons (2006), Spider Man 3 (2007) and Downton Abbey (2011). Among his many awards are a special Tony Award (1963) and the Academy Award for Best Song of the Year for "White Christmas" in 1942.
An intuitive business man, Irving Berlin was a co-founder of ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), founder of his own music publishing company, and with producer Sam Harris, builder of his own Broadway theatre, The Music Box. An unabashed patriot, his love for - and generosity to - his country is legendary, exemplified by his establishing The God Bless America Fund, which receives all income from his patriotic songs and distributes it to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.
His actions were acknowledged with such accolades as the Army's Medal of Merit from President Truman in 1945; a Congressional Gold Medal for "God Bless America" and other patriotic songs from President Eisenhower in 1954; and the Freedom Medal from President Ford in 1977. In 2002, the U.S. Army at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, named the Army Entertainment Division (AED) World Headquarters "The Irving Berlin Center" in his honor. Also that year he was commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp.
Irving Berlin's centennial in 1988 was celebrated worldwide, culminating in an all-star tribute at Carnegie Hall benefitting the Hall and ASCAP, subsequently an Emmy Award winning special on CBS, and featuring such varied luminaries of the musical world as Frank Sinatra, Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, Natalie Cole and Willie Nelson.
On September 22, 1989, at the age of 101, Irving Berlin died in his sleep in his town house in New York City. A widower since his wife of 62 years, the former Ellin Mackay, had died the previous year at the age of 85, Berlin was survived by three daughters and their families at the time of his death.
Biography From IrvingBerlin.com