Charles Busch and the Opening Number Cast for the 2006 New York Innovative Theatre Awards

Charles Busch (born August 23, 1954) is an American actor and writer who has appeared in many off-Broadway productions. Image File history File linksMetadata No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File linksMetadata No higher resolution available. ... The New York Innovative Theatre Awards (IT Awards) are presented annually and were founded to honor excellence in Off-Off-Broadway Theatre and to help nuture the Off-Off-Broadway community. ... August 23 is the 235th day of the year (236th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1954 (MCMLIV) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Off-Broadway plays or musicals are performed in New York City in smaller theatres than Broadway, but larger than Off-Off-Broadway, productions. ...

Busch first came to prominence as both author and performer (as the leading lady, in drag) in plays that simultaneously sent up and celebrated classic film genres. These include Vampire Lesbians of Sodom (1984), Psycho Beach Party (1987), The Lady in Question (1989), and Red Scare on Sunset (1991). Less well-known are some earlier works in the same vein: Theodora, She-Bitch of Byzantium (1984), Sleeping Beauty, or Coma (1984) and Pardon My Inquisition, or Kiss the Blood Off My Castanets (1986). He revamped the book for the musical Ankles Aweigh for an 1989 production staged by the Goodspeed Opera House. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Original cast recording Ankles Aweigh is a musical with a book by Guy Bolton and Eddie Davis, lyrics by Dan Shapiro, and music by Sammy Fain. ... In 1959 an organization, the Goodspeed Musicals, was formed to restore the old Goodspeed Opera House, located in East Haddam, Connecticut, to its original Victorian appearance and elegance. ...

Busch's success in his own works led to his performance in a 1993 revival of Genet's The Maids. In 1994, he took the male lead in his comedy You Should Be So Lucky. Other works of the 1990s include his autobiographical one-man show Flipping My Wig (1996) and a serious valentine to melodrama Queen Amarantha (1997). His 1999 play Die, Mommie, Die! was performed in Los Angeles and was made into the 2003 feature film of the same name. Genet can refer to: Citizen Genêt (or Edmond-Charles Genêt) a French ambassador to the United States. ... Salacious Sinners The Maids is a play written by French writer Jean Genet. ... You Should Be So Lucky was a BBC childrens television programme broadcast during the 1980s. ... Die, Mommie, Die! is a 1999 comedic play written by Charles Busch. ...

Busch's film appearances include Addams Family Values (1993), It Could Happen to You (1994) and Trouble on the Corner (1997). Busch has twice appeared in film versions of his own plays: 2000's Psycho Beach Party (with Lauren Ambrose playing the Gidget role Busch originated onstage and Busch playing the new part of the policewoman trying to solve the mystery) and Die, Mommie, Die!, for which he won a Sundance Special Performance Award. Addams Family Values (1993) is an Academy Award-nominated sequel to the 1991 comedy The Addams Family. ... It Could Happen to You is a 1994 film starring Nicholas Cage and Bridget Fonda. ... Psycho Beach Party is a 2000 film based on the off-Broadway play of the same name, directed by Robert Lee King. ... Lauren Ambrose Lauren Ambrose (born Lauren Anne DAmbruoso, 20 February 1978) is an American film and television actor, best known for portraying the character Claire Fisher on the popular HBO drama Six Feet Under. ... Die, Mommie, Die! is a 1999 comedic play written by Charles Busch. ... The Sundance Film Festival is a film festival in the United States, and ranks alongside the Cannes, France, Venice, Italy, Berlin, Germany, and Toronto, Canada festivals as one of the most prestigious in the world. ...

In 2000, Busch's work debuted on Broadway, when The Tale of the Allergist's Wife opened following an earlier off-Broadway. The play, his first in which he did not star and the first created for a mainstream audience, was written as a vehicle for actress Linda Lavin, who played opposite Michele Lee and Tony Roberts. Allergist's Wife received a 2001 Tony Award nomination for Best Play and ran for 777 performances. Late in the run, Valerie Harper and Richard Kind took over the lead roles. His only other Broadway work to date has been as the rewritten book for Boy George's autobiographical musical Taboo, which lasted 100 performances. Broadway theatre[1] is the most prestigious form of professional theatre in the U.S., as well as the most well known to the general public and most lucrative for the performers, technicians and others involved in putting on the shows. ... The Tale of the Allergists Wife is a play by Charles Busch. ... Linda Lavin as Alice Hyatt on Alice. ... Michele Lee (born on June 24, 1942) is an American singer, dancer, actress, producer, director and frequent game show panelist of the 1970s who is of Russian-Polish descent is best-known for her role as the beloved matriarch Karen Cooper Fairgate MacKenzie on the 1980s prime-time soap opera... Anthony (Tony) Roberts (born August 4, 1969) is a professional Welsh football player. ... What is popularly called the Tony Award (formally, the Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre) is an annual award celebrating achievements in live American theater, including musical theater, primarily honoring productions on Broadway in New York. ... Image:Muppetsplits. ... Richard Kind (b. ... George Alan ODowd, better known as Boy George (born June 14, 1961 in Eltham, Kent) is a pop singer-songwriter. ... This article is about cultural prohibitions in general, for other uses, see Taboo (disambiguation). ...

Since 2000, Busch has performed an annual one-night-only staged reading of his 1984 Christmas play Times Square Angel. In 2003, he headlined a revival of his 1999 play Shanghai Moon (costarring B. D. Wong). He has taken the eponymous lead in three productions of Auntie Mame, two of them all-star staged readings (fall 1998 and 2003) and one a scaled-down summer touring production (2004). Bradley Darryl Wong (Simplified Chinese: ; Traditional Chinese: ; Hanyu Pinyin: ; Jyutping: Wong4 Wing4 Leung6) (born October 24, 1960) is an American actor. ... Broadway poster Auntie Mame is a 1955 novel by Patrick Dennis that chronicles his madcap adventures growing up as the ward of his deceased fathers eccentric sister. ...

Our Leading Lady, Busch's play about Laura Keene, the nineteenth-century actress who starred in the production of Our American Cousin that Abraham Lincoln attended the night he was assassinated in Ford's Theatre, is scheduled to premiere in New York during the 2006-2007 season of the Manhattan Theater Club. Laura Keene (c. ... Our American Cousin is a play in three acts by Tom Taylor. ... For other uses, see Abraham Lincoln (disambiguation). ... Fords Theatre at 511 10th Street, NW, Washington, D.C. is an active theater in Washington DC, United States, used for various performances. ...

On TV, Busch has played the characters of Peg Barlow on One Life to Live and, in his best-known role to mainstream audiences, crossdressing inmate Nat Ginzburg in the third and fourth seasons of Oz. One Life to Live (OLTL) is an American soap opera which has been broadcast on the ABC television network since July 15, 1968. ... Oz is the first one-hour dramatic television series to be produced by HBO. The show, which aired for six seasons (1997-2003), was created by Tom Fontana and produced by Barry Levinson. ...

Busch is the author of the 1995 novel Whores of Lost Atlantis, a fictionalized re-telling of the creation of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.

External links

• Charles Busch's website
• Charles Busch (I) at the Internet Movie Database