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.

The Morgan Puts a Spotlight on Set Design

If you’re a theater lover, this has got to be the best time of the year. In the four-week period between the announcement of the Tony nominations and the handing out of the awards, it seems as though the whole world (and not just we theater geeks) starts thinking and talking about Broadway. And the buzz is even louder than usual this year.

The June issue of the glossy mainstream magazine Vanity Fair has a photo spread with 25 stars who have appeared on Broadway this past season. Just this week, PBS aired a documentary on the making of In the Heights, which took home Tony’s Best Musical honors last year. Recent guests on “The View's" daily gabfest have included David Hyde Pierce (star of Accent on Youth), Nathan Lane (co-star of Waiting for Godot) and, coming next Friday, Neil Patrick Harris (the host of this year’s Tony Awards show).

The New York Times has already devoted an Arts & Leisure section to the Tonys and continues to run features about the nominated shows. There are also interviews with nominees on the Playbill website, on the BroadwayRadio podcast, on blogs, in tweets. And, of course, there are predictions everywhere; one of the best is NY1 critic Roma Torre’s chats with some actual Tony voters.

Now, even the Morgan Library & Museum, which usually celebrates printed text, has gotten into the act with a new show, “Creating the Modern Stage: Designs for Theater and Opera.” The exhibit, which opened last week and runs through Aug. 16, traces the history of set design in the 20th century and although it displays more drawings from opera productions than the theater ones that most fascinate me, it is still a terrific introduction to a field about which I know far too little.

The exhibit is small, with only around 50 drawings, which means you can really focus on each one, without worrying that you won’t have time to get through the whole thing as is the case with so many megashows. Most of the drawings are drawn from a gift by the widow of Donald Oenslager, the prolific set designer who got his start as an actor with the Provincetown Players but went on to create the sets for such shows as the original productions of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Cole Porter’s Anything Goes and to teach at the Yale School of Drama for 45 years.

Oenslager was clearly a student of set design as well as a master of it. His collection includes drawings by the pioneers Adolphe Appia, the Swiss designer who led the move away from painted scenery to what he called “living” sets; Edward Gordon Craig, son of the celebrated British actress Ellen Terry, whose influential book “The Art of the Theater” advocated experimental lighting techniques and expressionistic sets like the one he did for the 1906 production of Hamlet in the drawing at the top of this entry; and avant garde Russian designers like Erté, who brought the art deco look to the Ziegfeld Follies; and Serge Soudeikine, who cut his design teeth with the Ballets Russes and later did the sets for the original 1935 production of Porgy and Bess.

American masters like Robert Edmond Jones, Norman Bel Geddes, Jo Mielziner, Oliver Smith and Ming Cho Lee are also represented. One display card tells the story of how Mielziner’s set drawing for the final act of Maxwell Anderson’s 1935 play Winterset was so impressive that Anderson changed his text to better correspond with Mielziner’s interpretation. I wish there had been more behind-the-sets stories like that one.

I also wished the exhibit had included more of what it calls the “ephemera” related to some of the productions like those in a display case near the Of Mice and Men drawing that include opening night tickets ($3.30 each for orchestra seats), Oenslager’s written account of a production meeting that Steinbeck attended, and a copy of the script, annotated by its female star Claire Luce in now-faded red pencil.

Another treat was being able to compare Soudeikine’s original 1935 set for Porgy and Bess with the one Juozas Junkas did for another production 30 years later. It all made me hungry for more exhibits like this one. And they'd be just as welcomed even when it’s not Tony season.

An Inadequate "Curtain Call"

Last week, I found myself with a couple of hours to spare between appointments and so I headed to one of my favorite places in the city: the exhibition gallery on the first floor of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. The shows they mount there are catnip for theater lovers like me who can’t get enough of showbiz lore. Still, I hadn’t rushed to see the current exhibition, “Curtain Call: Celebrating a Century of Women Designing for Live Performance,” when it opened last November. And apparently I’m not the only one. The New York Times, which usually reviews the Library’s exhibits, seems to have skipped this one.

I don’t know why the Times snubbed the show but I dragged my feet about going because I hate ghettoizing of any kind. Why, I thought indignantly, should accomplished female costume, set and lighting designers be lumped together by gender instead of recognized right alongside their lauded male counterparts? But that, said a plaque at the beginning of the exhibit, is exactly the problem: “The multifaceted talents of women that translate into design are tragically absent from the histories of art and performance.” This show, declared its curators Barbara Cohen-Stratyner and Carrie Robbins, aims to remedy those past wrongs by documenting the work of over 100 designing women.

These remarkable designers include pioneers like Caroline F. Siedle, the first woman recognized as a professional costume designer back around the turn of the last century; Aline Bernstein, the first to be admitted to the AFL’s Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers in the 1920s, and Lucinda Ballard, the recipient of the first Tony Award for design in 1947. But the show also celebrates the work of contemporary craftswomen like Sally Jacobs, who created the seminal white box and trapeze swings for Peter Brook’s legendary 1971 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the prolific Anna Louizos, whose work includes the sets for Avenue Q, High Fidelity, Curtains, In the Heights and White Christmas; and the longtime lighting whiz Peggy Eisenhauer.

There are sketches and fabric swatches as well as full costumes, architectural drawings and small models of sets in addition to photos that show how it all fits together. It was fascinating to see and read about all of them. Or it would have been if I could have concentrated on what I was seeing and reading. Instead, I had to fight to hear myself think over the continuous loops of two very loud and extremely annoying recordings that droned through the small space. The first, which lasted just under five minutes (I timed it) and then immediately repeated itself, served very little point, except to welcome visitors to the gallery. I would have preferred silent hospitality.

The second recording was more informative. It offered interesting tidbits about some of the items on display. The problem here is that all of the costumes are jammed onto two platforms. Small numbers are placed in front of each one but the information about them is on a collective label in the middle of the platform and the recorded tour is so random that so you have to run from one spot to another if you want to see the details that are being explained.

Over the next couple of months, the Library, in collaboration with the League of Professional Theatre Women, will be holding a series of events showcasing the work of some of the pioneers and offering interviews with some of the designers working today (click here for more information about the dates and times). That should compensate a bit. Still it's a sad commentary that a show created to honor innovative designers who haven't gotten their proper due is perhaps the most poorly designed exhibit the Library has ever presented. The talented women whose works are on display here deserve a much better curtain call than they're getting.