West Side Story Playwright Dead at 93

He should know ... he wrote them

(NEWSER) - When Stephen Sondheim thinks about the lyrics he wrote for West Side Story—for example, “It’s alarming how charming I feel”—he likes to “put my head under my wing and pretend I’m not there,” he tells Nightline . The universally beloved musical “embarrasses me,” he says. “It's very hard for me to listen to some of those songs,” which he wrote in his early twenties. “I don't mean that they are terrible,” he adds of the lyrics, “I just mean they're so self-conscious.” More»

Joseph Stein penned hit Broadway musicals over 60-year career

(NEWSER) - Joseph Stein, the playwright best known for turning Fiddler On the Roof from a Yiddish short story into a Broadway musical, has died at the age of 98. The Tony Award-winning writer supplied the story for almost a dozen more musicals, including Zorba and Take Me Along, in a career that began in 1948 and lasted well into his '90s, AP reports. More»

'Stormy Weather' great broke ground for African Americans

(NEWSER) - Lena Horne, the legendary singer who broke new ground for African-Americans in Hollywood, has died at the age of 92. Best known for the song "Stormy Weather," the jazz vocalist won accolades as a cabaret and Broadway performer. Horne got her start in 1933 as a teenage chorus girl at the legendary Cotton Club in Harlem; she was such a sensation that she later became the first African-American signed to long-term Hollywood contract, the LA Times reports. More»

(NEWSER) - John Forsythe, a versatile actor who gained lasting fame as Blake Carrington on the pioneering prime-time soap Dynasty and as the voice of the mysterious Charlie on Charlie's Angels, died yesterday in California. He was 92. Best known at the time as the affable star of Bachelor Father, Forsythe played a villainous judge in the 1979 Al Pacino vehicle And Justice for All, demonstrating he had the chops to channel the scheming Blake Carrington. More»

Violates playwright Wilson's wishes

(NEWSER) - The selection of a white director for the Broadway revival of an August Wilson play has sparked racial tension, the New York Times reports. Before his death in 2005, Wilson refused to let white directors oversee productions of his work, partially out of racial solidarity, partially because he felt black directors best understood his characters. Lincoln Center's choice of Bartlett Sher for Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, though approved by Wilson’s widow, was called "straight up institutional racism” by one black director. More»