travsd

Houdini Tonight!

Far be it from me to turn this blog into TV Guide, but sometimes I just gotta alert the public to developments of vaudevillian interest! Tonight at 10pm (EST) TCM is showing one of my favorite childhood movies, the George Pal produced 1953 Houdini bio-pic starring Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh.

Like most Hollywood bio-pics this one is light on facts, and is often downright misleading, but somehow captures both the soul of its subject and his milieu. As the poster implies, the heart of the picture is the love story between Houdini and his beloved Bess, nicely playing off of Curtis and Leigh’s real life off screen marriage. I was about to call it a magical picture, but just stopped myself. But you know what? It is, so never mind!

ALERT! This movie is NOT, repeat NOT currently Netflixable. So seize this rare opportunity to see it!

Published by travsd

Writer and performer Trav S.D. (www.travsd.com) is best known for his books "No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous" (2005) and "Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube" (2013). He has written for the NY Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out NY, Reason, the Villager and numerous other publications. Trav has been in the vanguard of New York’s vaudeville and burlesque scenes since 1995 when he launched his company Mountebanks, presenting hundreds of acts ranging from Todd Robbins to Dirty Martini to Tammy Faye Starlite to the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He has directed his own plays, revues and solo pieces at such venues as Joe’s Pub, La Mama, HERE, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, the Ohio Theatre, the Brick, and 6 separate shows in the NY International Fringe Festival. In 2014 he produced and directed the smash-hit "I’ll Say She Is", the first ever revival of the Marx Brothers hit 1924 Broadway show in the NY International Fringe Festival.

2 comments

Leave a Reply

Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.