Posts from the Billy Rose Theatre Division

A thing of beauty is a joy forever... — Keats

(quoted in opening night program, B. S. Moss' Coliseum Theatre, 1920)

The end of 2011 also brought the quiet demise of the last movie theater in Washington Heights, Coliseum Cinemas. Known to most residents as the RKO Coliseum, the large theater, occupying the entire corner of 181st and Broadway, has been a fixture of the neighborhood for over 90 years. As the community now debates the future of the Coliseum and nostalgia starts to kick in, let’s open this theater's historical file, found among the rich collections of the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the New York Public 

This series is designed to showcase the often little-known stage background of popular TV and movie stars. In this installment, we'll explore the Broadway origins of the cast of I Love Lucy, including the secret life of Ethel Mertz!

Richard Lewine and Arnold B. Horwitt’s Make Mine Manhattan, which clocked in 429 performances at the Broadhurst in 1948 might be the longest-running musical you’ve never heard of. I had never heard of it until I processed the Richard Lewine Papers in 2007. The collection includes scores and scripts from many musicals and revues Lewine composed before becoming a successful television producer. Make Mine Manhattan intrigued me the most because the songs have been recorded and because it was a pretty big hit.

A Guest Blog by Project Co-Director, William Everett

Orientalism* and propaganda were common themes in American musical theater and popular song during the years surrounding World War I. Revues frequently included scenes set in the Middle East, and some of Broadway’s most famous composer-lyricists wrote music in direct response to the conflict. Orientalist manifestations include Irving Berlin’s “In My Harem” (1913) and the Omar Khayyam sequence in The Passing Show of 1914, while wartime messages infuse George M. Cohan’s “Over There” (1917) and Irving Berlin’s Yip, Yip, Yaphank (1918). These 

I needed a couple of extra archival boxes a few weeks ago, so I went over to a building where the Library keeps materials that do not fit in the main storage areas. While I was there, the reference archivist, Annemarie van Roessel, showed me a collection that made me feel like I had taken a wrong turn on 64th Street and wandered down Diagon Alley. It was a set of 25 boxes of “Magic Scrapbooks” that had belonged to stage magicians between 1832 and 1959. The first scrapbook I looked in was similar to a lot of performers’ scrapbooks: newspaper clippings of articles featuring the performer and his shows. This sort of thing can be incredibly valuable to 

On October 22, “Wikipedia! The Musical!” was staged at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Despite its whimsical name, it was not really a musical but an editathon — a chance to edit Wikipedia with a group of people in an inspiring location. Though its focus was improving articles on musical theater, anyone interested in the performing arts was welcome.

Most New Yorkers, when asked to name NYC landmarks, will conjure up the familiar array of iconographic symbols that make up our city: the Statue Liberty, the Empire State Building, Times Square, the Ground Zero Memorial, etc. — but having grown up in Washington Heights, I can’t help but place the George Washington Bridge among the great monuments of Gotham pride. Ever since its completion in 1931, this stunning suspension bridge has remained a sight that never gets old, one which seems so in harmony with its surroundings, and whose effortless beauty belies a remarkable feat of engineering.

Boris Karloff, who will be paid tribute to in a Thursday, October 27 program at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, played Frankenstein’s Monster in three films, the first of which was released 80 years ago next month.

Joseph Papp conceived of a marathon at the Public Theater of every one of Shakespeare’s plays, in the order in which they were written. This began under Papp in 1988 and was continued by the Theater’s subsequent artistic directors, Joanne Akalaitis and George C. Wolfe, after Papp’s retirement and death. After early productions at the Delacorte Theater in 1962 and 1973 (see my previous blog post), the Theater didn’t tackle King Lear again until 1996 when its turn came up in the marathon.

We hereby announce the new blog series When They Trod the Boards, designed to highlight notable film or television actors who have a substantial background in stage work as documented in the collections of the Library's Billy Rose Theatre Division. We launch the series with John Lithgow and his new memoir, Drama: An Actor’s Education,  published this week. Traditional books and ebooks are now flying off the Library's shelves! We’d like to highlight some of his shining moments on stage as reflected in our vast collection of stage photographs.

Lincoln Center is all abuzz as it ramps up for another Fashion Week. Fashion luminaries, hovering press reps, and harried show staff walk briskly across the Plaza towards the next scheduled event. The sense of anticipation is accompanied by the throbbing bass from the show tent, where models strut their stuff. For the in-crowd, the new look of tomorrow eclipses the desire to reflect on what has come before. But the scholars just next door in The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts relish the past. While Lincoln Center has always been considered the locus of cultural history as-it-happens, it also harbors cultural artifacts of yesteryear stored nearby in the archives of LPA. 

... sometimes we write them too!

NYPL is proud to announce a new book written by a Library staff member on the subject of film noir, just in time for the latest exhibition at the Library for the Performing Arts, Out of the shadows: The Fashion of Film Noir. 

Within the world of music theater there are many sub-genres — pop opera, juke-box musical, concept musical, and so on — that go in and out of style as generations transition and audience tastes change. At present, the juke-box musical and musical comedies are very popular; 18 years ago — when I first fell in love with musicals — pop operas like Evita, Les Miserables, and Phantom of the Opera filled out the season schedule at most regional touring houses. The Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-style “integrated book musical” seemed shockingly innovative in the 1940s, became a joke in the 1970s, and today The Book of Mormon, using 

For July’s Musical of the Month, we take a summer vacation to a tropical island in the Philippines: a place where the scent of a native flower perfumes the air and provides both the place, and the musical, with its name: Florodora. It is the South Pacific in 1900, before the ravages of the Second World War and the social conscience of Rodgers and Hammerstein caused audiences to consider it as anything other than an Edenic garden of delights. Every young man and woman in the piece is beautiful, and the most pressing concerns are not racism and war, but petty swindlers and a tyrannical but ineffectual aristocratic landlord.

Peter Stone, the author of Charade and 1776, is the first writer to win an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony (three times!) award, and, as you would expect, his papers include extensive drafts for his works. The surprise find in the Library's Peter Stone Collection, however; is a group of envelopes marked “Speeches and Toasts.” During the latter part of his career, Stone was frequently asked to host awards shows and to write and deliver award tributes and memorial tributes to friends and colleagues. 

It won’t surprise anyone who has seen a musical or a movie written by Stone that his tribute toasts are extremely clever and witty, poignant and 

As the month of June draws to a close, it's time to leave The Black Crook and move on to a new Musical of the Month. Before I do, though, I want to take a minute to let those who may have been intrigued by the small samples I’ve posted know how they can find more information about The Black Crook and other historical musicals.

 This is the second in a series of posts about the 1866 proto-musical, The Black Crook. See my first post in the series for additional background on the show

Very little is known about the music used in the original production of The Black Crook. Early advertisements feature the scenic effects (TRANSFORMATION SCENE or THE CRYSTAL CASCADE) much more prominently than the music. Spectacular dances (eg. "Pas de Demons" or "Pas de Fleurs") are sometimes listed as well (albeit in a slightly smaller typeface), but rarely are the songs announced at all. Some 1866 programs cite "music 

Most musical theater history books cautiously locate the birth of the American Musical at Niblo's Garden (a theater once located on Prince Street) on September 12, 1866 at the opening of The Black Crook. Of course, among many scholars, this identification is regarded as something of a joke — song had been integrated into plays since the early days of Greek drama, and the songs in The Black Crook, at least in its original version, were mostly diversions from the plot — no more related to the action and characters than commercial breaks are to an episode of Glee. Nonetheless, for all the very good reasons to reject The Black Crook as the 

Growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, my favorite part of the week was visiting the Florissant Valley Public Library and checking out cast recordings. I remember flipping through the bins of LPs, staring down at the big black album with glowing cat eyes, and wondering what in the world that show might be about. It was always a little disappointing when the liner notes were missing or the plot summaries were particularly sparse. In such cases, I would make up a story to fit between the songs (which led to some surprises when I finally saw these shows in their entirety). Sometimes I would go to the shelves to try to find a libretto, but, with the exception of the titles in Stanley