Theatre Register

Desi Arnaz

Shows · Desi Arnaz

Actor 1917–1986 On stage 1939

Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III (March 2, 1917 – December 2, 1986), known as Desi Arnaz, was a Cuban-American actor, musician, producer, and bandleader. He played Ricky Ricardo on the American television sitcom I Love Lucy, in which he co-starred with his wife Lucille Ball. Arnaz and Ball are credited as the innovators of the syndicated rerun, which they pioneered with the I Love Lucy series. Arnaz and Lucille Ball co-founded and ran the television production company Desilu Productions, originally to market I Love Lucy to television networks. After I Love Lucy ended, Arnaz went on to produce several other television series, at first with Desilu Productions, and later independently, inc…

On stage 1 production

1939 Too Many Girls Imperial Theatre · Original · directed by George Abbott 249 perf.

Each row is a staging this name appears in the cast list of, read from the production record rather than from the person record. The person record names works instead, and a work cannot say which run somebody was in — that is how Elaine Stritch ends up filed under Show Boat 1927 when she was in the 1994 revival. No row here says what part was played, because no cast list records it.

In the literature8 passages

  • Too Many Girls. Eddie Bracken and Hal LeRoy help and inebriated Desi Arnaz confront Marcy Wescott. (Vandamm)ebooks/Green, Stanley/Broadway Musicals, Show By Show - Seventh Edition - Stanley Green & Cary Ginell.txt
  • Cast: Marcy Wescott, Desi Arnaz, Hal LeRoy, Mary Jane Walsh, Diosa Costello, Richard Kollmar, Eddie Bracken, Leila Ernst, Van Johnsonebooks/Green, Stanley/Broadway Musicals, Show By Show - Seventh Edition - Stanley Green & Cary Ginell.txt
  • I n 1960 Lucille Ball was at a crossroads. Approaching fifty and in the process of divorcing Desi Arnaz, her husband of nineteen years, she believed she was through in television. “I will never do another TV series. It couldn’t top I Love Lucy , and I’d be foolish to try. In this business, you have to know when to get off.” (Of course, sh…ebooks/Hadleigh, Boze/Broadway Babylon - Boze Hadleigh.txt
  • Desi Arnaz eventually called the playwright to ask if he could send out two I Love Lucy writers to add material? Nash acquiesced, but the new material didn’t work. “Michael [Kidd] and I went backstage [afterward] and said, ‘It’s a different medium, Lucy’ … She took all the lines out instantly. That was a bad shock for her. In television,…ebooks/Hadleigh, Boze/Broadway Babylon - Boze Hadleigh.txt
  • Meanwhile, the musicians’ union demanded that its members be paid during the layoff. Desi Arnaz refused to pay the salaries and the theater’s rental while Ball was away. So Wildcat shut down for good and the redhead’s theatrical career was over, though she later considered a straight play based on James Kirkwood’s semi-autobiographical no…ebooks/Hadleigh, Boze/Broadway Babylon - Boze Hadleigh.txt
  • Too Many Girls by Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, with (1. to r.) Eddie Bracken, Desi Arnaz, Hal LeRoy, and Marcy Westcott. New York, Imperial Theatre, 1939. [Photograph by Vandamm. Theatre Collection, The New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations]theatre-pdfs/McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama, v. 4 (O-S).txt

Passages naming this person, found by keyword across 178 books. A keyword match is not a biography, and a common name will pull in the wrong one.

What this page does not know

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