The part, based on the mother of legendary burlesque entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee, was created by Ethel Merman in Jerome Robbins' original 1959 production. Countless actresses have stepped into her ...

Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, Ethel Merman, Denzel Washington, David Letterman and so many more performed will be a memory. Decades of memories, just gone, brushed aside into piles of trash.

I wistfully reflected on the broken-doll quality that Bernadette Peters brought to a character formed in the battleship mode of Ethel Merman, the original Rose. As soon as the orchestra began ...

In "Call Me Madam," the 1953 movie version of Irving Berlin's hit musical, it was no secret that Ethel Merman was channeling a real person – a wealthy widow by the name of Perle Mesta ...

Characteristically, Mesta embraced the production and befriended its star, Ethel Merman. Renowned for her lavish bipartisan shindigs, Mesta was more than Washington’s premiere party giver.

She’s been taken on by Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury ... letting McDonald hold sway until he’s abruptly yelling at someone. The pair have a warm chemistry together wherever they go.

“I tried to sound like Gene Pitney,” she said in her Edith Bunker-like Queens, Noo Yawk, accent, “and I sounded like Ethel Merman.” She reprised that 1960s song, Pitney’s “I’m Gonna ...

First portrayed by Ethel Merman, she is to that genre’s actresses what Hamlet and Lear are to Shakespearean actors, a sky-scraping, Himalayan peak. As Arthur Laurents, who wrote the show’s ...

Ethel Merman was the most important musical theatre star who ever took to the stage. A powerful woman in an era when women were not supposed to be powerful, her strength informed her work and her art.

LOS ANGELES — Actress Rita McKenzie, who starred in the longest one-woman show in theatrical history when she appeared in “Ethel Merman’s Broadway,” died Saturday. She was 76. McKenzie ...