Everyone loves a backstage story, and none so much as the one about the brilliant but unsung talent who finally makes it into the spotlight. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the League of Professional Theatre Women bring that long-deserved moment to 140 of those stories in Curtain Call: Celebrating a Century of Women Designing for Live Performance.
Featuring treasures from the Library's archives, Curtain Call is a multi-media exhibition crackling with creative verve and bursting at the seams with the dazzling works of the little-noted women without whose costume, set, and lighting designs and innovations the show could not have gone on in North America for the past hundred-plus years. This is the stuff that makes the audience gasp in awe. This is the opportunity to meet those responsible for taking our breath away.
Curtain Call will be on view November 17, 2008 through May 2, 2009 in the Library's Donald and Mary Oenslager Gallery. Admission is free. Workshops, films screenings, and a full slate of public programs will be scheduled for early in the year. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, is located at 40 Lincoln Center Plaza. For further information, telephone 212.870.1630 or visit www.nypl.org.
The exhibition was conceptualized and co-curated by award-winning costume designer Carrie Robbins (whose designs for the upcoming Broadway production of Irving Berlin's White Christmas are included in the show) in collaboration with noted performance historian Barbara Cohen-Stratyner, Judy R. and Alfred A. Rosenberg Curator of Exhibitions for the Performing Arts Library.
Curtain Call showcases the strong presence and progress of women within a field still dominated by men. In spite of limited opportunities, women designers exerted significant influence on every major artistic movement since 1890: from Caroline Siedle's costume illustrations for The Belle of New York (the 1897 precursor to Guys and Dolls) to Anna Louizos' 2008 Tony®-nominated set design for In the Heights; from the vast array of sketches from the staff designers who devised the never-ending parade of glamorous, exotic, and downright bizarre characters (dancing hotdogs in bowlers, anyone?) who strutted the revue stages of the Hippodrome, the Roxy and the Greenwich Village Follies to the grandeur of Tanya Moiseiwitsch's masks for the Guthrie's House of Atreus; from the Neighborhood Playhouse to the Metropolitan Opera House; the chiaroscuro first moment of modern dance in America to the Golden Age of Broadway and the great regional stages. The exhibition also acknowledges the women artisans and business owners with whom designers collaborate to manifest the magic they devise.
Some names might ring a bell among theatre and fashion buffs-Aline Bernstein, Theoni V. Aldredge, Bonnie Cashin, Joan Personette, Irene Sharaff, Patricia Zipprodt. Others less clearly or not at all-Beatrice Irwin, Gladys Monkhouse, Cora MacGeachy, Katharine H. Lovell, Kate Drain Lawson, or the once-dominant triumvirate known as Motley. But their trailblazing work and contributions to high-profile productions will be familiar to most.
In addition to the moving and immensely fun history lesson here, Curtain Call takes visitors into the heart of the creative process. "How do you turn a human actor into a believable lizard? How do you fashion armor that will move with a Fosse-flexed spine? Or make Peter Pan's shadow disappear?" asks Jacqueline Z. Davis, The Barbara G. and Lawrence A. Fleischman Executive Director of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. "Design for the stage takes into account so many unusual variables and challenges. This is a rare opportunity for the public to see the experimental passes designers take along the way to their ingenious solutions to problems of theme, concept, character, and sheer physical possibility. In some cases, they can see the trial-and-error and the finished product in the same room."
