THEATRE

GINGER ROGERS, the Academy Award winning screen legend from the films 42nd Street, Top Hat, The Gay Divorcee and dozens more, would have been 100 this year. She will be celebrated with a live performance and an exhibition of her archive and memorabilia created as a tribute to her life and career as one of America’s most luminescent and talented motion picture actresses. The special exhibition opens at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center on Monday, October 24. Hosted by Nick Clooney, the event will feature an appearance by special guest Angela Lansbury. The live performances will debut at the Tsai Performance Center (October 24) in Boston and the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline (October 25).

The items shown in the exhibition are exclusive, and the show is being written especially for the event – containing stories and music about and by Ginger. It paints a portrait of this incredible Oscar winning actress, dancer, comedienne, artist, and singer who was a cosmopolitan woman, leading the way in a career in motion pictures, as well as in her personal life.

This exclusive engagement (in Boston in October, and NYC in early 2012) will include not only the songs written especially for her by Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Jerome Kern, and many more – but it will tell stories from her life that have never been heard, contain songs that she wrote, and share moments kept in diaries by her very creative writer/mother Lela. Some of the film clips will include her fantastic dancing, her Oscar winning performance in Kitty Foyle, her creation of the character Roxie Hart (that was to become the basis for the musical Chicago) and her comic turns with Cary Grant.

Hosted by famed film historian Nick Clooney and starring the wonderful singer and actress Karen Oberlin backed by a fine quartet of musicians – this show will be a first for the nation in 2011. Also at each performance, a special invited guest star will appear to reminisce about Ginger’s importance to American film, and to American society.