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    Museum of Broadway in Times Square Sets New Opening Date

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    The first institution dedicated to the history of the Great White Way and the artistry of its shows and theaters plans to welcome visitors next summer.After multiple delays, the first museum dedicated to telling the storied history of Broadway shows is now expected to open its doors next summer in the heart of the theater district.The Museum of Broadway, described as an interactive and immersive experience, was originally scheduled to debut in 2020. But its founders, Julie Boardman, a four-time Tony nominated producer, and Diane Nicoletti, founder of Rubik Marketing, said the project was delayed by the pandemic.“We really thought it would be this great idea that was a hybrid of both an experiential museum that’s very interactive and colorful and fun,” Nicoletti said in an interview, “as well as making sure that we were really getting the integrity of the history of Broadway, by including costumes and artifacts and historic elements as well.”The museum, at 145 West 45th Street, next door to the Lyceum Theater, will have three sections: The first, a map room, will lay out the migration of the city’s theaters from the financial district to Union Square, Herald Square and then, eventually, Times Square.The second area will be a timeline, stretching from Broadway’s birth in the mid-18th century to classic book musicals and follies to shows currently running onstage. Opening-night telegrams, lyric sketches and handwritten pieces of sheet music have been obtained with the help of the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.Along the timeline there will be installations created by visual artists and Broadway designers — think vibrant murals or interactive augmented reality experiences — that will explore some of the most important and influential shows. A room at the end of this section will highlight the shows playing on Broadway at that moment, and examine some of the 41 theaters that make up Broadway.A stage door will open into a backstage that deconstructs the making of a Broadway show. This last area is intended to honor the professionals — both onstage and off, actors and not — who ensure the shows go on.“It really paints the picture of how that all comes to be, and then honors all of the brilliant, talented creatives, and people who bring that to life,” said Boardman, one of the producer’s of a revival of “Company” this season.The Museum of Broadway was founded in collaboration with Playbill, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, the Al Hirschfeld Foundation, Concord Theatricals and Goodspeed Musicals. Tickets are expected to go on sale next year.“With Covid, and the industry being completely shut down, we’re really excited to be able to open our doors to everyone” next summer, Boardman said. More

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      Harvey Fierstein Donates $2.5 Million for Public Library Theater Lab

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      The gift from the writer and performer will help create an educational hub at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.Harvey Fierstein may be a multiple Tony-winning performer and writer. But he is also the son of a librarian, who still sometimes heads to the reading room when he needs to do homework.In 2005, when he was preparing to play Tevye in a revival of “Fiddler on the Roof,” he visited the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to watch a recording of an earlier Broadway revival featuring Zero Mostel, which is included in its famed Theater on Film and Tape Archive.“And don’t tell anyone, but I’ve also used the library,” he said in an interview, dropping his famous Brooklyn molasses-spiked-with-gravel voice, “for pleasure.”Now, Fierstein has donated $2.5 million to create a new “theater lab” at the library’s Lincoln Center campus, a dedicated educational space where students and the general public will be able to attend programs drawing on its vast holdings of photographs, scripts, recordings, set models, costumes and other materials.“Live theater is live theater — you do it and that’s it,” said Fierstein, 67. “Without a library collecting this stuff, our whole history disappears.”The lab, which will be named for Fierstein, is to be built in what is currently a 770-square-foot office space. In a statement, Jennifer Schantz, the library’s director, said it would be “an incubator of creativity” that embodies “the library’s mission to inspire lifelong learning using the theater division’s unparalleled collections.”The performing arts library holds material from shows Fierstein wrote or performed in, including “Torch Song Trilogy,” “La Cage aux Folles,” “Kinky Boots” and “Hairspray.” But as it happens, his personal papers are elsewhere.In 2005, before a home renovation, Fierstein placed his personal archive at Yale University. “So I needed to also do something for the performing arts library,” he said.In addition to the $2.5 million donation, the library has been named a beneficiary of the Harvey Fierstein Trust, which will allow it to receive additional support in the future.Fierstein said he hoped the lab would help people reimagine what theater can be after the pandemic, which shuttered the entire industry. He recalled how over the years, every time he did a revival of “Torch Song Trilogy,” for which he won his first two Tonys in 1983, he would call the downtown experimental theater La MaMa to ask if he could use their rehearsal space, which he described as a kind of spiritual home.“I would ask, ‘Can I borrow your basement?’” he said. “I thought of it as a kind of womb. That’s what I think of this space as — a womb for something wonderful. You just don’t know what’s going to be born out of it.” More