‘It’s kind of crazy there wasn’t one’: inside the new Museum of Broadway

It is a patchwork of colour and craft, its 8in squares celebrating productions from the 1980s – Annie, Cats, Chess, Carousel, Les Misérables, Macbeth, Me and My Girl, Oh! Calcutta!, Starlight Express. One square, for the musical The Rink, is signed by stars Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera.

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But the Aids quilt, among more than a thousand objects and photographs displayed at the Museum of Broadway in New York, is also a mourning shroud. It was handcrafted by wardrobe teams of various productions to express grief and support for a generation of artists devastated by the HIV epidemic.

The quilt stops you short because the museum, which opened last month just off Times Square with timed tickets from $39, has a tone more sweet than bitter, more Mary Poppins than Sweeney Todd, trumpeting upbeat statistics – 14.77 million people attended a Broadway show in the 2018-19 season – rather than bemoaning high ticket prices or audiences dominated by tourists.

Just over a year after the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened in Los Angeles, American theatre now has a shrine of its own. “It’s kind of crazy that there wasn’t one,” says co-founder Julie Boardman, 40. “Broadway has such a long history and the fact that there wasn’t a place that celebrates Broadway and the people who make it in Times Square is mind-blowing.”

But behind the glitz, look hard enough and there are reminders that Broadway – now consisting of 41 theatres – is a trouper with the battle scars to prove it. Its torch song could be I’m Still Here from Stephen Sondheim’s musical Follies – brassy, stoical, weathered, world weary, whisky-voiced, indestructible.

Aids hit its community harder than most in the 1980s and early 1990s. “You would go into rehearsal and before you could get to previews, friends, colleagues and co-workers would have disappeared,” reads an anonymous quotation in the museum. “People became sick and landed in the hospital. Some would come out, many more would not.”

This coincided with a British invasion: musicals such as Starlight Express in 1987 and The Phantom of the Opera in 1988. The recent documentary film On Broadway makes the case that this was a cause of resentment among Broadway folk at their moment of maximum vulnerability.

When the great American play about Aids survival did arrive in the shape of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, it first took flight at London’s National Theatre in 1992 before transferring Broadway the following year. It took a few more years for Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent, inspired by the opera La Bohème but swapping tuberculosis for Aids, to take Broadway by storm in 1996. (Rent is celebrated here by a room that recreates part of the East Village, complete with Mark’s costume and props such as a film projector and payphone.)

There had been other crises, as detailed in the museum’s “map room”. The Great Depression of the 1930s forced many theatres to close or be turned into cinemas. New York’s financial crisis in the 1970s saw Times Square become notorious for prostitution, violent crime and mugging – queuing for returns was a dicey business. Ticket sales slumped in a world now familiar from films such as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.

But as the museum notes, mayors used eminent domain laws to condemn and take control of decrepit buildings and rezoning laws to drive out the sex trade. Mayor Rudy Giuliani was able to convince Disney to sign a 99-year lease on the New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street, the former home of Ziegfeld’s Follies which had fallen to rack and ruin. It became home to The Lion King for nearly nine years.

Meanwhile a nonprofit, The New 42nd Street, oversaw the redevelopment of seven other neglected venues, attracting hotels, restaurants and retailers to the area. Today’s Broadway is cleaner, safer and more touristy. There may be some who miss the edgier, grittier version in spite of themselves.

Calamity struck again on 12 March 2020 when Broadway went dark because of the coronavirus pandemic and endured, at more than 15 months, the longest shutdown in its history. It tentatively reopened on 26 June 2021 with Springsteen on Broadway but several productions never returned.

The pandemic also closed an Irish pub off in a prime location steps away from Times Square. In August last year the lease was acquired by Julie Boardman, a Tony award-winning producer, Diane Nicoletti, a marketing agency founder who has created “fan experiences” including for Game of Thrones. They set about turning it into a museum spanning 26,000 sq ft over four floors (they decline to reveal how much it all cost).

“We came up with the idea over five years ago and we’ve been working on it and figuring out what the story was that we could tell,” said Boardman. “We’ve focused this idea on we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Had people not pioneered and broken ground and taken risks, we wouldn’t have the art form that we have today. The Hamiltons and the Wickeds: none of those would be possible had all these people earlier not tried and experimented.”

The museum is organised chronologically and highlights more than 500 individual productions from the 18th century to the present (the first theatres took root in what is known today as the Financial District and Chinatown before the industry moved north).

After galleries that mark the influence of European artists, minstrelsy and vaudeville, there are individual rooms created by scenic designers devoted to landmark Broadway shows. It is a provocative statement about which qualify for “the canon” and which do not. It is also proof that, unlike London, the signature art form of New York is the musical rather than the straight play.

Enter a room devoted to 1927’s Show Boatand you hear Paul Robeson sing Ol’ Man River; move on through and the sound is mixed with the sound of Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ from Oklahoma! The latter’s room features fake corn standing tall and photos from the original 1943 production. Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner later described Oklahoma! as “one of the few real, genuine, 14-carat, true-blue milestones ever called a milestone”.

Dense panels of text acknowledge nights of miracles and wonder on the postwar stage: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and many more. There are welcome, long-neglected stories of Black theatre in this period. But don’t expect to see Miller’s secret stage notes or Lorraine Hansberry’s favourite typewriter. The musicals march on.

A room dedicated to West Side Story recreates Doc’s Drugstore in impressive period detail: a cash register, ads pinned to a noticeboard, Hershey’s cocoa and dozens of other products on the shelves, a rack for fresh cigars, big jars of candy, a wall-mounted rotary pay phone, a jukebox with handwritten titles: Jet Song; Tonight; Cool; I Feel Pretty; Gee, Officer Krupke and so on.

But the star object is a blue and yellow Jets jacket that was worn by the actor Don Grilley, who took over from Larry Kert, who originated the role of Tony when the show began on Broadway in 1957. The jacket was donated to the museum by Grilley’s widow after hanging in a closet for decades.

The timeline continues with Fiddler on the Roof, Hello, Dolly! (telegrams received by lead actress Carol Channing are displayed), Cabaret, Hair, Company (visitors can step on the set of the recent production that starred Katrina Lenk), The Wiz (“Stephen Sondheim confessed that The Wiz was his favorite show, because ‘it’s the one show which makes you feel better when you come out of it than you did when you walked in.’”)

Other highlights include original costumes and Robin Wagner’s original set model for 1975’s A Chorus Line, the unmistakable red dress from 1977’s Annie, the costume worn by Meryl Streep in her Broadway debut in Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ at the Lincoln Center in 1975 and a chandelier installation by German artist Ulli Böhmelmann consisting of 13,917 crystals in honour of 1988’s The Phantom of the Opera.

There is also a wig worn by Patti LuPone in Evita, masks from The Lion King, puppets from Avenue Q, a recreation of Max Bialystock’s office in The Producers, knee-high red-heeled boots from Kinky Boots, the last shirt and arm cast worn by Sam Primack in Dear Evan Hansen earlier this year, a 5ft-wide scale set model for Wicked (including 300 seated audience members) and a pair of boots worn by Lin-Manuel Miranda in Hamilton in 2015.

Boardman’s career as a two-time Tony award-winning producer certainly helped when it came to gathering the material, most of which is on loan from artists, producers and organisations. A chance meeting in the street with the producer of Hadestown on the street secured the costume of a departing actor. Her co-founder and old friend from college, Nicoletti, has a personal favourite that dates much further back.

The 40-year-old says: “I love the Ziegfeld Follies early 1900s dresses that Disney Theatrical is loaning us from the New Amsterdam. They were basically found in the theatre that was decrepit and these lasted through that. Those are pretty magnificent given how old they are but also how beautiful and colourful and opulent. When you’re seeing black-and-white photos, you don’t realise what they truly are.”

The final floor of the museum includes a special exhibition about Al Hirschfeld, a caricaturist renowned for his black-and-white portraits of Broadway stars such as Streep, Sondheim, Minnelli, Julie Andrews, John Leguizamo and Barbra Streisand. But the permanent display is entitled The Making of a Broadway Show, designed in lavish detail by David Rockwell to take visitors backstage for an insight into the work of stage managers; dramatists; lighting, projection and sound professionals; and marketing, press and advertising agents.

Boardman comments: “There’s a place for you on Broadway if that’s where you want to work and you don’t have to be an actor. There’s so many places that you could work, like behind the scenes.

“But also, as you’re walking through the timeline, you get this real sense of mentorship, like passing of the torch from creative to creative. There’s so many people who have touched Broadway but there’s a lot of mentorship that goes into it. One generation inspires the next, inspires the next, but we’re always taking new creative leaps and bounds.”

• The Museum of Broadway is open now in New York