Broadway

Helen Kardon Moss of Center City, a singer who performed on operatic stages, on Broadway, and in area clubs, died of a Parkinson's related illness at Penn Hospice Rittenhouse on Wednesday, Dec. 26, her 81st birthday. As a young woman, Mrs. Moss performed as a soprano with the New York City Opera Company and the San Francisco Opera Company. Her repertoire for most of her career, though, was the Great American Songbook. "I'm fortunate enough to have a background in many musical forms," she said in a 1994 Inquirer article.

The story of Dr. Jekyll and his evil alter-ego, Mr. Hyde, is legendary: Desperate to save his comatose father by curing the evil that lurks in the human soul and causes illness, the good doctor makes a mess of things and succumbs to madness himself. Constantine Maroulis' life story may lack the dire drama of Jekyll's, but his family history has shaped Maroulis' approach to playing the dichotomous doctor. Maroulis, a former American Idol contestant, stars in the revival of the musical tragedy Jekyll & Hyde , a late-'90s Broadway smash by songwriter Frank Wildhorn and lyricist/author Leslie Bricusse that hits the Forrest Theatre for a five-day run starting Wednesday.

Martin Richards, 80, the Tony-winning producer behind such Broadway hits as On the Twentieth Century, Sweeney Todd, and The Will Rogers Follies, as well as an Academy Award-winning producer of the film Chicago, has died after battling cancer, his publicist said Tuesday. Publicist Judy Jacksina said Mr. Richards died Monday. The marquees of Broadway theaters were dimmed in his memory Tuesday. His shows won 36 Tonys during his five decades in the theater. In addition to his stage work, he was the producer of the original Chicago on Broadway and went on to win an Oscar for producing the film version in 2003.

It was a Ford Econoline Van, the flat-front version. Alki Steriopoulos was 20, driving that van. Full tank, empty head. That empty head cobwebbed with fatigue, because it was New Year's Day and he'd been up all night playing piano in a band, then partying with a girl he'd met that night, then scrambling into that van to drive from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis and another gig. Came within inches of driving that van into the back end of a gasoline tanker...

THEATER 'Horse' gallops into Philly "War Horse," one of the most honored dramas in recent Broadway history and a hit film last year, debuts locally Tuesday at the Academy of Music. The multiple Tony-winning show tells the story of how a young boy's horse wound up in combat during World War I, and the boy's journey to the front to save his beloved companion. Puppets - which won their own Tony - play the horses. Academy of Music, Broad and Locust streets, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday, Saturday, $100-$20, 215-893-1999, kimmelcenter.org/broadway.

I couldn't help but think of an ATF agent named Peter Forcelli while I watched the super-charged Broadway revival of An Enemy of the People , Henrik Ibsen's play about a man who tries to do the right thing and makes the awful discovery that in his Norwegian town, money is the root of all truth. The man is a whistleblower, and is reviled by everyone for the message he delivers: The water in the town's spas - its lifeblood - has become toxic. Ibsen's play, which opened in a production Thursday night by Manhattan Theatre Club at its Friedman Theatre, remains urgent 130 years after he wrote it, and too bad for us. Peter Forcelli is a whistleblower who made news this summer when he settled, for an untold sum of money, with the bureau that employed him and whose officials assassinated his character because he told Congress about a mismanaged project in which 2,000 or so guns disappeared.

Albert Marre, 87, the Tony Award-winning director of the original Broadway production of Man of La Mancha - and three of its four Broadway revivals - died Sept. 4 in Manhattan, said his wife, Mimi Turque Marre. Mr. Marre directed or staged more than two dozen Broadway shows during his more than 50 years in theater, among them the musicals Kismet and Milk and Honey. But it was Man of La Mancha , the musical adaptation of Don Quixote (written by Dale Wasserman, with lyrics by Joe Darion and music by Mitch Leigh)

In the new musical Chaplin , which is every bit as entertaining as Charlie Chaplin himself, Rob McClure portrays the film genius with an irresistible sweetness, like candy you can't - and don't want to - stop eating. In that, of course, he mirrors the Chaplin film persona perfectly. And so does the show, which itself comes off looking like a movie from the pre-talkie years. Most of the evening is costumed by Amy Clark and the late Broadway designer Martin Pakledinaz, in remarkably varied shades of black, white and gray.

Joan Roberts, 95, who created the role of the winsome "yeller"-haired heroine, Laurey, in the original Broadway production of Oklahoma! , died Monday in Stamford, Conn. Her death was announced by the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization. One of the last living members of the musical's original cast, Ms. Roberts had lived for many years in Rockville Centre, N.Y. Oklahoma! , which opened in 1943, was Ms. Roberts' second Broadway show. Oklahoma! ran for 2,212 performances and became a benchmark by which later musicals would be judged.

LOS ANGELES - Gore Vidal, 86, the iconoclastic author, savvy analyst, and glorious gadfly, died Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills from complications of pneumonia, his nephew Burr Steers said. Impossible to categorize, Mr. Vidal was a literary juggernaut who wrote 25 novels and volumes of essays that critics consider among the most elegant in the English language. He wrote Broadway hits, Hollywood screenplays, television dramas, and a trio of mysteries still in print after 50 years.