#basil sydney

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Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) Gabriel Pascal

March 9th 2025

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Basil Sydney

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Ivanhoe 1952

Based on the 1819 novel by Sir Walter Scott.

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still image of Basil Sydney and Doris Keane in the 1920 film drama, Romance

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SANDRO BOTTICELLI

March 26, 1923

Sandro Botticelli is a three act play written by Mercedes De Acosta produced by Players Company Inc. at Provincetown Playhouse. It opened on March 26, 1923 and played 24 performances starring Eva Le Gallienne and Basil Sydney in the title role. 

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (1445–1510) known as Sandro Botticelli was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici. He painted a wide range of religious subjects and also some portraits. Botticelli's best-known works are The Birth of Venus (above) and Primavera. He lived all his life in the same neighborhood of Florence.

SYNOPSIS

AUTHOR

Mercedes De Acosta (1892-1968) wrote almost a dozen plays, only four of which were produced, and only two on Broadway. She also published a novel and three volumes of poetry. She was known for her many lesbian relationships with famous Broadway and Hollywood personalities and numerous friendships with prominent artists of the period. She became involved in a five-year relationship with actress Eva Le Gallienne and wrote two plays for her, Sandro Botticelli and Jehanne de Arc. After the financial failures of both plays they ended their relationship. Ill and needing money, she wrote her memoirs in 1960.  Le Gallienne was furious, denouncing de Acosta as a liar and stating that she invented the stories for fame. Despite this, many of her affairs and relationships with women, including that with Le Gallienne, are confirmed in personal correspondence.

CAST

Eva Le Gallienne (1899-1991) as Simonette Vespucci.  A Broadway star by age 21, Le Gallienne ended her work on Broadway to devote herself to founding the Civic Repertory Theatre, in which she was both director, producer, and lead actress. She became a pioneering figure in the American Repertory Movement, a forerunner to today's Off-Broadway. A versatile and eloquent actress herself playing everything from Peter Pan to Hamlet, Le Gallienne also became a respected stage coach, director, producer and manager.

Basil Sydney (1894-1968) as Sandro Botticelli.  Sydney made his name in the London stage hit Romance opposite the play's Broadway star Doris Keane, and costarred with Keane in the 1920 silent film of the play. The couple married in 1918, and when Keane revived Romance in New York in 1921, Sydney made his Broadway debut in the parts. He stayed in New York for over a decade.  He made over fifty screen appearances, most memorably as Claudius in Laurence Olivier's 1948 film of Hamlet.

CRITIQUE

~ Theatre Magazine, Volume 37

VENUE

Provincetown Playhouse (133 MacDougal Street) is named for the Provincetown Players, who converted the former bottling plant into a theater in 1918. The Players were formed while vacationing in Provincetown, Mass. The original Players were Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Djuna Barnes.  The building was extensively renovated in 1940 when it became designated as an Off-Broadway rather than a Broadway theatre.  The Playhouse’s longest-running play was the five-year run of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom (1985-1990) by Charles Busch, which was also its last major production before being shut down for many years, needing building code upgrades.  From 1998 until the present, the Playhouse has primarily been used by New York University's Educational Theatre department. In the Fall of 2008, however, the original Playhouse structure was torn down to make way for office space for the university's law school, citing that the original building's foundation (built in the 1840s) was structurally unsound to build upon. The university promised a new theatre in the same air space as the original and construction was completed by the fall of 2010. The space was then returned for use by the University's Educational Theatre program. 

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Laurence Olivier and Basil Sydney in Hamlet, 1948

The Academy Awards, a pictorial history by Paul Michael, 1964

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'The Devil's Disciple' – Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in the American Revolution on Prime Video

Friends and frequent costars Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas reunited for their collaboration in The Devil’s Disciple (1959). Set during the American Revolution and adapted from the play by George Bernard Shaw, it’s an odd kind of American-British co-production: produced by Lancaster’s production company, directed by British filmmaker Guy Hamilton (who replaced Alexander Mackendrick), set in…

'The Devil's Disciple' – Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in the American Revolution on Prime Video