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Shirley
Booth (1898-1992) initially gained notice by
appearing in Dorothy Parker's "Sunday Nights at
Nine" sketches at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel, in exchange for
room and breakfast, and after this made her Broadway debut in a play
called Hell's Bells (1925), alongside Humphrey Bogart.
After that, she went on to have a long, full career, and became
quite praised for the wonderful roles she played in such comedies as
Three Men on a Horse (1935), The Philadelphia Story
(1939), My Sister Eileen (1940), and The Desk Set (1955).
Along the way she was also a three-time recipient of the Tony Award,
for Goodbye, My Fancy (1949), Come Back, Little
Sheba (1950), and The Time of the Cuckoo (1953).
Her first appearance in a musical comedy was as gossip columnist
Louhedda Hoppsons (a.k.a. "Little Butter-Up") in George S.
Kaufman's Hollywood Pinafore (1945), an adaptation of
Gilbert & Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore. From there,
we got her in George Abbott's production of A Tree Grows in
Brooklyn (1951), By the Beautiful Sea (1954), and as a
nun in Look to the Lillies (1970), a flop which
featured her singing Jule Styne songs that had originally been
intended for Ethel Merman! Of
course, Booth was no stranger to drama, either, and aside from Sheba,
arguably, she gave the greatest performance of her career in Marc
Blizstein's Juno (1958), a powerful musical based on Sean
O'Casey's Irish tragedy Juno and the Paycock, which was
(unfortunately) not a success. |
