The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center
Notable User Stories
Passionate
Preservation
When the Library's
Theatre on Film and Tape Archive (TOFT), which is part of the Billy Rose
Theatre Collection, videotaped James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim's
Broadway musical Passion in August of 1994, it brought full circle
a project begun ten months earlier. In October 1993, TOFT recorded
a workshop production of Passion presented by Lincoln Center Theater.
As Lapine and Sondheim continued to develop the work, they became regular
visitors to the Library, reviewing the video of their musical as they
shaped and refined it for Broadway. "It was revelatory to come back
several months later and watch the piece with some sense of objectivity
and distance," said Lapine, the show's librettist and director.
"It helped us figure out what worked and what didn't and what changes
we need to make."
Since 1970, TOFT
has produced video documentation of more that 2,500 live performances
of theatrical productions in New York and throughout the country.
The Archive also produces video dialogues with noteworthy theatre personalities
and acquires theatre-related films and videotapes for a total collection
of 4,500 items. These tapes form a unique legacy for theatre professionals
and researchers. "Particularly as a director," Lapine continues,
"I think it's very important that we have in the theatre a permanent record
of our work."
The Billy Rose Theatre
Collection documents not only theatre, but also film, television, radio,
circuses, wild west shows, carnivals, beauty pageants, fairs, and festivals.
Its extensive resources include such material as posters, clippings, manuscripts,
original designs, scrapbooks, programs, and personal archives of accomplished
theatre personalities.
Broadway's
Phantom Haunts Library too!
Users beware, partaking
of the extensive circulating collections at the Library for the Performing
Arts can become an addiction. Just ask Howard McGillin, seasoned
Broadway vet currently playing the title role in The Phantom of the
Opera. For Mr. McGillin, who is presently recording a new solo
CD entitled, Where Time Stands Still, haunting the stacks in the
Library is a common escapade; almost every song on the album was unearthed
from the vast assortment of sheet music and scores encompassed by the
collection. "The Circulating Collection is a fantastic resource.
I found everything from Rodgers and Hart to the Indigo Girls and Mary
Chapin Carpenter for this album." All told, Mr. McGillin estimates he
spent as many as 30 hours delving through the stacks and card catalogs
to discover the perfect mix of songs for his diverse album. No stranger
to multifarious subject matter, his roster of roles includes Molina in
Kiss of the Spider Woman, Archibald in The Secret Garden,
and Kodaly in She Loves Me, he waxes exuberant about the Library's
offerings. "Selecting material to record, preparing for concerts,
or as a member of the Drama Department, searching for overlooked plays
of the past, I can happily spend the entire day at the Library and often
do."
Marshalling an Encore
Kathleen Marshall,
noted Broadway director and choreographer and former Artistic Director
of the City Center Encores! series, knows where to go when
encountering a mystery. Faced with the challenge of mounting numerous
revivals, some of which haven't been seen by audiences in decades, Ms.
Marshall has learned to rely on The New York Public Library for the Performing
Arts' vast theatre and dance collections. "Sometimes, by the time a script
is published things could have changed around a bit," Ms. Marshall explained.
In the meantime characters may have been eliminated and songs replaced.
Discovering this valuable history -- when alterations were made and perhaps
even why -- is important to Ms. Marshall, who emphasized that, "it's great
to know what was there opening night."
When in 1998 Encores!
mounted a production of St. Louis Woman, originally produced in
1946, the artistic team was posed with a flummoxing dilemma: orchestrations
were nowhere to be found and there was no indication of the original order
of songs.
"The orchestrations
didn't exist, so we were reconstructing the score. I went to the Library
and I got opening night Playbills from the three out of town tryouts
and New York. By comparing these programs I could see exactly what
the history of the show was; I could see when songs were added and when
songs were dropped. Also, the order of songs ended up being what
was in the original opening night program."
Of course, mounting
a revival, as Ms. Marshall is quick to point out, does not mean replicating
the original. However, by exploring the resources the Library has to offer,
souvenir programs, stills from the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, and
original scripts from the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, innovators like
Ms. Marshall are offered a unique insight into the original before embarking
on their own creation.
The Pursuit of Booth
Rifling through the
collections at the Library of the Performing Arts is occasionally a breathtaking
adventure; one never knows what discoveries are lurking down the path
that leads away from the innocent plaza entrance. Writer and music
director, Brian Hurley, might agree with that statement.
Currently researching material in the Circulating Collections' songbooks
for The Season, a cabaret retrospective of each Broadway season
since 1945, he estimates that he has visited the Library every week for
the last 30 years. In that time, he has had ample opportunities
to glide from one fascinating subject to the next, checking out original
cast recordings, perusing scripts in a multitude of languages -- Pirandello
in Italian, Brecht in German, Racine in French, even stumbling upon French
songbooks from Nazi-occupied Paris.
One particularly
exciting expedition took him on a journey through the life of one of America's
first great actors, Edwin Booth. After pursuing a youthful Booth,
in the Circulating Collections, on a banjo-playing tour of California
mining camps with his father, and tracing Edwin's later triumphs in Hamlet
and Othello, Mr. Hurley's quest led him to the Research Collections.
There he struck gold, and in the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded
Sound, discovered the only recording Booth ever made: excerpts from Othello
which he performed for Edison. Continuing his search, he was again
rewarded when, in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, he found the handkerchief
Booth used as Othello as well as the locket containing his father's photograph
that he wore during Hamlet. That he has amassed this research
from the collections of a single source impresses Mr. Hurley, who muses,
"That's the amazing one-two punch in accessing information from this remarkable
library of circulating, research, and archival materials."
The
Dancing Detective
Marjorie Folkman,
a dancer with the Mark Morris Dance Groups, might also be thought of as
a dance detective. As a researcher for Mark Morris, she has been
responsible for sleuthing out details to dances shrouded in the mists
of time. Dance, that most ephemeral of all the arts, does leave
a trail, however, and evidence can be found in the Jerome Robbins Dance
Division, internationally recognized as the largest and most comprehensive
archive devoted to the documentation of dance.
Ms. Folkman is currently
hunting for information about a 19th-century Romantic ballet, Sylvia,
which will form the basis for a new full-evening ballet Morris is choreographing.
She is combing through the tomes and video clips of the division, searching
for costume sketches, set designs, and other examples of the look and
feel of the original Sylvia, created in 1876 with music by Léo
Delibes and choreography by Louis Mérante.
As a Barnard College
undergraduate working on dance history projects, Ms. Folkman discovered
the glories of the Library's Dance Division. After college, she
worked as a temp at night and spent her days at the Library, studying
dance videos of companies for which she wanted to audition. Her
love for research developed into paying jobs, and after she began studying
with Morris, he hired her in 1996 to research Rameau's opera Platée
(1745), which he was choreographing and directing for the Royal Opera,
Covent Garden. In the Jerome Robbins Archive of the Recorded Moving
Image, Ms. Folkman found a silent film from the 1950s of rehearsal footage
of Leonide Massine's choreography to the ballet music from Platée.
Looking through books on the art of dancing in the 18th century, she came
across an engraving of guests at a masked ball in the theatre of Versailles,
one of the many events that took place during the month-long celebration
of the same royal wedding at which Platée was premiered.
She augmented this with additional research in the Library's Music Division,
where she found French books from the 1800s with reviews of the comic
opera. Ms. Folkman's investigations and the creativity of Morris
paid off. Morris's Platée received rave reviews and
audiences cheered.
Ragtime
Revival
When Vera Brodsky
Lawrence began researching the works of Scott Joplin in the Library's
Music Division, she never imagined that she would trigger an international
revival of interest in the great composer of ragtime. Although Joplin
was revered by a small cadre of devotees, his works were mostly forgotten
by the broader music world. After researching and gathering the sheet
music of all his known compositions -- most of which were found in the
Music Division -- Lawrence began approaching publishers to bring out an
edition of Joplin's works. She was rejected by 24 publishers before she
thought to submit the project to the publications office of the Library
itself. In 1971, The Collected Works of Scott Joplin was published
by The New York Public Library, and as Lawrence once wrote, "The rest
is history."
At the time of the
two-volume publication, the Music Division sponsored an all-Joplin concert
in the Library's Bruno Walter Auditorium featuring pianists Mary Lou Williams,
William Bolcom, and Joshua Rifkin performing Joplin rags, as well as a
choir and vocal soloists in excerpts from Joplin's little-known opera
Treemonisha. The concert was recorded live and released by Nonesuch
Records. Treemonisha was later produced at the Kennedy Center and
on Broadway and was released as a bestselling recording. Joplin's compositions
were then used for the soundtrack of the 1974 movie The Sting,
further exploding the interest in his music and in ragtime. Vera Brodsky
Lawrence died in 1996, but her determined efforts to call attention to
Scott Joplin's work have restored the composer to long-lasting prominence.
Today the Joplin collection is still one of the Library's most requested
publications, and his works remain popular throughout the world.
The collections of
the Library's Music Division chronicle music in all its diversity. In
addition to books, periodicals, scores, and sheet music, the division
offers clippings, programs, photographs, and the personal papers of important
musicians.
A Songwriter Sings
While the performance
of a talented vocalist can enhance a great song, it can also be revealing
to turn to the songwriters themselves for interpretations that return
to the heart of the composition. For years Irving Berlin's charming and
plaintive performance of his song "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,"
from an Army Revue called Yip, Yip, Yaphank was one of the
few widely available recordings of a Broadway songwriter performing his
own material.
But over the last
decade, theatre historian and record producer Steve Nelson has
been on a quest to uncover rare and previously unavailable recordings
by American songwriters. In that time he has produced five recordings
for Koch International's Songwriter Series, each devoted to an individual
creator of songs for Broadway and movies. His most recent effort is Irving
Sings Berlin, an anthology of performances by the great songwriter
ranging from an early pre-World War I recording to a demo from 1962 for
his last Broadway show, Mr. President.
"We could not have
made these discs without the materials, facilities, and the personnel
of the Library's Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives," said Nelson.
"It is one of the few places in the world where this kind of material
exists and is made available." The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of
Recorded Sound offers researchers more than 500,000 recordings, including
commercially released materials and a wide range of radio broadcasts and
private recordings. Among the tracks uncovered for the latest album were
a 1940s performance of Berlin's earliest song, "Marie from Sunny Italy,"
from CBS Radio's show Songs by Sinatra, and a medley of his tunes
he performed in 1934 on NBC's Good Gulf Show.
Nelson has been a
regular user of the Library for the Performing Arts since 1980 when he
was a doctoral student at New York University. He now teaches "The History
of American Musical Theater" at the University's Tisch School of the Arts.
"I send my students to the Library and tell them 'you have the preeminent
place to do research in the performing arts at your disposal. Whatever
your career will be, discover this place now!'" Who knows? Maybe
some of those students will be songwriters and one day a theatre historian
like Steve Nelson will discover them singing their own songs in the Rodgers
and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound.
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