The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts > Exhibitions

Show Business: Irving Berlin's Broadway

From February 14, 2006 through May 26, 2006
Vincent Astor Gallery
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, 40 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-7498 (directions)

For six decades beginning in 1909, Irving Berlin contributed songs and scores to more than fifty productions on Broadway. From interpolations to the integrated musical, Berlin's story tells the evolution of the Broadway musical as an art form. through photographs, drawings, set and costume designs, programs, and related ephemera, we present moments from every part of his Broadway career, as he and his audience first saw it.

Ethel Merman belting out "Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)"; a bevy of Follies Girls descending a celestial staircase while John Steel sings the Ziegfeld theme song "A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody"; Ethel Waters summoning the African American experience while intoning "Suppertime" under the headline "Unknown Negro Lynched by Frenzied Mob." These iconic images from Broadway history all sprang from the hand of one man: Irving Berlin. Irving Berlin was at the forefront of every form of mass popular culture of his time: sheet music, the Broadway stage, radio, records, film, and television. Yet he loved Broadway because he could not only hear his songs immediately, but also judge an audience's reaction just as fast.

The exhibition is a project of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts that will also travel to the San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum (July - December 2005) and the Marion Kogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio (July - October 2006). It was curated by David Leopold.

Press Release