Two Museums Put On Good Stage Shows

Spring's incessant flow of show openings slows to a trickle in the summer so theater junkies like me have to look elsewhere for our fixes. I recently found some solace in theater-related exhibits at two of the city's most unsung museums.

The New-York Historical Society is hosting the New York stop of "First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare," a traveling exhibit that the Folger Shakespeare Library has organized to honor the 400th anniversary of the Bard's death.

John Heminges and Henry Condell, members of the King's Men acting company and close friends mentioned in Shakespeare's will, collected and published 36 of his plays in 1623. A few, such as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, had been published before but without the Folio later generations might never have known Macbeth, Julius Caesar or Twelfth Night.

About 750 copies of that first edition are believed to have been printed and they didn't go for cheap; it's estimated that each would have cost about $250 in today's money. A Second Folio was published nine years later but with some 1,700 changes from the first and that, of course, makes the original edition even more prized. One sold for $3.7 million in May.

Experts have authenticated 233 surviving copies and the Folger, named after a Standard Oil exec who collected Shakespeare memorabilia and located in Washington D.C., has 82 of them, more than anywhere else (the British Library only has five).

The Folger's road show isn't fancy. The exhibit includes a few easy-to-pack screens with information about the Bard and his book but the main attraction is the Folio itself. It sits in a glass-enclosed case in the lobby of the Historical Society, open to Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" soliloquy.

I got a thrill out of seeing the words, complete with their odd spellings ("The Slings and Arrowes of outragious Fortune") on the parchment pages, even though a guard watched me like a hawk as I inspected them.

Admission to this part of the museum is free and I may even go back before the exhibit leaves July 17. Keep an eye out for when the Folio hits your town or, at the very least, check out the website the Folger has set up for it by clicking here.

You do have to pay to see "New York's Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway," which will be at The Museum of the City of New York through Aug. 14 but it's worth the $14 fee ($10 for seniors and free for kids and teens).

Broadway, particularly the Broadway musical, wouldn't be the same if it hadn't been for Yiddish theater, which began in the mid-19th century as a popular form of entertainment in Europe's Jewish communities and migrated along with the waves of those immigrants who came to New York around the turn of the 20th century.

Using photos, posters, scripts, sheet music, costumes, puppets and film clips, curator Edna Nahshon, a professor of theater and drama at The Jewish Theological Seminary (click here to read a Q&A with her), tracks the story of Yiddish theater from the early 1900s when the lower part of Second Avenue became known as the Jewish Rialto to the productions of Fiddler on the Roof and Funny Girl, which both put the Jewish experience front and center on the Broadway stage in 1964.

Along the way, the Yiddish theater nurtured a cornucopia of talents whose influence on the movies, TV and, of course, the theater can still be felt today. 

A whole section of the exhibit is devoted to the Adler family. The patriarch Jacob was celebrated for his Yiddish versions of Shakespeare and his daughter Stella later became an influential member of the Group Theater and the founder of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, where she mentored, among others, Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro.

Other names that got their start in the Yiddish theater include Paul Muni (née Frederich Meier Weisenfreund,) Molly Picon (née Małka Opiekun,) Edward G. Robinson (Emanuel Goldenberg) and Mickey Katz (Meyer Myron Katz,) whose son Joel would change his last name to Grey and win a Tony for playing the M.C. in Cabaret. 

It's also fun to see the costumes Zero Mostel wore as Tevye the Milkman in Fiddler and Barbra Streisand wore as the great second Avenue vaudevillian Fanny Brice in Funny Girl.

But I particularly appreciated the sections devoted to less familiar names like Jacob Gordin, whose socially conscious dramas made him kind of the Eugene O'Neill of Yiddish drama and Abraham Goldfaden, whose role as the father of Yiddish theater is honored on the face of the Goldie Award, the Yiddish theater's equivalent of the Tony.

 A major highlight were the sketches and models by the Russian-born set designer Boris Aronson, who began his American career on the Lower East Side before moving uptown to Broadway where he eventually won six Tony awards for his stylized sets for the original production of Cabaret, Follies and Company.

Both exhibits turn theater history into a visceral experience that you should have if you can.

Mad About NYPL'S "The World of Noel Coward"

The best new show in town right now is at Lincoln Center.  But I’m not talking about the mighty War Horse, which even after a year is still packing them in at the Vivian Beaumont, or even 4000 Miles, the endearing Amy Herzog play now in previews at the Mitzi Newhouse.

No, the show I’m talking about is next door to the theater, in the first-floor gallery space in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, where the new exhibition “Star Quality: the World of Noël Coward” is running through Aug. 18. 

Coward is, of course, the artistic polymath who dominated British theater from the 1920s through the ‘40s with the plays and musicals that he wrote, composed, directed, produced and usually starred in. In his spare time, he made movies, performed cabaret, partied with café society, painted and wrote poetry and, for a brief period, served as a secret agent, gathering information for the British government before World War II.  All of it is on brilliant display in the new exhibit.

In the past, I’ve had problems with some of the Library’s shows.  The subjects have almost always been fascinating but the execution has sometimes been overzealous so that too much is stuffed into the space—and sometimes so willy-nilly—that it’s hard to absorb it all or even sort it out.  But this time the Library has got it right. 

The exhibit is as full as Coward’s life was and yet it’s so well laid out and nicely annotated that even Coward neophytes will be entertained. “Wow,” I can imagine them saying, “I didn’t know he was the one who did that.” Coward made his professional stage debut at 11 and he quickly developed the personae of a latter-day Oscar Wilde—sophisticated, self-consciously debonair and quick with just the right smart quip.

As one might expect, there are photos galore.  Coward seems to have never seen a camera for which he didn’t want to pose. He was born a week before Christmas in 1899 and there are shots of him from the time he was a toddler straight through to just days before he died in 1973 from heart failure at his beloved home Firefly in Jamaica.

The stuff in between dazzles for if you’ve ever longed for the glamor and the glory of the good old theatrical days, you’ve been fantasizing about Coward's life.  Friends called him “The Master” and this exhibit makes it easy to see why.

Coward's 1924 breakthrough play, The Vortex, was a drama but he made his reputation with comedies such as Hay Fever, Present Laughter, Private Lives, which he wrote for himself and his childhood and life-long friend Gertrude Lawrence, Design for Living, a daring-for-the-time ménage à trois written for himself and his great pals Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and Blithe Spirit.

Four of those now-classic plays have been revived on Broadway just since 2001. Meanwhile, the latest production of Hay Fever with Lindsay Duncan as the not-quite-retired actress Judith Bliss is currently a hit in London. And Coward could be serious too, as evidenced by such works as the unrequited romance Brief Encounter, which got its own Broadway revival during last year’s season.

One of the things that’s been most annoying about past Library shows is that the noise from the various sound and video recordings created an unpleasant din, making it difficult to hear the selection you wanted. But this show has listening stations with earphones and even small stools where people can sit.  Occasionally, there’s an outbreak of laughter from some listener who’s just encountered some of Coward's witty lyrics.

And speaking of lyrics, there are handwritten copies of a few of the over 300 songs Coward wrote, including the jocular “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” and the romantic “Mad About the Boy” (they’re written in pencil but there don’t seem to be many cross outs or erasures—he was a famously fast and assured writer).

There are scrapbooks of reviews and stories, mainly put together by his pal Gertie Lawrence, and lots of show posters, including the one Coward himself designed for the show Sail Away, which featured a young Elaine Stritch, who became another dear and life-long friend.

It’s hard to resist making a list of Coward's close friends because the names are so glitzy but it would almost be easier to tote up the famous people who weren’t his friends because his chums included Charlie Chaplin, Beatrice Lillie, David Niven, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Maggie Smith, Lauren Bacall, Winston Churchill, Ian Fleming, Lawrence of Arabia, Lord Mountbatten and the Queen Mother.

Coward was a dedicated letter writer and the exhibit includes several between him and friends.  There’s a particularly poignant one from Leigh, expressing her gratitude for his allowing her to spend the Christmas holidays with him after her marriage to Olivier fell apart.

In fact, it’s the glimpses of the personal Coward—the piano from one of his homes, the typewriter he traveled with, the dressing gowns he wore, his favorite tuxedo, his battered makeup kit, his shiny cigarette cases (he was almost never without a smoke) the home movies of a vacation in St. Moritz, the unfinished painting he was working on the day he died, the copy of the book that was opened by his bedside that final night—that help make the exhibit so special.

Like many self-invented men, Coward worried that his achievements would fade after he was gone. That day may come but this superb tribute to his work and his life, almost 40 years after his death, should allow him to rest in peace for a while yet. Go pay homage. 

Joel Grey is Showcased in a Dual Role

Theater is such an integral a part of New York that it often overflows into other parts of city life. The windows of the big Fifth Avenue department store Lord & Taylor have recently paid tribute to How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Meanwhile, further uptown, the Museum of the City of New York is celebrating the life and work of the Broadway favorite Joel Grey.

Tourists may be unaware of these kinds of Broadway treats and those of who live here may take them for granted. But this past week—my first this year without seeing at least one show—I got my theater fix by going to the museum to see “Joel Grey/A New York Life.”  The exhibit is divided into two easily digestible parts. The first is a retrospective of Grey’s nearly 75-year acting career and the second half is a display of his art photography. Both are sensational.

Grey, who is 79, isn’t actually a Broadway baby.  He was born in Cleveland. The son of the comic Mickey Katz, he started his career as a child actor in the Cleveland Playhouse. By the time he was 10, he was enough of a pro to come to New York to audition for a spot to replace one of the kids in Broadway’s long-running Life With Father. 

He didn’t get the part but when he was 19, he moved here and got hired for a couple of the revues that were popular on Broadway in the ‘50s. In 1961, he caught the industry’s attention when he replaced the lead in Come Blow Your Horn, Neil Simon’s first play about a young innocent who moves in with his playboy older brother. Just five years later, Grey created the role of the emcee in Cabaret and won the first of his two Tonys.

Roles as Amos “Mr. Cellophane” Hart in the revival of Chicago, the Wizard of Oz in Wicked and the gangster Moonface Martin in the current hit revival of Anything Goes (plus his role in bringing the Tony-winning revival of The Normal Heart to Broadway) have all endeared him to a younger generation of theatergoers (click here to read an astute New York magazine profile of him). 

Like many actors, Grey is a packrat who seems to have saved everything along the way. And that’s to the benefit of the exhibit which includes props, posters and awards from his various shows as well as more personal items such as a letter from Eddie Cantor, a telegram from Maurice Chevalier, a good luck mezuzah from Beverly Sills, a Life magazine spread on the apartment in the Hotel des Artistes that he shared with his wife the actress Jo Wilder and kids (James, now a chef, and Jennifer of “Dirty Dancing” and “Dancing With the Stars” fame) and photos galore.

But, to my surprise, the real treat are the photos Grey took. These aren’t the expected candid snapshots of famous friends or nicely posed pictures of animals, trees and interesting faces that most hobbyist gravitate towards. Instead, Grey takes close-ups of the city’s buildings, bridges and other infrastructure that through his discerning lens are transformed into powerful Rothko-like abstracts. In recent years, he’s also begun using his cell phone camera to capture images like hookers on the prowl or two young male lovers at a gay pride parade.  They’re all totally arresting. (Click here to see a few.)

You can see all of it for yourself if you get to the museum before the exhibit closes on Aug. 7.  Or you might even consider attending a discussion between Grey and the playwright Jon Robin Baitz that the museum is hosting on Monday, Aug.1.  You can find more out about that by clicking here.