The Woodstock Opera House has always been a place for the community. Over the past 100 years, the Woodstock Opera House has been attracting famous performers. The list goes on and on, but below are a few of the more notable “stars” that have performed on the stage at the Opera House.
Arlo Guthrie
Arlo Guthrie was born in Coney Island, New York in 1947. Arlo gave his first public performance at age 13 and quickly became involved in the music that was shaping the world during the 1960s. His career exploded in 1967 with the release of "Alice's Restaurant", whose title song premiered at the Newport Folk Festival. With songs like "Alice's Restaurant" and "Coming into Los Angeles", banned from many radio stations, Guthrie was no "one-hit-wonder". He is an artist of international stature, although he has never had a hit in the usual sense.
Betsy Palmer
Betsy Palmer is probably best known for playing Jason Voorhees mother in the 1980 hit horror film "Friday the 13th", but her career as an actress began many years before. Palmer was encouraged to play a young female officer co-starring with Jack Lemmon in "Mister Roberts" and in "The Long Gray Line". Throughout the late fifties, Palmer could be seen as a news reporter on "The Today Show on NBC". Later she focused almost exclusively on television, where she performed in "made for TV films" and she made many notable guest appearances.
Bill Murray
Bill is the fifth of nine children born to Edward & Lucille Murray. He and most of his siblings worked as caddies, which paid his tuition to Loyola Academy, an all-boy's Jesuit school. His break came when he joined the "National Lampoon Radio Hour" with fellow members Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, and John Belushi. However, while those three became the original members of "Saturday Night Live", he joined the "Howard Cosell Variety Hour". When that show failed, he joined his friends on SNL.
Bonnie Koloc
It's been said that together with Steve Goodman and John Prine, Bonnie made up the trinity of the Chicago Folk Scene. Bonnie was the first in her family to ever go to college, attending a teacher's college, The University of Northern Iowa. Bonnie had majored at first in Drama and then Art. She was paying her way through college by singing. Eventually she gave up on college and came
to Chicago to pursue her singing career. In the early 1980's Bonnie left Chicago to further her career in New York.
Buddy Rich
Arguably the greatest jazz drummer of all time, the legendary Buddy Rich exhibited his love for music through the dedication of his life to the art. His career spanned seven decades, beginning when Rich was 18 months old and continuing until his death in 1987. Born to vaudevillians on September 30, 1917, the famed drummer was introduced to audiences at a very young age. By 1921, he was a seasoned solo performer. At the peak of Rich's early career, he was the second-highest paid child entertainer in the world.
Corky Siegel
Corky Siegel has earned an international reputation as one of the world's great blues harmonica masters. He is a composer, blues pianist, singer / songwriter. He is the recent winner of both the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest/Meet the Composer's National Award for chamber music composition, and the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award for Music Composition. At the age of 20 he formed the legendary Siegel-Schwall Band and toured the major rock palaces and clubs in the 60's and 70's. "For groups like the Rolling Stones ... names like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf were exotic inspirations. For Siegel-Schwall they were the guys that played with them on 43rd Street."
Dizzy Gillespie
Dizzy was born in 1917 to a family of ten. At four years of age, Dizzy was already playing the piano and taught himself to play the trombone and trumpet before the age of twelve. He soon earned the nickname "Dizzy" for his comical stage antics. He began appearing at Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Uptown House where he could try out his new ideas and styles. Often joining him was Thelonious Monk, and the two began to experiment with the complex chord changes that would soon characterize the Bebop Era...not to mention familiarizing jazz with the black horn-rimmed glasses, beret and goatee that would be just as much a part of the era.
George Shearing
George Shearing enjoys an international reputation as a pianist, arranger and composer. Equally at home on the concert stage as in jazz clubs, Shearing is recognized for inventive, orchestrated jazz. He has written more than 300 compositions, including the classic "Lullaby of Birdland", which has become a jazz standard. Shearing was born in 1919 in the Battersea area of London. His only formal musical education consisted of four years of study at the Linden Lodge School for the Blind.
Geraldine Page
More a fixture of the New York stage than the Hollywood screen, the Method-tinged performances of this highly acclaimed actress also won her eight Academy Award nominations; she finally won a Best Actress Oscar for her touching, seemingly effortless performance in "The Trip to Bountiful". She won two Emmy Awards, for a pair of acclaimed TV movies, Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory", (1967) and "The Thanksgiving Visitor", (1969). Page was married to stage and screen actor Rip Torn.
Glenn Miller
Glenn was born in Iowa on March 1, 1904. In 1923, Miller entered the University of Colorado. After flunking most of his courses, Glenn dropped out to concentrate on his career as a professional musician. In April 1935, Glenn Miller recorded for the first time under his own name, "Moonlight on the Ganges" and "A Blues Serenade" for Columbia. The Orchestra was invited by ASCAP to perform at Carnegie Hall with three of the greatest bands ever Paul Whiteman, Fred Waring and Benny Goodman.
Gwendolyn Brooks
The African American poet Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born June 7, 1917 in Topeka, Kansas. Later that year the Brooks family moved to Chicago. In 1945 Gwendolyn Brooks' first book entitled "A Street In Bronzeville" was published. In 1968 she was named poet laureate for the state of Illinois and was also the first African American to receive an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 1976. Since then, Gwendolyn Brooks has gone on to receive over fifty honorary doctorates from numerous colleges and universities. She has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and has served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress.
John Astin
John Astin is most recognized as a pop-culture icon: Morticia's madcap, eccentric, charming Latin lover Gomez Addams. But as incredible as his portrayal of Gomez is, it's just a small sliver of this man's wonderful genius. Even with John Astin's rave critical reviews, (for directing, writing, producing,) his awesome dramatic flair is often overlooked because the public views him primarily as a comedic actor. History will judge him more accurately. Most recently he starred in a one-man play on the life and times of Edgar Allan Poe.
Kingston Trio
In 1957 The Kingston Trio emerged from San Francisco's North Beach club scene to take the country by storm, bringing the rich tradition of American folk music into the mainstream for the first time. During the late 50s & early 60s, the Trio enjoyed unprecedented record sales and worldwide fame, while influencing the musical tastes of a generation. Over forty years after Tom Dooley shot to the top of the charts, the Trio is still on the road thirty weeks out of the year, bringing back all the great memories and making new ones.
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