Kennedy Center Honor Award

Kennedy Center Honor Award, CBS will continue to be home for the Kennedy Center Honors broadcast through 2018, the network and KenCen announced Thursday.

No big surprise here — the gala has been broadcast on CBS every year since its launch 34 years ago. It’s one of the longest running broadcast partnerships in TV history.

It’s also one of the longest-running gigs for a TV special producer. George Stevens Jr. co-created the Kennedy Center Honors in 1978 with Nick Vanoff, and has produced and co-written the show for 34 years. His son, Michael Stevens has produced and co-written the show for the past five years.

And, of late, it has become an Emmy staple for the network — the 2011 Emmy competition marked the broadcast’s third consecutive win for best variety, musical or comedy special, accounting for nearly half of the franchise’s total of eight Emmy wins.

The Kennedy Center Honors fetes folks for their lifetime contributions to American culture through the performing arts; they’re picked by the center’s board of trustees. The most recent crop of honorees included chameleon actress Meryl Streep, pop singer Neil Diamond, Broadway singer Barbara Cook, famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins.

It’s also produced some of the more interesting talent lineups of any trophy show. Where else could you see Beyonce re-enacting Tina Turner’s ‘70’s performance of “Proud Mary,” Stephen Colbert waxing eloquent on the subject of Yo Yo Ma, or Jessica Simpson struggling through the complexities of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” and then bouncing off stage like a jackrabbit. Oh wait! Viewers didn’t get to see that one — it got expunged from the broadcast. Well, anyway, it was riveting.

The most recent “Kennedy Center Honors” broadcast logged nearly 9 million viewers, which is not bad, considering it airs during the Christmas holiday season, when the number of Homes Using Television is not as high as other times of year.

Chicago The Musical

Chicago The Musical, Chicago is a musical set in Prohibition-era Chicago. The music is by John Kander with lyrics by Fred Ebb and a book by Ebb and Bob Fosse. The story is a satire on corruption in the administration of criminal justice and the concept of the “celebrity criminal”. The musical is based on a 1926 play of the same name by reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins about actual criminals and crimes she reported on.

The original Broadway production opened June 3, 1975, at the 46th Street Theatre and ran for 936 performances. Bob Fosse choreographed the original production, and his style is strongly identified with the show. Chicago’s 1996 Broadway revival holds the record for the longest-running musical revival on Broadway and is its fourth longest-running show.

As of January 2012, it has played for more than 6,200 performances. The musical was produced in London’s West End and on several tours and international productions. The Academy Award-winning film version (2002) of the musical was directed by Rob Marshall and starred Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renee Zellweger, Richard Gere, John C. Reilly, and Queen Latifah.

The Original Velma Kelly

The Original Velma Kelly, Velma Kelly is one of the main characters in the successful Broadway musical Chicago. The Velma Kelly in Chicago: The Movie is a nightclub singer/vaudevillian who was accused of murder of her husband and sister.

She is sent to the Cook County Jail where she hires the best soliciting lawyer, Billy Flynn. Singing and dancing, and telling her side of the story, Kelly goes through her time at jail being the star until Roxie Hart comes into the picture.
Velma Kelly’s character was based on a woman named Belva Gaertner. Belva was a cabaret singer who had been married and divorced twice. After those men had come and gone, she had a lover named Walter Law, who she thought was the right man for her. On March 11, 1924, Belva shot Law, who was already married with one child.

Law was found with a bottle of gin and a gun that had three shots fired next to him in the front seat of Belva’s car. The next day, she was found at her apartment with bloody clothes on the floor. She claimed that she had been drunk and couldn’t remember what had happened.

She was arrested for the murder of Walter Law on March 12, 1924. When she was getting interviewed by Maurine Watkins, she told her “gin and guns- either one is bad enough, but together they get you in a dickens of a mess, don’t they.” In court, her defense was that he could’ve committed suicide, and was released in June 1924. She remarried her husband William Gaertner and was later convicted of drunk driving in 1926. In 1927, she attended the opening of Watkins play Chicago in Chicago, Illinois.