Nice early Jeanette MacDonald photo on Flickr
Someone posted this early shot of Jeanette MacDonald – lovely – but not 1933. I believe the correct year is 1930.
Someone posted this early shot of Jeanette MacDonald – lovely – but not 1933. I believe the correct year is 1930.
A picture from the Roman Catholic Parishes of Bluewater.
We think Nelson Eddy did more for the popularity of Canada’s police uniform than any other publicity they could have come up with! Rock on, Nelson!
The latest CD is JN143: Radio Promotions #2. This includes 5 radio shows, about 15 minutes each, for the following films: Rosalie, The Girl of the Golden West, Let Freedom Ring, Balalaika and I Married an Angel.
One of my constant and mostly happy memories of childhood center around the family being together, relatively peaceful, and listening to music. My mom loved Jeanette MacDonald films and Nelson Eddy films and so we would traipse to the Vanguard theater, or the vintage theater to see their films. Now every time I see or hear one of their many wonderful lush melodies, I have to say, I get a little misty-eyed.
These excerpts from Smiling Through, one of my mommas favorite songs, and the ending of the fabulous “Maytime”, with their reunion.
Link – also click onto her favorite film clips as she has included some Mac/Eddy films
Every President in U.S. history can be tied to Los Angeles. For each one that you think is too much of a stretch, take a shot. For each historical inaccuracy, take two.
Let’s begin…
George Washington (1) has a statue here, in Civic Center Park, presented by the citizens of Los Angeles School Children Women’s Community Service Auxiliary of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.
One of the oldest middle schools in Los Angeles is named after John Adams (2). They sometimes call it “JAMS.”
Jane Floyd, retired black teacher from L.A., is said to be a great-great granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson (3).
James Madison (4) High School was at the heart of a debate over the control of large secondary schools in the LAUSD.
The students of James Monroe (5) High School once tried to change the name to Marilyn Monroe High, because they thought it would be more relevant using a modern era person instead of a President no one knows much about. Apparently, the Monroe Doctrine isn’t in the curriculum.
Actress Mary Kay Adams is a direct descendent of John Quincy Adams (6), who just happens to be the first president to have his photograph taken.
In 2008, the Center Theatre Group gave birth to a new rock musical revolution, with Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (7).
One of Martin Van Buren’s (8) most famous descendants is singer Nelson Eddy, who has 3 stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame…
Actually, a careful study of the Van Buren family tree shows that President Martin Van Buren was related to Cornelis Maessen (Van Buren) while Nelson’s great-great-aunt Belinda Sophia Van Buren was related to Johannes Van Buren – a different family tree. For details, read the extensive articles with documentation regarding both Nelson’s and Jeanette’s genealogies in Mac/Eddy Today, Volume 68!
3/6/1933 Hollywood Citizen News Elizabeth Yeaman
Maiden Cruise, the big musical picture scheduled at Radio Pictures studio, underwent a change of cast today. Ben Lyon, who was scheduled for the leading male role, will not be seen in the picture. He was loaned by MGM. And Dorothy Jordan, now free-lancing, also is out of the cast.
Helen Mack, little auburn-haired ingenue who was at Fox under contract for a time, has been given the feminine lead. This is the biggest break that she has had since coming to Hollywood. She both dances and sings and these talents are requirements for her role.
Although no one is definitely set for the male lead replacing Ben Lyon, there is talk about signing a young concert singer by the name of Nelson Eddy. Eddy has never made a picture. Mark Sandrich is to direct the picture and Chic Chandler will have the comedy lead. According to the schedule now mapped out, the picture is due to go before the cameras day after tomorrow.
In what is now one of the trendier areas of London, a large flat above an electrical shop at No. 292, Westbourne Grove was my early childhood home in the 1940’s. Even back then, a stone’s throw from Notting Hill Gate and close by the antiques and fruit & veg markets of Portobello Road, it had a lively and eccentric atmosphere.
Streets were gap-toothed from the bombing, the old mews passages behind tall, shabby Victorian terraces were still cobbled and lived in by working people. Opposite us, at No.297, my aunts lived above their hairdresser’s shop; I would go to ‘work’ there aged about six, in a small pink overall (cut down by Mum), sweeping up hair from the floor, handing pins to the stylists, chatting with ladies who were wired up to permanent waving machines like strange hydras.
In their large premises over the road, the Jones family sold antiques or, more accurately, second-hand goods; clever at business, they would go on to make a fortune by being in exactly the right place when the trade took off in the sixties and the sweet times started. Years later, Mr. Jones pulled up by a bus stop where I was queueing and whisked me home in a gleaming Rolls Royce…The walk to school in Chepstow Villas took me past Henekey’s pub where the aforesaid Uncle swore that he had seen my Mother Superior dancing on the table with a pint of Guinness. I half believed him. Sam, another uncle, once told me as a joke that his job entailed knitting barbed wire, this I reported as interesting to my friends and suffered the full fallout. I was a gullible child.
Further up the Grove was the Roxy Cinema, a flea-pit really, where Mum took me to my first film – Nelson Eddy (wearing lipstick) & Jeanette MacDonald in Rose Marie. I couldn’t get over the wonderment of it. More wonderful still was to be my first local and very tentative contact with the theatre.
I was watching film clips from Jeanette Macdonald and Nelson Eddy films, which are some of my favorite musicals. They are so different from the other MGM musicals, and I love that. But it makes me sad that they aren’t on DVD yet. I often check what classic films are coming on to DVD, and I keep feeling that lots of crap movies, or just more of the same kind of classic films are being released onto DVD. Maybe it’s just because some of my favorite films have yet to be released (I demand a Greer Garson Film collection!), but I am so frustrated with the selections of classic films that are becoming DVDs.
Glenda Korella has done it again. The effervescent director of the Peninsula Singers has stitched together an action-packed, upbeat and altogether inspiring selection of music for Get Happy featuring A Salute to Canada. The spring concert series of the 55-voice show chorus’s will run April 25, 26 and 27 at Mary Winspear Centre in Sidney.
It’s the kind of feel-good show you expect from Korella, a mother of three, and grandmother of nine, who once conducted a 200-voice glee club in Calgary. Luckily for the Peninsula Singers, she moved to Dean Park several years ago, where she teaches piano and voice when she’s not directing the chorus The choir’s president, Lynda Spence, says Korella’s “joie de vivre, musicianship and boundless creativity spurs the choir on to greater professional heights every year.”
If you are attending for the first time, be warned. This is a choir that delights in surprising its audience with plenty of humour, lots of props and vocal and musical ensembles drawn from the chorus.
During the second half of the show you might encounter native chanting and a voyageur or two, not to mention Nelson Eddie and Jeanette MacDonald from the movie Rose Marie. You’ll also meet the Homemade Jam band complete with fiddle, banjo, guitar and washtub bass…
“How did Natoma Avenue get its name?”
by Abby Lindros
This street, near Santa Barbara’s West Beach, is named after what has been called the “first American grand opera.” In 1909, composer Victor Herbert approached San Francisco attorney Joseph Redding to come up with a theme for a new opera. The result was Natoma: The Maid from the Mountains, an opera in three acts set in Santa Barbara in the early 1800s, when Alta California was under Spanish governance.
Victor Herbert, an Irish native, became one of this country’s greatest composers of light operas. His best-known works were Babes in Toyland, made famous by a film version with Laurel and Hardy, and Naughty Marietta, the movie that made stars out of the romantic duo of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald.
Link to the rest of the article