Rent is a rock musical with music, lyrics, and book by Jonathan Larson, loosely based on Giacomo Puccini's 1896 opera La Bohème. It tells the story of a group of impoverished young artists struggling to survive and create a life in Lower Manhattan's East Village in the thriving days of bohemian Alphabet City, under the shadow of HIV/AIDS.
Dame Joan Henrietta Collins is an English actress, author and columnist. Collins is the recipient of several accolades, including a Golden Globe Award, a People's Choice Award, two Soap Opera Digest Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. In 1983, she was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She has been recognised for her philanthropy, particularly her advocacy towards causes relating to children, which has earned her many honours. In 2015, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for her charitable services. In 2021 she celebrated her 70th year in the entertainment industry.
Philip David Charles Collins is an English drummer, singer-songwriter, record producer, and actor. He is best known for his tenure as the drummer and lead singer of the rock band Genesis and for his solo career which began in 1981. Between 1982 and 1990, Collins scored three UK and seven US number-one singles as a solo artist. When his work with Genesis, his work with other artists, as well as his solo career is totalled, he had more US top 40 singles than any other artist during the 1980s. His most successful singles from the period include "In the Air Tonight", "Against All Odds ", "One More Night", and "Another Day in Paradise".
Alan Sillitoe FRSL was an English writer and one of the so-called "angry young men" of the 1950s. He disliked the label, as did most of the other writers to whom it was applied. He is best known for his debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and his early short story "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", both of which were adapted into films.
John David Newcombe AO OBE is an Australian former professional tennis player. He is one of the few men to have attained a world No. 1 ranking in both singles and doubles. At the majors, he won seven singles titles, a former record 17 men's doubles titles, and two mixed doubles titles. He also contributed to five Davis Cup titles for Australia during an age when the Davis Cup was deemed as significant as the majors. Tennis magazine rated him the 10th best male player of the period 1965–2005.
William James Collins is an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As of 2020, he is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.
Thomas Michael Bond was a British author. He is best known for a series of fictional stories for children, featuring the character of Paddington Bear. More than 35 million Paddington books have been sold around the world, and the characters have also appeared in a popular film series and on television. His first book was published in 1958 and his last in 2017, a span of 59 years.
Floyd Collins is a musical with music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, and book by Tina Landau. The story is based on the death of Floyd Collins near Cave City, Kentucky in the winter of 1925. The musical opened Off-Broadway on February 9, 1996, where it ran for 25 performances. There have been subsequent London productions as well as regional U.S. productions.
Christopher Hibbert MC was an English author, historian and biographer. He has been called "a pearl of biographers" and "probably the most widely-read popular historian of our time and undoubtedly one of the most prolific". Hibbert was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of many books, including The Story of England, Disraeli, Edward VII, George IV, The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici, and Cavaliers and Roundheads.
Richard Wesley is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is an associate professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in the Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing.
The "Architects Sketch" is a Monty Python sketch, first seen in episode 17 of Monty Python's Flying Circus, "The Buzz Aldrin Show". The episode was recorded on 18 September 1970 and originally broadcast on 20 October 1970. The following year, an audio version was recorded for Another Monty Python Record.
Warwick Collins was a British novelist, screenwriter, yacht designer, and evolutionary theorist. Collins was born in Johannesburg to English-speaking parents. His father, Robin Collins, was a novelist who wrote under the nom-de-plume Robin Cranford. Robin Collins's novels were written from a liberal perspective and one of them, My City Fears Tomorrow, was banned by the South African apartheid regime. When Warwick Collins was eleven, his family moved to England, and Collins entered The King's School, Canterbury. He continued his education at the University of Sussex, where he read Biology. He lived for many years in the Hampshire town of Lymington where he set two of his novels.
Gents Without Cents is a 1944 short subject directed by Jules White starring American slapstick comedy team The Three Stooges. It is the 81st entry in the series released by Columbia Pictures starring the comedians, who released 190 shorts for the studio between 1934 and 1959.
South Brooklyn Boys is a famous New York City street gang. In the 1950s, various Italian-American gangs were formed in South Brooklyn, New York City, and came together under the moniker of "South Brooklyn Boys" sometime around the 1950s. The gang has a mostly Italian American membership.
The Sophisticated Gents is a TV miniseries that aired on three consecutive nights from September 29 to October 1, 1981, on NBC. Its ensemble cast featured a number of African-American stage and film actors, many of whom were customarily seen in blaxploitation films in the 1970s. The miniseries is based upon the 1976 novel The Junior Bachelor Society by John A. Williams. Although production of the project ended in 1979, NBC did not air the miniseries until almost two years later.
In Christian theology, Jesus is sometimes referred to by the title Redeemer. This refers to the salvation he is believed to have accomplished, and is based on the metaphor of redemption, or "buying back". In the New Testament, redemption is used to refer both to deliverance from sin and to freedom from captivity.
Joe Hurley is a singer, songwriter, actor, playwright and voice-over artist. He leads the critically lauded bands Joe Hurley & The Gents and Joe Hurley & Rogue's March. He is the founder and curator of the Allstar Irish Rock Revue, a musical-literary homage to "The Great Irish Songbook", celebrated annually around St. Patrick's Day.
Five official episode guides for the American animated sitcom The Simpsons have been published by HarperCollins since 1997. The first guide covers seasons 1 to 8, while the following three cover seasons 9 to 14. The fifth was released in 2010 and covers seasons 1 to 20.
On 12 October 1992, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) detonated a bomb that had been planted in the gents' toilets in the Sussex Arms pub in Upper St Martins Lane near Long Acre, London, killing a man and injuring seven other people.
