RECONSTRUCTING THE PRODUCTION: THE CHALLENGE OF RESEARCHING THE AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATER IN ARCHIVES PDF Free Download
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RECONSTRUCTING THE PRODUCTION:
THE CHALLENGE OF RESEARCHING THE AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATER
IN ARCHIVES
by
MATT SCHICKER
A capstone submitted to the
Graduate School - Camden
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
In partial fulfillment of the requirements
For the degree of
Master of Arts
Graduate Program in Liberal Studies
Written under the direction of
Dr. Greg Salyer
And approved by
______________________________________________
Dr. Greg Salyer
Camden, New Jersey
August 2025
ii
CAPSTONE ABSTRACT
Reconstructing the Production:
The Challenge of Researching the American Musical Theatre in Archives
By MATT SCHICKER
Capstone Director:
Dr. Greg Salyer
The amalgam of artistic and technical components involved in the realization of a
theatrical text in performance – the text’s “full expression” – constitutes a complex whole
called “the production.” Performing arts archives preserve documents, artifacts, and
sometimes audiovisual recordings of original productions of works of the American
Musical Theater, but these fragments do not reproduce what German philosopher Walter
Benjamin termed the “aura” of a production, leaving a gap in the archival record. At the
theoretical level, performance is considered ephemeral due to its temporality, and some
scholars have argued that documenting performance in a way that evokes the authenticity
of the original event is impossible because performance “disappears” as it takes place
before a unique audience. For some theorists, the missing presence of bodies (of
performers, of audience) is an acutely limiting factor of performance archives. Others
posit that past performance may be reactivated through representations. This paper
combines theoretical analysis of performance documentation with archival research into
specific Broadway productions to explore the question of what effect this lack of
“complete” documentation of seminal works of the American Musical Theater repertory
has on researchers, historians, and student artists. Adapting theater professor Matthew
Reason’s image of an “archive of detritus” left on the stage at the end of a performance,
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this paper proposes that technology-enabled presentations of archival documentation and
objects emanating from past theatrical productions can bring researchers closer to the
experience of their reactivated aura. By reproducing moments of movement and other
sensory evocations of original productions through immersive presentations of digitized
primary source materials, archives users could learn more about the past artistic
achievement and audience impact of these eminent multidisciplinary works, and
invaluable cultural knowledge – currently at risk – may be preserved.
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Introduction
The American Musical Theater is a significant art form that has emerged from the
culture of the United States of America (Library of Congress). As with any form of
human communication and expression, scholars want to study this genre's most
prominent works to investigate the artistry of the author(s) and other creative and
technical contributors for insight into their craft and processes, to learn more about these
works and the artform overall, and to assess what makes them culturally significant. To
do this, researchers, historians, and students rely on performing arts archives to preserve
documentation of these works in past performances, facilitate their study, and create
presentations to display their holdings. Documenting performing arts, however, is a
notoriously complicated proposition. Some academics, led by Peggy Phelan, whose 1993
book Unmarked: The Politics of Performance has been influential on scholarly
explorations of the subject, argue that performance “disappears” the instant after it
“appears,” and therefore documentation of the live performing arts event is theoretically
impossible. For audiences, the ephemerality of performance is of positive value; they
treasure their special, one-of-a-kind, in-person experience that, after the event, exists
exclusively in their memories. The same is true for some artists, who prize their work's
rare, momentary, “live” exposure to exclusive audiences (Melzer 148). However, as
Rodrigue Villeneuve points out in Canadian Theatre Review, “the same is not true for
journalists, scholars, or historians, who must speak about the performance. They will
want to retain something of it. Something material, some tangible trace” (Villeneuve 32).
For those seeking to understand the impact of a musical's artistry on the audience at its
dawn, to appreciate deeply the hybrid of crafts that it represents, and to analyze its
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machine-like workings, the ephemerality of performance is a problem rather than a
positive. Christopher Innes, Katherine Carlstrom, and Scott Fraser, writing in Twentieth-
Century British and American Theatre: A Critical Guide to Archives, concur with
Villeneuve and explain why this situation has created a conundrum: “The study of theatre
now requires the evaluation of what actually occurred on the stage...it is necessary to
reconstruct the original production of a piece” (Innes et al ix, italics mine).
If, per Phelan, performance itself technically cannot be documented and, per
Innes, the study of theater requires reconstruction of “the original production” of a piece,
can the archival traces that remain after such a production suffice for the efforts of
researchers and historians? Can they accurately assess, for example, what qualities made
the original 1964 production of the musical Fiddler on the Roof so impactful that the
property has subsequently been revived five times on Broadway (only Porgy and Bess,
The Threepenny Opera, and Show Boat have received more revivals in that lofty arena
(Culwell-Block)) and produced 56 times at the most prominent regional theaters across
the country (Reside 19) (not to mention having received hundreds of productions and
thousands of performances around the world and been adapted for an Oscar-winning
film)? This paper argues that fragmented archival collections fail to preserve what
German philosopher and critical theorist Walter Benjamin termed the “aura” of a work of
art – the work of art in this case being an original production of a musical on Broadway –
creating significant gaps in cultural preservation that emerging technologies might help
address.
For this discussion, I will combine theoretical analysis of performance
documentation with archival research into specific Broadway productions. I will borrow
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theater professor Matthew Reason's proposal that an “archive of detritus” left on the stage
at the end of performance represents its past “appearance” for those who were present to
symbolize the current fragmented state of theatrical archives. I will use this image to
propose that individual archival records are missing the aura which emanated from the
original, cohesive production of these works for those who were not present. “Aura,” as
conceived by Benjamin and described by humanities professor Miriam Bratu Hansen as
“an elusive phenomenal substance, ether, or halo that surrounds a person or object of
perception, encapsulating their individuality and authenticity” (Hansen 340), emanates
from the whole of a “production” of a work, not from separated parts, static records, or
discrete traces. Thus, the absence of aura of theatrical productions in archives has created
a problematic gap in the preservation of this essential American culture.
To illuminate this topic, I will survey scholarly literature on the subjects of
documenting performance and “fixing” it in archives, then provide a framework for the
concepts of “the production” and “the original production.” I will follow this by
providing background on the repertory of the American Musical Theater to define the
scope of the works discussed and describe the current state of archival documentation of
productions of the artform’s central achievements. Finally, I will discuss and analyze my
findings, ultimately suggesting that the potential use of technology to “resurrect” the
“ghost” of a past production – its aura, per Benjamin – might provide scholars with as
much primary source context as possible regarding the most prominent works of the
repertory.
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Theoretical Perspectives/Literature Survey
Live performance is an evanescent phenomenon, which raises the question of how
to capture and “fix” it for the archive and whether it is possible to archive performance at
all. Many cultural and archival scholars and practitioners have addressed and debated the
theoretical implications of performance documentation, and as the nature of performance
and its preservation evolves with new technologies, the discussion continues.
Stanford University professor Peggy Phelan's Unmarked: The Politics of
Performance (1993) is one of the most cited theoretical writings about performance as it
pertains to performing arts documentation. Chapter 7 of the volume, titled “The ontology
of performance: representation without reproduction,” begins with a bold statement that
calls into question the very idea of documenting performance for the archive:
Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded,
documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of
representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance...
Performance's being...becomes itself through disappearance (Phelan 146).
For Phelan, the uniqueness and ephemerality of performance means that it “plunges into
visibility—in a maniacally charged present—and disappears into memory” (Phelan 148),
ultimately leaving no trace that could be reproduced, which she believes is its greatest
strength. In Phelan's view, video documentation of performance can prompt a memory,
but the document misses the “traceless” presence of bodies and thus becomes something
else: a mediated representation, but not the performance. Likewise, writing about
performance “invoke[s] the rules of the written document and thereby alter[s] the event
itself” (Phelan 148), and so is unsatisfactory as a record of the actual thing. Both
audiovisual documentation and writing about the “undocumentable” transform
performance into other, non-performance/non-”live” media.
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Phelan also focuses on the power dynamics at play in the exchange between
performer and spectator, with the spectator's gaze having the ability to determine any
“fixed meaning of the (floating) signifier” in performance (Phelan 150). This performer-
spectator dynamic resists the “fixing” of documentation. Spectatorship is the primary
subject of professor of English and theater and performance theorist Marco Pustianaz's
Surviving Theatre: The Living Archive of Spectatorship (2022). Contrasting with Phelan's
view that live performance cannot be documented, Pustianaz considers videotaped
performance to be the live event's “digital double,” an alternative to “liveness,” and
suggests that this means of archiving performance is both a “temporary measure” and,
concerning the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown and the digital inventiveness it provoked,
potentially a “means of sustainability in the future” (Pustianaz 3). However, he sees
spectatorship itself as an archival technology, one that digital archives threaten as they
“subtly encroach upon spectatorial agency by undermining...memorialisation” (Pustianaz
3). This perspective builds on Phelan's conviction that live performance and (digital)
representation of it are two different animals and that the latter is not a reproduction of
the former. However, Pustianaz, unlike Phelan, frames this deficiency in positive terms:
“Performance is the undocumentable – it is the residue that is not going to be saved by
the [digital] document” (Pustianaz 5). In other words, spectatorship is key to the
durability of theater; if the archive could reproduce the live event, spectatorship would be
unnecessary, and the presence of an audience would be irrelevant.
“Presence” is an essential factor of live performance in the works of Benjamin as
well, most notably in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935).
In it, Benjamin proposes that the uniqueness of a work of art that establishes its
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“authenticity” is based on its “presence in time and space,” which is not technically
reproducible (Benjamin 218). However, as with Pustianaz, Benjamin acknowledges that
copies of a work of art can substitute for the authentic originals, and when such a copy
“meet[s] the beholder in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced”
(Benjamin 219). So, a reproduction of a performance or representation of a production in
the archives is not authentic, but, for the researcher, it may reactivate the event that took
place in (another) time and space.
Temporal and spatial matters figure importantly into Benjamin's concept of aura
as formulated in his 1931 essay, “Little History of Photography.” Regarding still
photography, Benjamin writes:
What is aura, actually? A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or
semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be... Every day the need to
possess the object in close-up in the form of a picture, or rather a copy, becomes
more imperative. And the difference between the copy...and the original picture is
unmistakable. Uniqueness and duration are as intimately intertwined in the latter as
are transience and reproducibility in the former (Benjamin 518-519).
For Benjamin, the unique original emanates an aura that the copy cannot reproduce.
However, even if not technically reproducible, aura is not confined to the past, either. In
the 2008 essay “Benjamin's Aura,” Miriam Bratu Hansen separates Benjamin's concept
of aura from the untouchable past and describes it as something that touches us now:
“The indexical dimension of aura's relation to the past is not necessarily a matter of
continuity or tradition; more often than not, it is a past whose ghostly apparition projects
into the present and... “wounds” the beholder” (Hansen 341). This helps explain the
importance of a production's aura for researchers: Aura brings the past, in its uniqueness
and temporality, to us in the present, affecting us in some measure as it did its physically
present audience.
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Prolific performance studies and popular music professor Philip Auslander, along
with Phelan, is among the most cited theorists regarding performing arts documentation.
In the article “The Performativity of Performance Documentation” (2006), Auslander,
contrasting with Phelan, Pustianaz, and Benjamin, proposes that the presence of an
audience is of no significance to performance documentation, as “the act of documenting
an event as a performance is what constitutes it as such” (Auslander 5). For Auslander,
when it comes to documenting performance, intention is everything. He states that the
purpose of such documentation is to capture an artist's creation and suggests that this
could be of the “live” or produced in a studio since the supposed authenticity of the live
event “may or may not be evident from the documentation” (Auslander 8). This view
shifts performance documentation from the tradition of ethnography, which values the
capturing of “events,” to the tradition of the fine arts, which values “art reproduction”
sans audience (Auslander 6). Auslander writes that this lack of dependence on the “live”
for performance documentation makes the act of the documentation itself performative.
Auslander raises the issues of authorial intent, originality, and authenticity around
documentation of the “live.” But while Benjamin suggests that unreproducible aura is the
stamp of authenticity, Auslander finds that authenticity depends on documentation of “an
artist's aesthetic project or sensibility and for which we are the present audience”
(Auslander 9), not necessarily on a work’s debut production for a past audience.
Authenticity, presence, and ephemerality concerning performing arts archives are
issues highlighted in NYU performance studies professor Diana Taylor's The Archive and
the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), another frequently-
cited volume. Taylor, like Benjamin, describes performance as a modal way of seeing
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and connects this to spiritual invocation practices that “[make] visible (for an instant,
live, now) that which is always already there: the ghosts, the tropes, the scenarios that
structure our individual and collective life” (Taylor 143). However, this “embodied
memory” in the form of live performance “exceeds the archive's ability to capture it”
(Taylor 20), so the repetition of the embodied and performed acts serves to both “record”
and “transmit” the knowledge. For Taylor, the emphasis in Western art on originality and
newness – on the “ownership” by a “creator” of expressed aesthetic ideas which she sees
as part of an ongoing performance practice rather than a new, original conception –
ignores the transmission of knowledge that takes place through performance and repeated
embodied acts, which has taken place outside of Euro-American culture. Taylor raises the
question of why attempting to evoke the aura of a past production in archives is desirable
for researchers and historians, as her definitions of “authentic” and “evidence” are not
rooted in the same institutional values as, say, Douglas Reside, curator of the Billy Rose
Theatre Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and author of
Fixing the Musical: How Technologies Shaped the Broadway Repertory, who will be
discussed below, and the aforementioned Christopher Innes et al.
Performance studies professor Rebecca Schneider's Performing Remains: Art and
War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (2011) is also concerned with performative
archiving through repetitive acts. However, Schneider finds the recollected memories of
performance transmitted through oral histories are not just contributions to an archive of
performance; they are a “performance-based archive,” a distinction lost in the positioning
of live event and archival documentation as antithetical (Schneider 100). For that matter,
according to Schneider, performance itself is an archive that “sets in play” a preceding
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text; it is in this way that performance itself is a “live” record of the text (Schneider 90), a
position that contrasts with Phelan and Auslander's views that live performance is not a
record. For Schneider, archival logic devalues both the “live” and the oral memory of it
as effective preservation of text through performative (ritual) repetition, causing the
document to be advanced instead. In the preeminence of the “fixed” document, Schneider
sees the legacies of patriarchy and colonialism, a view she shares with Taylor. Schneider
ultimately posits that the archive itself is “a live performance space” and that
performance is “an archive for the revenant” (Schneider 110), drawing fascinating
theoretical connections between the archives and performance.
Theater professor Matthew Reason also has observed that documentation of
performance replaces the “live” in archives, which creates a problem for those seeking to
reproduce the “live” show's aura. In his article “Archive or Memory? The Detritus of
Live Performance” (2003), Reason identifies Phelan's theoretical “disappearance” of
performance as problematic for journalists, scholars, and historians, a position I share.
Some material, “tangible trace” of performance is required to establish the authenticity of
a performance document. Reason argues that, in documenting the realization of a text in
performance, it is possible to see “the transformation of a valuation of live performance's
ephemerality into a fear of ephemerality and a subsequent valuation of documentation
and the document” (Reason 83). Reason explains that this transformation results in the
archive replacing memory, ultimately becoming the authoritative, accessible, objective
record of the original, a notion that digital curator Douglas Reside, who will be discussed
further down, suggests as well. However, Reason, unlike Reside, who bases the primacy
of the document on its legal authority in the realm of copyright law, looks to a record to
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“[recreate] not the appearance of the performance, but the experience of the
performance” (Reason 87, emphasis mine). Reason's logic leads him to suggest that
debris left on the stage at the end of a performance – traces of the event such as props,
costumes, and set pieces which the audience associates with what they have just seen –
are an immediate archive in itself, one that reflects the “randomness and selectiveness...of
the audience's memory of the production” (Reason 88).
“Leavings” of all kinds connected to performing arts productions are also
discussed as valuable by other archival scholars. Kathryn Harvey, archivist at the
University of Guelph's Archival and Special Collections, former archives specialist at
Dalhousie University, and author of “Tangible Archives of the Intangible, or Archiving
the Ineluctable Modality of the Theatrical” (2012), makes a direct and passionate call for
(Canadian) archivists to include documentation of the full range of creative and
administrative activities in theater archives, lest cultural history be lost. Citing an
inventory of items recommended for archiving – from drafts of play texts to stage
manager scripts; from design renderings and technical plans to objects such as props and
costumes; from contracts and marketing materials to meeting minutes – Harvey suggests,
echoing Reason, that the “detritus” of a stage production should be preserved in addition
to videos and photographs of live performances (Harvey 62). She states that, for
performing arts archivists, context and the human-artifact interaction are crucial and that
the variety of documents, objects, and other media that are part of the ideal theatrical
archive makes for a special challenge (Harvey 63).
Harvey's view that a mixture of records is essential to preserving performance in
archives is shared by digital curator Sarah Jones and her University of Glasgow
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colleagues Daisy Abbott and Seamus Ross, who, in their article “Redefining the
Performing Arts Archive” (2009), discuss alternative methods of documenting
performance in archives as well. These authors agree with Auslander and Schneider that
archiving is performance since records are “surrogates that provide a window onto past
moments that can never be recreated, and users interact with these records in a
performance to reinterpret this past” (Jones et al 1). They write: “In order to accurately
represent performance, such representations should do more than merely document the
facts...[they] echo its nature and inspire in their users the experience of the event” (Jones
et al 2, emphasis mine). This description echoes the notion that a production's aura is
essential to understanding the nature of the work it “sets in play,” to borrow Schneider's
phrase. To answer the question of how the record can convey this experience, Jones et al
argue that various remnants of the immaterial have their own value and that archivists
should bring these together to create a fuller record of performance. Doing this requires a
more flexible approach to performance archiving that does not consider the record of
performance to be “fixed.” Such an approach brings together traditionally authoritative
“enduring material” and the ephemeral, which “requires presence for the transmission of
meaning and is therefore perceived as inaccessible and subjective,” on equal terms to
represent the nature of the performance (Jones et al 4). In my discussion and analysis of
this topic, I will expand on this idea of a partnership of the enduring and the ephemeral to
suggest possible new (digital) methods of presenting documentation and archival
materials of theatrical productions.
The digital also is the focus of Sarah Bay-Cheng, dean of the School of the Arts,
Media, Performance & Design at York University and professor of theater, performance
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studies, and media at several East Coast colleges and universities, who proposes that
performance history is implanted within digital media (Bay-Cheng 28). Supporting
Pustianaz's prediction, Bay-Cheng, in “Theater Is Media: Some Principles for a Digital
Historiography of Performance” (2012), theorizes that digital documentation may
“[displace] the primacy of the live performing bodies” (Bay-Cheng 30) and that “our
modes of knowledge are inextricably affected by the technologies we use to capture,
store, and disseminate information” (Bay-Cheng 32). She counters Taylor's argument
(and also positions taken by Phelan, Pustianaz, and Benjamin) that performance requires
presence and thus cannot be captured – for example, on video – by describing digital
documentation as presence and also as performance (Bay-Cheng 31). For Bay-Cheng, the
digitizing of historical documents in archives is “reperformance of documentation,” and
participation in digital media – for example, social networks – is a “theatrical
performance, including careful attention to scripts, costumes, and audience response”
(Bay-Cheng 32). For Bay-Cheng, the ubiquity of digital documentation erases the
difference between the presumed opposites of “live” and “recorded” and engages us in
media exchanges that create the “presence” that performance requires.
Maria Mercè Saumell Vergés of the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona agrees with
Bay-Cheng that digital records of performance can be rich for scholars. In “Layered
Documentation—On the Process of Documenting Contemporary Dance and Physical
Theatre” (2015), Vergés specifies that public presentation is the “end result” of the larger
process of “rehearsals, repetitions, and re-interpretations,” and that together these
constitute a performance, along with other records like costumes, printed programs,
interviews, etc. (Vergés 457). Therefore, digital performance documentation in the
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archives should include “hybrid media as well as all the networking possibilities” that can
“demonstrate multiple viewing perspectives” to “capture motion 'in process'” (Vergés
457). Recalling Benjamin, Vergés suggests that digital performance archives can evoke
the aura of the instant in which performance occurs (Vergés 459).
The ubiquity of digital documentation inspired the collection Documenting
Performance: The Context and Processes of Digital Curation and Archiving (2017),
which comprises 18 articles sharing the theme of documenting and archiving
performance, organized in four main categories: contexts for documenting performance,
ways of documenting performance, “from documents to documenting,” and
“documenting bodies in motion.” Several of these articles are germane to the question of
what an appropriate performing arts archive should be, and they employ a variety of
theoretical approaches in their discussions.
In the “Ways of Documenting a Performance” section, the article “Translating
Performance: Desire, Intention and Interpretation in Photographic Documents,” by Helen
Newall, Amy Skinner, and Allan Taylor, discusses two-dimensional photographic images
as “representations of the live moment” (Sant 93), which raises the question of whether
this makes photographs an archive of performance. The authors note that the photograph,
with its gap between the moment the image is “written” by photography and its later
“performance” of reenacting that moment at a later time, is “missing text.” This
incompleteness explains why static photography, even as it is “radiating motion from the
captured instant,” only partially embodies live performance (Sant 110). The “capture” of
the moment through photography is valuable to performance documentation yet still not
representative because it is missing the “text” and, I would add, the continuity and tempo
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of various types of movement within a production. The shortcomings of the photographic
capture reflect the need for scholars to assemble all the available documents and
components of the production, as suggested by Jones et al (and Vergés and Harvey),
including not only production photos but the text that the production “sets in play,” to use
Schneider's phrase.
Newer technology than photography inspires academics to consider fresh ways
performance might be captured. In another article collected in Documenting
Performance, “Documenting Audience Experience: Social Media as Lively
Stratification,” lecturer and practice-based theater scholar Joanna Bucknall and cultural
writer Kirsty Sedgman propose that social media platforms are where audience
documentation of live performances endure “as petrified fossils [that] continually
perform an authorizing function on behalf of the disappeared event” (Sant 115). They
write that, in line with the theories of Auslander, Jones et al, and, to some degree, Bay-
Cheng, the documentation itself “performs” the legacy of the live performance and thus
becomes an official narrative of it after the fact (Sant 115). Audiences have the primary
experience of the moment of live performance and the secondary experience of
remembering “liveness” through social media interactions such as live-”tweeting.” This
memory work in the form of social media posts that serve as a variation on oral histories
becomes a vivid element of the archival record of performance and connects to the non-
Western methods of archiving such as oral traditions and performance practice discussed
by Taylor. It also is reminiscent of the insight of Reside, to be discussed shortly, that a
widely seen and distributed audiovisual production capture can become the accepted
“record” of a theatrical property, even if it is not fully representative of the original
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production. Bucknall and Sedgman's social media memory work, like the oral histories
discussed by Reason and Schneider, can be considered primary source material for
researchers and historians, which, even if subjective and incomplete, are key accounts of
past events.
In the third section of Documenting Performance, “From Documents to
Documenting,” UK-based researchers Daisy Abbott and Claire Read, using the National
Theatre's NT Live cinema broadcast of the company's 2015 production of Shakespeare's
Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch (“CumberHamlet”) as their case study, discuss
pre-textual, post-textual, and con-textual functions of documents created in connection
with the “text” of a digital livestream of a play (“paradocumentation”). Cinema
broadcasts of the “live” challenge the notion that actor and audience presence are the
defining qualities of performance, which Taylor also discusses in her writings. As records
of the live performance transmitted by the National Theatre, these high-definition digital
audiovisual captures complicate traditional notions of archives. This is because these
captures provide more clarity and detail in the image than what audience members who
were present for the “live” performance in the venue where the production was
assembled could have observed with the naked eye, particularly if they were seated far
from the stage or their view was obscured. Such captures provide more information for
researchers, just as high-resolution, 3D images of archival artifacts can allow the close-up
study of an otherwise untouchable object (Glitch Studios).
Turning to academic literature covering the specific topic of theatrical
performance and production in the archives, two volumes are particularly elucidating.
Douglas L. Reside's genre-specific analysis, Fixing the Musical: How Technologies
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Shaped the Broadway Repertory (2023), explicitly addresses the subject of documenting
musical theater for the archives. In the book, Reside, curator of the Billy Rose Theatre
Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, an institution that
holds extensive performing arts archival collections, discusses various ways a production
of a musical may be “fixed,” as in captured for the archives and posterity. Reside
highlights the interesting fact that a recording of a live performance, not a live
performance itself, is the performance recognized and protected by U.S. copyright law,
which gives credence to an audiovisual recording being considered a valuable, high-
status document of performance. Reside explains that this means that a technology-
facilitated capture of a theatrical production, imperfect and incomplete as it may be,
becomes the basis on which a work enters the repertory: A (larger) audience that was not
present at the live performance comes to know and love it through the recording (Reside
23). Reside also discusses how recordings of “opening nights” could serve to establish
authorial intent by providing what the Library of America defines as “the first accepted,
published text” (Reside 69). However, Reside notes that a later version of the text of a
musical “that is already safely fixed in a tangible medium” is more realistic for
establishing a single version to refer to as “the original” than opening nights since, for
instance, the first edition of a published libretto is evidence of what early readers read (if
not what early audience's saw/heard) (Reside 70-71). However, the fact that musicals are
designed to be seen, not read, ultimately becomes the grounds for Reside to suggest, like
Innes (below), that video recordings “more fully capture at least one interpretation of the
realized work.” It is these versions, when available, that shape the textual history of the
property (Reside 160).
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The legacy of theatrical works in archives is the sole subject of Christopher Innes,
Katherine Carlstrom, and Scott Fraser's Twentieth-Century British and American
Theatre: A Critical Guide to Archives as well. Their book is a tool “intended to help
researchers track down such scattered materials” as primary-source manuscripts and
ephemera representing theatrical works in the U.S. and England (Innes et al x). The
Guide's extensive cross-referencing among its 175 entries confirms that it is collaborative
forces (writers, directors, designers, etc.) that together realize (and influence) a playscript
or musical theater text in production, and it is this feat of integrated creative cooperation
that makes a performance under the circumstances of “production” the text's “full
expression” (Innes et al xii). Innes et al argue that, to study these texts, “it is necessary to
reconstruct the original production of a piece” (Innes et al ix), a conviction that is at the
heart of the argument posed in this paper.
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Conceptual Frameworks
Works of the American Musical Theater, due to their multidisciplinary nature and
collective authorship, their employment of spectacle (for narrative purpose, dramatic
effect, and entertainment value), and the role that commercialization plays in the
establishment of the most-produced works of the repertory, have multiple and particular
challenges for archives, even among the performing arts. First, “premiere,” and “original”
(originating) productions of musicals are the most authentic for researchers to investigate
to understand the qualities that contributed to a musical theater work’s enduring
popularity among audiences and to its cultural significance, the reasons for which I will
discuss below. Historically, most “original productions” of musicals that have become
part of the repertory have emerged in the commercial milieu of the Broadway theater
district in New York City, which comprises 41 theaters (The Broadway League). In this
environment, the authors and creatives’ enforcement of their copyrights in the musicals
prevent their unauthorized documentation-by-recording. Moreover, producers with the
exclusive rights to exploit these works fiercely police their commercial investments,
guarding against unauthorized recordings of musicals as a matter of controlling their
exposure and publicity. This not only prevents the public from being saturated with
images of the live performance and possibly diminishing their interest in paying to see it,
but also prevents rogues looking to sell these prohibited recordings on the black
market/online from profiting from them. In addition, these productions are under the
jurisdiction of multiple labor unions which protect their members’ ability to profit from
their own work before anyone else does, further precluding the making of unapproved
recordings and copies of them.
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As significant as the legal obstacles are to preserving performances of musicals is
the genre’s elevated emphasis on the holistic “production” to its identity as a theatrical
creation. As has been emphasized here already, musicals are an amalgam of the creative
contributions of artists from many disciplines, all working together to communicate the
narrative and mold the audience’s experience of how it is told. Musicals also feature
complex movement – of performers, set pieces, lighting, sometimes even costumes, all of
which are choreographed, usually in coordination with pre-composed, live-performed
music, and even with each other. “The production” of a musical, as I use the term here, is
the synthesis of all the elements of the performance seen, heard, and felt by all of the
participants in the event – audiences, performers, creatives, and other production
personnel – as a single work of performance art. On top of the ephemerality of
performance, this manifold artistic effort makes the notion of “capturing,” representing,
or reconstructing “the whole” of a musical in production, especially one of the past, a
daunting, probably futile one. The aura emanating from this complex, holistic entity
eludes researchers and historians in archives.
Innes and his co-authors identify what makes the original production of particular
importance to researchers and historians: The preservation of increased documentation of
theater productions that began in the mid-20th century meant that theater scholarship,
criticism, and historical records could now be based on factual evidence. These writers
uncover what this evolution in documentation means for scholars:
The study of theatre now requires the evaluation of what actually occurred on the
stage. It is widely understood that play-texts – traditionally the most stable element
of an evanescent art – can only be fully understood in the light of their performance.
Since theatre is so directly related to society, political developments or audience
taste can change the meaning of a script and condition the way it is presented. This
implies that, apart from the most contemporary work that can be directly observed
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(although even then only when one happens to be in the same city and able to
experience the performance personally), it is necessary to reconstruct the original
production of a piece (Innes et al ix, emphasis mine).
Innes et al’s determination that “play-texts only reach their full expression in
performance” (Innes et al xii) makes the individual parts of the production of a musical –
for instance, its libretto, its musical score, its designs, its staging and choreography –
insufficient for finding out how a work impacted its initial audiences. For this reason, it is
often the aura of the first “full expression” of a musical text – the original production –
that researchers and historians are looking for in performing arts archives.
Archives users seek knowledge from primary source materials to ensure
legitimacy and accuracy. Original productions of works of the American Musical Theater
repertory on Broadway, and, by extension, documentation of them, have the requisite
stamp of authenticity for scholars. Library and archives educators Heather Marie
MacNeil and Bonnie Mak attribute this quality of authenticity in texts to “the one that
best embodies the final intentions of the author” (MacNeil and Mak 35). For works of the
American Musical Theater, it often has been the case that a show’s premier production on
Broadway is the benchmark by which future productions are measured. Simply put,
original productions are considered to be authentic because the authors (or singular
bookwriter/composer/lyricist, as the case may be) were present for, saw, and had input
into the realization of their work on stage, whether that realization completely satisfied
them or not. This presence and participation imbue such productions with the validity and
veritableness required by scholars in archives. Here we will remember that Miriam Bratu
Hansen names authenticity as one of the qualities that aura, in Walter Benjamin’s
conception, encapsulates (Hansen 340).
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Case Studies
To define the scope of works discussed and measure what works are quantifiably
significant or important within the American Musical Theater repertory, I make use of
Reside’s research for Fixing the Musical and focus on the works most produced after
their initial Broadway production by the fifteen oldest major regional theaters that have
consistently produced musicals. This survey supplies a framework for defining what
qualities make some works more important than others. Rather than perpetuate the idea of
a canonical hierarchy of works within the genre that “authorities” and “experts” have
deemed historically or artistically significant, Reside identifies the “most-produced”
shows at these theaters. Since programmers at theaters must consider the potential appeal
of titles on their season for the ticket buyers whose literal buy-in the theater company is
dependent on, these titles also can be understood as “most popular” with audiences. From
this confirmation of success with both theater operators and audiences, we can
extrapolate that the titles “most produced,” which is equivalent to the “most revived,” are
also the “most prominent” in the repertory. As Geoffrey Block writes in Enchanted
Evenings: The Broadway Musical from ‘Show Boat’ to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber,
“While one measure of a show’s popularity and its even more important correlate,
commercial success, is the length of its initial run, the revivability of a show arguably
constitutes a more compelling measure of its success” (Block 81).
Reside’s research shows that as of the 2019 (pre-pandemic) season, Fiddler on the
Roof and The Sound of Music were the most prominent and important musical shows
based on their both having been, since their respective Broadway debuts in 1964 and
1959, produced 51 times at the “major resident companies around the country that have
22
existed for at least twenty-five years and that regularly produce at least two musicals
each” (Reside 17-18). (My own research extends Reside’s tabulation to show that, since
2019, productions of Fiddler on the Roof have been surpassed by those of The Sound of
Music, with the latter show having been produced 59 times at the same 15 theaters
surveyed, while the former has been produced 56 times.) Not only does Reside’s list
provide a framework for defining a non-canonical repertory of principal works of the
American Musical Theater, but out of the 85 titles in Reside’s table of the most-produced
shows, an “original production” on Broadway figured into the histories of 53 of these
(65%), which provides reasonable basis for considering the Broadway theater landscape
to be the location where the “authentic,” original productions of the “most significant”
works of the repertory have been experienced.
Fiddler on the Roof, with a book by Joseph Stein, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and
music by Jerry Bock, based on stories by Sholem Aleichem, tells the story of Tevye, a
milkman in the shtetl of Anatevka on the eve of the Russian Revolution. His resilience is
tested when his family, community, and traditions are upended by change. The show’s
original production, directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, opened on
Broadway at the Imperial Theatre on September 22, 1964, and closed on July 2, 1972, at
the Broadway Theatre, playing for a then-unprecedented 3,242 performances in total after
seven previews, and winning nine Tony Awards, including best musical, score, book,
direction, and choreography (Internet Broadway Database). Fiddler made an impact on
Broadway audiences and critics, resulting in a record-breaking, acclaimed run. The
cultural transferability of its themes, including adjustment to shifting values, the
challenge of parent-child relationships, and the cultural losses that come with
23
modernization, so successfully communicated in the original production, led to the
property’s larger, global impact. Such a broad appeal was not predictable for the show,
and its far-reaching acclaim can be largely attributed to the craftsmanship and collective
experience of the artists who shaped and presented the material so effectively. According
to Larry Stempel, author of Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater,
[Fiddler had an] astonishingly wide cultural resonance despite what some feared
would be “too Jewish” a show to play outside New York. That it negotiated deftly
between the particularity of its subject and the universality of its theme accounts in
large measure for its success. It...proved a worldwide hit (Stempel 363).
This American artwork continues to speak to audiences throughout the world and, as we
know from Reside’s survey, at major regional theaters across the U.S. Its persistent
popularity explains why scholars are interested in researching the show’s first Broadway
production, where the impact of its “full expression” first was felt, and why a
representation beyond fragments and traces is of value to them for examining the
qualities that endure from that initial incarnation.
Closely matching the popularity of Fiddler on the Roof, if not the impressive
length of the run of its original Broadway production, is The Sound of Music. Based on
“The Trapp Family Singers” by Maria Augusta Trapp, with a book by Howard Lindsay
and Russel Crouse, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, II, and music by Richard Rodgers, the
show opened on Broadway at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on November 16, 1959, and
closed at the Mark Hellinger Theater on June 15, 1963, making its total run 1,443
performances after five previews (Internet Broadway Database). The show tells the heart-
warming true story of a young postulant at an Austrian convent who is assigned to be
governess of the seven children of a retired naval officer, eventually marrying and
forming a family with him, which they together lead in a risky escape from the Nazis. It
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won 1960 Tony Awards for Best Musical (tied with Fiorello!), Best Actress in a Musical
(Mary Martin), Best Featured Actress in a Musical (Patricia Neway), Best Scenic Design
(Oliver Smith), and Best Conductor/Musical Director (Frederick Dvonch) (Internet
Broadway Database). As crowd-pleasing as the stage musical was on Broadway, The
Sound of Music achieved global fame via its 1965 film adaptation, which won the Oscar
for Best Picture, becoming one of the most commercially successful films ever
(Santopietro 253). Streaming, cable, and home video re-releases of the film adaptation
and the perennial popularity of the stage version in licensed productions around the world
create continual new interest in the property, which means that theater historians will
continually want to investigate its original production in archives to learn about its roots.
That neither original production of these titles, the most-produced of the
American Musical Theater repertory, were memorialized in audiovisual recordings (both
took place prior to the inception of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’
Theater On Film and Tape Archive, and no complete or partial films are known to exist),
speaks to the gap in the archive that continues to impede researchers and historians.
Without moving image of the original production of Fiddler on the Roof, for example, we
are limited in our ability to understand Jerome Robbins’ innovations in staging and
choreography (“he weaves dance into action with subtlety and flaring theatricalism”) or
the “integrated achievement of uncommon quality” of his overall production (Taubman).
Howard Taubman of The New York Times called Zero Mostel’s leading performance
“...one of the most glowing creations in the history of musical theatre. He does not keep
his acting and singing or his walking and dancing in separate compartments. His Tevye is
a unified, lyrical conception” (Taubman). But artists are unable to examine Mostel’s
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physical comedy and how it meshed with Robbins’ staging in 1964. Film of the original
Fiddler on the Roof would be a document of the movement of the production, one of the
aspects that could help reproduce its aura. This focus on preserving the aura of an original
production has not been addressed explicitly by performing arts and archival scholars and
theorists.
So, what does exist in archives for researchers of these pre-1970 original
Broadway productions? The 2000 article “The Show Goes On! Preserving Performing
Arts Ephemera, Or the Power of the Program,” by Richard Stone of the National Library
of Australia, offers a helpful listing of the physical objects, paper and printed documents,
and other ephemera that typically are included in performing arts archives, and what their
documentary and research significance is. For example, printed programs and
advertisements record the basic information about a performance event, such as date,
location, venue, running time, performers involved, creative team and production
personnel, and author information (Stone 32). For those investigating the original 1964
production of Fiddler on the Roof, archival documents, artifacts, and ephemera that exist
include playbills, but also the Friedman-Abeles Studio’s production photos showing lead
actor Zero Mostel and the original cast in moments from the show1;
director/choreographer Jerome Robbins’ production notes2; stage manager Ruth
Mitchell’s script with cues3; scenic designer Boris Aronson’s set model4; and papers and
designs produced by costume designer Patricia Zipprodt while working on the
1. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/7a830280-c542-012f-b87c-
58d385a7bc34?filters=%5Bsubcollection%3D01664ef0-c549-012f-ca1a-
58d385a7bc34%5D.
2. https://archives.nypl.org/dan/19771#detailed.
3. https://archives.nypl.org/the/18670#detailed.
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production5. These items hold much information, especially visual information, about the
original production. However, they do not represent the production’s movement or
reproduce what the show sounded like in the theater.
In the case of the original production of The Sound of Music, an audio recording
of the full production exists, having been “bootlegged” from the audience, possibly
arranged by a member of the show’s company. The recording captures the sound of the
final performance of the show’s original star Mary Martin on October 7, 1961, which also
preserves the sound of the performances of the rest of the leading actors in the original
cast (there may have been some replacement actors in secondary roles at this point in the
run). For historians, scholars, and fans, this audio recording of the “live” is a treasurable
document that thrills in its contrasts with the show’s original cast album on Columbia
Records. Unlike the pristine quality of the studio-recorded renditions of the main songs
from the score which are heard on the commercially released cast album, on the live
recording we hear the audience’s responses, applause, and laughter. We hear the show’s
dialogue, which is entirely omitted on the cast album, as well as atmospheric noises such
as shifting set pieces. We also hear details of the instrumental performance of the
orchestra and of the orchestration. (As of this writing, a copy of the recording is available
on YouTube6.) All these additional elements not found on the cast album provide a sense
of occasion that is felt in the theater but not from a studio recording. However, as an
audio-only recording, it contains no visual information about the staging, the movement,
4. https://www.nypl.org/research/research-catalog/bib/b23036456.
5. https://archives.nypl.org/the/21733#detailed.
6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szjWjfYDy7A
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the choreography, and the design witnessed simultaneously with the diction and music
heard. So, even a complete audio recording is deficient in representing what audiences
experienced. Considering the need of researchers and historians to “reconstruct the
original production” in order to, as Innes suggests, evaluate “what actually occurred on
the stage,” written documents, still images, and ephemera will not suffice on their own as
they do not reproduce the complex movement of the production. Audio recordings of a
musical’s score as heard at performances of its original production – whether a studio
cast album or an illegal bootleg recording made from the audience – likewise do not
reproduce the appearance or the movement of the production witnessed by the audience.
Audiovisual recordings (film, video) of theatrical productions provide more
information for archives users. For Auslander and Abbott & Read, audiovisual recordings
are acceptable substitutes for witnessing an actual performance. Auslander writes that “no
documented piece is performed solely as an end in itself: the performance is always at
one level raw material for documentation, the final product through which it will be
circulated and with which it will inevitably become identified” (Auslander 3). And
Abbott & Read write that preserved ‘paradocumentation,’ which are “non-core
documents of the play that include audience reaction to the primary ‘text’,” advance and
extend “the life of a single performance” (Sant 166). Even though they do not find it to be
a substitute for live performance, Pustianaz, Benjamin, and Reside see audiovisual
recordings as being a useful alternative, one that, especially in light of the 2020 COVID-
19 pandemic shutdown of theaters and other live entertainment venues and art centers,
may serve as a “means of sustainability in the future” (Pustianaz 3). Audiovisual
recordings may also serve the archival purpose of establishing an authoritative version of
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the property it “captures.” This idea also corresponds with Reason’s conclusion in
Documentation, Disappearance and the Representation of Live Performance (2006) that
“the enduring representations of performance inevitably have a certain power and
authority over their subject, directing and shaping how we see, understand and know the
thing itself” (Reason 236-237).
Having established that the commercial Broadway theater is the setting where
original productions of musicals of the repertory traditionally have been experienced, we
must consider the particular and limiting factors of this environment to understand why
audiovisual recordings of these productions are so rare. As previously mentioned, the
copyright to a musical usually vests in the numerous artists involved in its production
(excluding performers and stagehands), e.g., composers, librettists, lyricists, whose work
legally “merges” for a Broadway production, as well as designers, directors, and
choreographers. This fact precludes the recording, audio or visual, of their work by
anyone without express permission or, potentially, compensation. Dramatists Guild, the
national trade association for playwrights, composers, librettists, and lyricists, explains
the law in this way:
[Copyright] exists so writers can profit from their work, enabling them to keep
creating new work that will eventually belong to everyone...Copyright Law makes it
illegal to use, without permission, the original work of an author for his/her/their
lifetime plus 70 years (Dramatists Guild).
This law also includes a bundle of rights that gives authors the exclusive right to publish,
display, distribute copies of, create derivative works from, and, perhaps most importantly
for this discussion, perform and/or reproduce their work (Dramatists Guild). These
creator rights mean that producers must deal with authors and their representatives to
mount a production, and authors would be the first party with which a negotiation to film
29
or videotape a production of a work would need to take place: “Owning the copyright is
what gives the author the ability to negotiate fair contracts for the use of their work, and
everybody who licenses and performs a show has to abide by those contracts”
(Dramatists Guild).
In addition to copyright restrictions protecting authors and their creative work,
guilds and labor unions representing the aforementioned creative team members, as well
as actors, stage managers, stagehands, and musicians, protect their members’ right to
profit first from their own work. This means that recording any part of a performance is
forbidden, lest someone illegally profit from its sale without the agreement and
participation of these parties. Further, the New York City theatrical community,
according to Kelly Gregg, writing in The University of Chicago Law Review, has
developed “welfare-maximizing norms” regarding creatives’ intellectual property even in
areas where courts have not been clear about copyright law protections (Gregg 1829).
If a producer or any other party or company agrees to pay the rates and royalties
that unions, guilds, and agents set for a production to be video recorded, it is possible that
a film or video of their work could be made. However, the day rates and buy-outs are
steep and usually deemed not worth the expense, especially considering that such
recordings likely are limited to non-commercial (read non-profit-generating or non-
expense-returning) promotional or even educational purposes within a specific time
frame. On a practical level, engaging performers, creatives, and technicians to make an
audiovisual record of the show is complicated precisely because the work constitutes the
full integration of the work of many. To make such a recording, a contractual agreement
must be reached among all of the parties and/or their representatives (starting with the
30
authors), and all participants would need to be compensated. This is a sizable and
expensive endeavor for producers, even for small musicals.
Over the years, some original (non-revival) productions featuring most or all of
the original casts have been filmed or videotaped and made publicly available through
television broadcast and/or home video, among them: Show Girl (1961), Pacific
Overtures (1976), Sophisticated Ladies (1982), Sunday in the Park With George (1985),
Into the Woods (taped 1989, broadcast 1991), The Will Rogers Follies (1991), Passion
(taped 1995, broadcast 1996), Smokey Joe’s Café (2000), Putting It Together (taped
2000, broadcast 2001), Contact (2002), Legally Blonde (2007), Passing Strange (filmed
by Spike Lee 2008, broadcast 2009), Victor/Victoria (1995), Memphis (2011), Shrek
(2013), Hamilton (taped 2016, broadcast 2020), Allegiance (2016), Holiday Inn (2017),
Bandstand (2018), and Diana (2020). However, according to our definition, these works
do not rank among the most prominent in the repertory; nonetheless, scholars can be
grateful that these exist for the opportunity to see and hear, if not experience, these
shows. Other non-revival “Broadway shows” have been memorialized on video: At the
Drop of Another Hat (taped 1967, broadcast 1968), Oh, Calcutta! (1970), Pippin (taped
1981, broadcast 1982), Sweeney Todd (taped 1981, broadcast 1982), Ain’t Misbehavin’
(1982), Working (1982), I Do! I Do! (1982), Something’s Afoot (1984),
Romance/Romance (1993), Play On! (2000), Jekyll and Hyde (2001), Fosse (taped 2001,
broadcast 2002), The Light in the Piazza (2006), Rent (2008), Come From Away (2021),
and Waitress (taped 2021, broadcast 2023) among them (Lyons). However, these are
either not of the original productions or have replacement actors in principal roles
31
interpreting the roles differently than the originals, so their existence does not contradict
my argument.
A notable and important exception to the general ban on non-commercial
recordings of Broadway productions exists. In 1970, the New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts conducted negotiations with the various unions and guilds covering the
creatives and technicians working on Broadway to establish the Theatre on Film and
Tape Archive (TOFT). It arrived at an agreement that permitted them to create recordings
of main stem productions under specific restrictions. The Archive’s collection holds
audiovisual recordings of more than 5,000 live-performed plays, musicals, classics,
experimental and avant-garde productions, the largest and most comprehensive in the
world (NYPL). They record approximately 50 productions per year, with more being Off-
Broadway than on (although many of these transfer to Broadway, such as In the Heights
and Rent) (Gordon). To exercise this exclusive ability, TOFT must provide notice to the
company of the show (who receive no additional compensation according to TOFT’s
agreement) as well as the Actors’ Equity Association at least 24 hours prior to a filming,
which is limited to one camera for close-ups and two cameras for wide shots and shots
from different angles (McGuire). Once made “in accordance with agreements with the
various theatrical unions which seek to protect the work of their members from piracy or
unauthorized use without compensation to the authors, directors, actors, designers, and
others who create a production,” the tapes reside at TOFT, which is located within the
NYPL for the Performing Arts’ Lincoln Center facility, and may only be viewed there
(Back Stage). One of the first Broadway productions recorded for TOFT was A Chorus
Line in 1975; not all Broadway productions are captured by TOFT, though, due to limited
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funding. Some Broadway producers, such as Disney Theatricals, donate the funding for
TOFT to document and preserve their productions in the archive (Hall).
However, as valuable as the TOFT collection is for the preservation of America’s
theatrical heritage, using it involves the expense of travel and lodging for non-New
Yorkers (no doubt a considerable obstacle for many researchers) and it does not include
full-length moving image representations of pre-1970 original productions, including
those of the works we have already established are the most significant in the repertory,
Fiddler on the Roof and The Sound of Music (although other, subsequent productions of
those titles are in the collection.) The absence of audiovisual representations of these
productions, including television broadcasts, is a significant obstacle to reconstructing
their original productions in archives. The question remains: Can researchers and
historians find the primary source evidence they seek to reconstruct the aura, the full,
authentic experience of the original “full expression” of a musical theater work?
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Discussion and Analysis
Considering the archival preservation of primary source materials regarding the
original productions of musical theater works, neither text documents, still images,
artifacts, nor audiovisual recordings fully represent the holistic production of a musical or
evoke the aura of an original production on their own. The positions of scholars who have
written on the subject reveal that the main disagreement is whether performance requires
the presence of bodies, of those performing, and of the audience. Some argue that
documentation transforms performance into other media (video and written document),
which means that preserving performance itself in archives is impossible (Phelan,
Pustianaz). Others propose that documentation of performance does not require the
presence of bodies, which makes audiovisual and other representations acceptable and
useful documents for reactivating past performance in archives (Auslander, Abbott &
Read, Bay-Cheng, Vergés). I agree with Reason that a record that recreates “the
experience of the performance” is the most desirable and valuable. However, his concept
of an “archive of detritus” related to a production can evoke a past performance only for
those who were present for the event; otherwise, post-performance detritus consists
simply of fragments that do not “speak” on their own. This is a weak point in archives
that creates a dilemma for researchers and historians and an urgent problem for
preserving American culture.
Theories about documenting performance apply to documenting a production
because a production is a three-dimensional, multi-faceted aesthetic and physical
framework within which temporally defined performances of a work move and sound in
front of audiences. Both “performance” and “production” are “live” experiences that
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work to bring a text to life. Just as a film is judged by the final product of the joint
creative effort of all the parties involved, including, but not limited to, the performances
of actors, in a musical, actor performances (which may involve dancing and singing as
part of portraying a character) are viewed as one important part of the overall production.
Together, actor performance (including diction, singing, gesture, and choreography) and
physical production (including sets, costumes, lighting, and props) become the event of a
live performance of a musical. The memories of audiences and other production
participants (oral histories), contemporaneous reports and reviews, and still photographs
can augment documents and fill in some gaps for those who were not present at the
performance event. However, although undoubtedly valuable as first-hand accounts of
the event, these are complicated by the very nature of the artform. In addition to the
enactment of text and the sound of diction and/or music, performances of musicals
usually involve layers of movement, which potentially defies description from memory or
otherwise. Indeed, none less than Aristotle, in his Poetics, philosophized that poetic arts
“produce mimesis in rhythm, language, and melody...and actions” (Aristotle 29,
emphasis mine), which puts movement, along with sound, at the center of theatrical
performance from its beginnings, and thus makes it something important to capture in
archival documents of performing arts.
As mentioned above, the concern that archives cannot preserve movement and
action becomes especially acute with regard to musicals: movement of bodies (including
choreography), lighting, scenery, and even costumes all must be represented. The
“production” framework, situated in time and space per Benjamin’s concept of aura,
holistically contains all this movement as well as the contributions of the underlying text,
35
visual and sound design, the performances, and the presence of the audience, which
reacts to their experience. In contrast to Auslander, who argues that presence is irrelevant
to documenting performance, I argue that spectatorship and the presence of the holistic
production are essential elements to include in the documentation of musicals. In the
research process, archives users are the spectators, so their proximity to primary source
materials simulates that of the present audience to the orality and movement of the
original production. Spectator presence contributes to the aura of the production, which,
reproduced through an amalgamation of all existing archival documents, is important to
gaining as full a retrospective understanding of that production as possible. But how,
technically, is this amalgamation and reproduction possible?
Reason proposes that an “archive of detritus” is left on stage at the end of a
performance and that this represents the past life of the performance “...with the
fragmented traces prompting fragmented memories” (Reason 53). For Reason, these
traces are an archive of the “unfixable,” but his concept is primarily metaphorical for
those who were not present for the original event, including historians and performance
studies scholars. Although I agree that the “disappearance” of performance identified by
Phelan is problematic for researchers and historians – and though Reason’s “archive of
detritus” contributes significantly to the full assemblage of archival materials that
together can be used to reconstruct the aura generated by a production as nearly as
possible – this “debris” alone (and fragmented) is not sufficient for researchers, even if it
is for artists and audiences. This is because the researcher has no memory of the
experience of the performance or the aura of the production. As with oral histories, such
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“random,” “selective” audience memories are essential but too erratic on their own to
satisfy scholars’ needs for documentation of performance and productions.
Researchers, historians, and students need a new way to translate archival
holdings representing the memories of those who experienced past productions – those
who had “the undissolvable experience of doing and being” connected to the production,
including performers and spectators – so that they are useful for reconstructing the event.
Reason acknowledges this, writing that “there is a need to extract and externalise this
knowledge, particularly in the form of documentations that can endure, be more widely
disseminated and known by those who were not there” (Reason 3). The question is, how
can this “experience” be extracted and presented in archives?
Robert K. Sarlós, a professor of Dramatic Arts at the University of California,
referring specifically to methods of reconstructing performance style of historical
theatrical work, wrote in 1984 that “theatre artists and spectators would derive pleasure
and profit from research culminating in displays,” an approach that is “not dissimilar to
the one museum of anthropology and natural history routinely follow when converting
hypotheses into three-dimensional life-size displays of human or animal habitats” (Sarlós
5, emphasis mine). While the goal of a museum-like, life-sized display that brings
together archival items and replicates the spatial aspects of a theatrical production is an
ideal that scholars could benefit from, it is difficult to imagine how these could be
practicably realized. Nevertheless, the notion of a display (rather than Sarlós’ “display,” I
will call it an “archival presentation”) that brings together records of a theatrical
production goes part-way to addressing the problem of fragmented archival holdings.
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To be of value to researchers, historians, artists, and scholars seeking authentic
primary source information, there are several considerations for archival presentations of
original productions of Broadway musicals:
• To be as accurately representative of the original production as possible,
presentations must display only actual artifacts, recordings, and documentation
that exist in archives, with nothing having been fabricated except the arrangement
of the presentation itself;
• Just as musicals, at their base, tell stories, archival presentations of original
Broadway productions should be focused on the experience of the narrative
expressed in the underlying text. This priority also helps prevent “imaginative”
extrapolating to “fill in the gaps” that still exist in archives, keeping the
presentation exclusively based on primary source materials and first-hand reports;
• Since spectatorship is missing from performing arts documents, the most
“complete” archival presentations will put the user in the position of the audience,
with its vantage point as a spectator-participant. Other spatial and temporal
perspectives might be possible, but for the purposes of a historian or artist seeking
to learn about the experience of seeing a past production, the audience’s vantage
point – the one the director, designers, and performers all had in mind in creating
the piece – is the desirable one.
At this point I should clarify that I do not mean to imply that performance records
in performing arts archives are not valuable for research and as evidence. These records
are rich with information and are primary source materials, even if they only partially
represent the productions to which they relate. The documents and artifacts displayed in,
38
for example, the NYPL for the Performing Arts’ 2019-2020 exhibit, “In the Company of
Harold Prince: Broadway Producer, Director, Collaborator,” gave ample grounds to
believe that documents and ephemera (such as letters and rehearsal scripts) and objects
(such as scenic designer Boris Aronson’s set model for the original 1966 production of
Cabaret) hold much information for those seeking to learn as much as possible about a
production7. The concern is that, for researchers and historians seeking to reactivate the
aura of an original production – the unique “presence in time and space” that establishes
its authenticity (Benjamin 218) – fragmented archival documents and artifacts on their
own or audiovisual recordings alone do not evoke holistic production. Viewing these in
an unintegrated way does not conjure atmosphere or identity. A solution that brings
together everything in the archive about a particular production into a useful, immersive
presentation or “experience” would bring archives users as close to that aura – and to an
understanding of the qualities that made it attractive and durable – as possible.
Vergés begins to propose a solution when she suggests that digital performance
documentation in the archives should include “hybrid media as well as all the networking
possibilities” that can “demonstrate multiple viewing perspectives” in order to “capture
motion ‘in process’” (Vergés 457). Recalling Benjamin, Vergés suggests that digital
performance archives can evoke the aura of the instant in which performance occurs
(Vergés 459). The more viewpoints and connections facilitated by digital technology, the
stronger the record of performance, which is better and more useful for the researchers
that archives serve. In “Redefining the Performing Arts Archive” (2009), Jones et al
7. https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/company-harold-prince-broadway-producer-
director-collaborator.
39
concur, writing that “in order to accurately represent performance, such representations
should do more than merely document the facts...[they] echo its nature and inspire in
their users the experience of the event” (Jones et al 2, emphasis mine), a description that
seems to echo the notion that a production’s aura is essential to understanding the nature
of the work it “sets in play.”
I agree with Vergés’ idea. Artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR),
augmented reality (AR), and other emergent technologies may be tools to help assemble
the existing material traces in archives, in addition to oral histories and any audio and/or
audiovisual recordings, to, as Innes writes, “reconstruct the original production of a
piece.” Just as a musical synthesizes many artistic and technical contributions, archival
presentations should synthesize all existing production documentation. Such an archival
presentation of an original production, in order to reproduce the various components that
evoke a production’s aura, ideally should represent several key aspects of the production
or as many of them as possible:
• the text, including the libretto and notated musical score with lyrics;
• the sound of a performance;
• visual performances of the cast, including staging and choreography;
• scenic and lighting elements.
Texts such as scripts, librettos, and musical scores are the blueprints for what the
production of a musical brings to life. Subtitled movies or running user commentary
accompanying some YouTube videos are familiar examples of how text may accompany
still or moving images, either superimposed on the image or appearing concurrently with
the image in a “split-screen” manner. Oral history transcripts also could be incorporated
40
into a presentation in this way. Historic actor performances are more difficult to
represent. Pre-1970 audiovisual captures of the performances of original Broadway casts
were relatively rare, and such footage of Fiddler on the Roof and The Sound of Music for
researchers to inspect is almost non-existent. Promotional television appearances are an
imperfect but still valuable exception: for example, on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the
original cast members of The Sound of Music portraying the nuns in the show performed
choral excerpts from the show’s score and Patricia Neway, the original “Mother Abbess,”
sang the show’s Act I closer, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” (YouTube). Although these filmed
performances, which took place on December 20, 1959, a little more than a month after
the show’s Broadway opening, did not take place on the original set (presumably they
were recorded in the Ed Sullivan Theater, approximately seven blocks from the Lunt-
Fontanne Theater), and the occasion involving television cameras may have caused the
actors to alter their the facial expressions and gestures somewhat, they still can be
considered authentic and useful for researchers of the original productions. They capture
the vocal performances as well as the overall appearance of the original actors at the time
when they appeared in the show. These recordings could be employed in a presentation to
show glimpses of the first interpreters of the roles in action.
Inventive work that has taken place at the NYPL Research Libraries previews
what potential archives of past productions may hold for reactivating original actor
performances in a way that displays their movement. In 2024, the NYPL’s Library for the
Performing Arts created and exhibited “animations” of brief duration from slides of
Broadway production and publicity photo shoots taken by Friedman-Abeles Studios
between 1954 and 1970. Reside digitized images in close sequence and “stitched” them
41
together in Google Photos (Green). These photos, most of which were previously unseen
due to the expense of reproductions in the pre-digital era, formed into animations, are
exciting precisely because they show the movement that took place in a performance of
that original production (including actors), which the NYPL acknowledges explicitly in
the description of the project:
Rather than selecting a single shot from these shows, the Library for the Performing
Arts has used the analog-printing technology of lenticular printing to simulate
animations of several of the shots. These animations give a sense of the movement of
the original production, and can reveal details that would be impossible to notice in
a static image (NYPL, emphasis mine).
Jesse Green, writing in The New York Times, explains the significance of seeing this
movement, referencing the concept of aura: “The work seemed to awaken the show’s
sleeping aura. When you see these characters move, you can see what they’re thinking.
And when you see the show move, you can see what it’s thinking, too” (Green). The
sense of receiving “what the show is thinking” – the special communication that
audiences receive from the collective work of the production and its company, focused by
the director – is an experience that in-person audiences had that researchers and
historians wish to reconstruct in archives. Green writes, “Photographs can preserve a
show’s wonderful moments, frame by frame, but frames aren’t what you see as you look
at the stage. You see a string of images, blurred into one” (Green).
Of course, creating animations from photographs is nothing new. In “Animating the
Instant: The Secret Symmetry between Animation and Photography,” cinema and media
studies professor Tom Gunning advises us that, aside from flipbooks and zoetropes,
“Most film animation actually depends on photography, at least technically, even when
photography does not supply animation’s imagery” (Gunning 38). But some recent
42
methods for animating series of still photos offered to the public create movement and
expression in scanned images that are purely fabricated – the genealogy service
MyHeritage, for instance, through its Deep Nostalgia feature, “[brings] photos of your
deceased relatives “alive” by adding animations like blinking, nodding, head-bopping,
and a number of other gestures” (Ramirez) – which is unsuitable for scholarly purposes
because it invents movement not based on primary source accounts. In comparison,
Reside’s animated photos are rich with authenticity, even though they are silent. If such
moving images could be created of moments and actor performances from the original
productions of Fiddler on the Roof or The Sound of Music, they would allow the scholar
to learn more about historical performances. If these were combined with other archival
records such as the show’s text, sound recordings, design renderings, still photographs,
oral histories, along with contemporaneous descriptions in writings by critics and others,
and then digitally “set in play” in a presentation, archives users could learn more about an
original production and “what it’s thinking” and communicating than they would
otherwise.
More common than film footage of performers in original productions are audio
recordings which could be used for archival presentations. In addition to aforementioned
bootleg recordings, official original cast albums of musicals’ scores typically have been
recorded soon after a show’s premiere. Indeed, both the 1959 Sound of Music and 1964
Fiddler original cast albums were recorded within a week of their official opening.
Original cast albums, as an archival record, can be considered reasonably representative
of the original vocal performances even if recorded in the studio, not on the stage with its
less-controlled acoustic. (The orchestration heard on original cast albums, however, may
43
not be as authentic as orchestrators, composers, and record producers sometimes
“sweeten” the score by adding additional instruments to create a fuller orchestral sound
than heard in the theater (Parrent 33).)
Whether official or not, audio recordings of the original cast performing songs
from the show could be joined to visual/moving images to provide a fuller picture of
original performances. To see this concept at work, we can look to “concerts” featuring
lifelike moving images of deceased performers, which, like photo animations, have
created possibilities for reconstructing performances but add the element of authentic
sound. In 2012, a public concert featured a hologram of Tupac Shakur, who had died in
1996. It made a science fiction fantasy a reality: the three-dimensional “appearance” of
the dead rapper at Coachella revealed the possibility that future audiences might be able
to experience “live” “performances” by more performers of the past. Since then,
hologram technology has also been used to “resurrect” some of the most famous artists of
the 20th Century, including, in 2018, Roy Orbison – In Dreams and Callas in Concert –
The Hologram Tour, and, in 2020, An Evening with Whitney (Houston). These events
produced for a live audience featured holographic images of the late singers, generated
from historic photos and film footage, projected onto a stage by 4K high-definition
projectors. Rather than using the low-tech, mirror-based “Pepper’s Ghost” technique for
creating holographic illusion on stage, which has been used for ghostly theatrical effects
since the time of vaudeville entertainment, these holograms were created using digital
and laser imaging and employed CGI (computer-generated imagery) (Salazar). Of
particular interest for imagining future applications for reconstructing theatrical
performances is that Base Hologram (the company behind the Orbison, Callas, and
44
Houston hologram concert tours) synced historic recordings of the artists’ actual voices to
the movements of three-dimensional images. For example, the holographic Maria Callas
“performed” approximately ten arias from operas of the standard canon, with her “voice”
married to the holographic image, accompanied by a live on-stage orchestra led by a
conductor.
While having proved a popular, modern-day form of entertainment, using digital
avatars such as these and other advanced technology for archival purposes raises the
subject of authenticity. Maggie B. Gale and Ann Featherstone, in their article “The
Imperative of the Archive: Creative Archive Research,” argue that “Some digitization
processes allow for an alteration of the original and provide us with new ways of viewing
materials, new versions of the real, and this might be something we might take advantage
of rather than dismiss the representation of the object as inauthentic” (Kershaw 33,
emphasis mine). If we accept that a digital “copy” can be considered to be as valuable as
the original for gaining knowledge about a theatrical production and its sound and
movement, as a “new version of the real,” new possibilities open up for what and how
one can learn about past performance. If the materials assembled are authentic, the “new
version of the real” which technology produces when combining these into a whole
remains useful for researchers and can serve researchers as primary source material that
represents the production and reproduces, as far as possible, its aura.
Less problematic to reproduce than original performances is scenic design.
Renderings, design plans, and still photos may exist, as is the case for Oliver Smith’s set
for The Sound of Music, and sometimes physical set models may also be inspected in
archives, as is the case for Boris Aronson’s Fiddler set. However, the movement of these
45
sets may not be easy to glean from such documents and items, and, likewise, the effect
and movement of lighting design are difficult to gather from archival materials. For
example, a script for The Sound of Music with marginal notes by director Vincent J.
Donehue dated October 4, 1959, a little more than one month before the musical’s first
Broadway preview, describes set and lighting movement in the transition between Act 2,
Scenes 3 and 4 – the preparation for Maria and Captain von Trapp’s wedding at the abbey
and the procession – this way:
All the lights dim out except those on the group. The lattice comes down separating
the nuns from Maria and the children. A light comes up on the opposite side of
downstage from the group and we see the CAPTAIN in full dress Naval uniform
with decorations, standing waiting for Maria. (NYPL Special Collections).
How can theater scholars understand the impact the lowering of the lattice – in the
licensed script provided by the Rodgers & Hammerstein Theatre Library for
contemporary productions it is more evocatively described as “a metal grille” – had on
audiences, since there is no film footage? In what ways did the lowering of a metal grille,
a large-scale set piece, and the separating of the nuns from Maria impact the audience’s
experience and understanding of the narrative? How can archives be used to experience
this theatrical moment involving simultaneous movement of performer bodies, lighting,
costumes, and set pieces, all timed to live-performed music? Turning back to Fiddler on
the Roof and thinking beyond a single moment to a production full of such moments of
movement: What would a digital reconstruction of Fiddler’s original production actually
look like? And how would it integrate Jerome Robbins’ production notes with Boris
Aronson’s set model and the Friedman-Abeles photos?
Recent technology points to alternative solutions that would take the idea of
Sarlós’ recommendation of museum-like displays and instead present digital assemblages
46
of documentation, which take up virtual rather than physical space. This alternative
avoids contributing to the already dire problem of space and capacity in archives.
Considering VR and AR archival presentations of theatrical productions, there are
possibilities for user immersion in completely digital “spaces” where archival assets are
assembled in virtual or hybrid spaces that combine historic locations with digital
imaging. For VR, we can find inspiration in the cutting-edge work of groups such as the
Europe-based Glitch Studios. Glitch’s digital conservation “VR experience” of
Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen’s House, created in collaboration with the Follo
Museum, allows the public to “visit” the house-cum-museum and closely investigate its
appearance and content without traveling to its physical location in a remote area outside
Oslo8. Glitch’s creation process involves high-resolution photogrammetry scans of all the
objects preserved in the museum, including, for instance, the contents of a desk drawer
and the surfaces of Roald Amundsen’s House itself. These scans are displayed in a web-
based UX interface that gives “visitors” the opportunity to transcend time and space to
explore the House and learn about Amundsen through the “experience” of interacting
with his archives. MuseumNext notes the significance of this project for the future of
archives and cultural heritage museums:
The digitisation of Roald Amundsen’s house shows the power of technology to
preserve and share cultural heritage. By embracing innovation, MiA Museum and
Glitch Studios has safeguarded a historic site but also redefined what it means to
experience history (Richardson).
Applying Glitch’s approach to archival presentations of original Broadway
productions of Fiddler on the Roof or The Sound of Music, high-quality photogrammetry
8. https://www.glitchstudios.co/projects-archive/roald-amundsen/.
47
scans of the interiors of the Imperial Theatre (where Fiddler first was seen) and the Lunt-
Fontanne Theatre (where The Sound of Music first played), both of which still exist with
their architecture more or less unchanged (paint color notwithstanding), could be made.
Together with similarly high-resolution 3D digital scans of objects, renderings, and
photographs related to the productions, these could be brought into an immersive VR
experience that, married with authentic sound recordings, would reconstruct as far as
possible the context of the appearance, sound, and movement of productions. This
synthesization might enable researchers to experience “a sensory realization” of the
production’s aura by extending these “stimuli” “into auditory, tactile, and olfactory
realms with a force and urgency beyond the reach of written language” (Sarlós 5). Such
an archival experience, by activating researchers’ own senses in a dynamic way, would
reactivate Benjamin’s aura and the individuality of the original production in a way that
static records cannot. This potential solution also satisfies our criteria of being based
solely on existing artifacts and documentation, being focused solely on how the
underlying narrative text was realized in production, and putting the archives user in the
position of being the present spectator of the event.
As an alternative, the potential for site-specific digital presentations of archival
materials can be seen in the work of the New York-based company TimeLooper.
TimeLooper’s innovative museum design connects immersive, technology-enabled
experiences directly to the historic preservation of artifacts, a priority we have stated is
imperative for presentations of production archives:
...our cultural institutions have an unprecedented opportunity to reimagine the
preservation, interpretation, and usage of our shared, public spaces. Our services
allow for spatial, experiential, and emotional visitor immersion without undue stress
on the sites and artifacts themselves, ensuring that cultural institutions can continue
48
to adapt into the future while fostering a deep and lasting connection to our shared
knowledge [and] histories... (About TimeLooper).
In their yet-unrealized designs for a tailored digital visitor experience for the Historic
Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, the space’s limitations inspired creative
solutions that led to connections to the architecture of a theater and the experience of an
audience9. As a registered Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument, National
Historic Landmark, and nominated UNESCO World Heritage site, the historic features of
the sanctuary may not be altered. So, TimeLooper’s team “took inspiration from theater
set design to create mobile screens that, when arranged around the sanctuary and married
with immersive 3D projection mapping, allow visitors to step back in time to recreate a
1960s mass meeting” (TimeLooper). The design concept rendering shows digital screens
placed within the landmarked sanctuary superimposing historic images and/or film
footage into the space, creating a double exposure for visitors that does not sacrifice
authenticity. This technology brings the enduring and the ephemeral together, and
projects the aura of the past into the present in a site-specific manner. Since most of the
Broadway theaters are registered historic landmarks, which largely are preserved in their
original state (New York Preservation Archive Project), the same method could be used
to place moving and still images and sound in the physical location where they were seen
and heard, creating an “authentic” encounter.
Taking all these technological possibilities together with scholarly ethics and
priorities, an ideal archival presentation that reproduces a performance of a past
production from archival materials would, like a musical, combine many disparate
9. https://www.timelooper.com/#pdfPage (bottom of the page).
49
elements into a whole. This whole would necessarily comprise any text documents
(including oral history transcriptions and information from contemporaneous reports),
audiovisual captures (if they exist), animated photos and/or holograms, authentic audio,
and 3D representations of the set. Imagining this amalgamation being used to study the
original production of Fiddler on the Roof, for example, inspires visions of researchers
sitting in the (digital) auditorium of the Imperial Theater – becoming a physically-present
audience and providing spectatorship – to see lead actor Zero Mostel, Jerome Robbins’
staging and choreography, and Boris Aronson’s sets all in motion, and hear the voices of
Mostel and other original cast members (and the orchestra), all timed to cues indicated in
the original stage manager’s script. Although the experience of such an archival
presentation would necessarily be incomplete and imperfect as a reconstruction of the
past, it would deepen the user experience and bring us closer to the aura currently missing
in memory institutions.
50
Conclusion
This paper has demonstrated that to study the initial “full expression” of the most-
revived works of the American Musical Theater repertory, archives users must interpret
limited, fragmented records of the original production to reconstruct it. However,
disintegrated, presence-less text documents, recordings, and artifacts do not evoke the
aura of the synthesized, multi-disciplinary musical in its original Broadway production. I
argue that this results in archives being less useful for reconstructing the past
achievements of the artform than they could be, which is a weakness for the preservation
of American culture.
Ideally, audiovisual captures that show the movement that took place within the
production of a musical could be studied in addition to text documents, still photos,
designs, and ephemera representing the past production to provide a fuller picture of the
complex whole. However, the fact that this artform finds its apex in the commercial arena
of the Broadway theater district, where its exploitation is governed by multiple labor
unions and protective contracts, in addition to U.S. copyright law, largely has prevented
film/video and audio recordings of productions from being made, especially of pre-1970
works. So, for the most part, this ultra-dynamic performance art has been documented in
static records.
I have suggested that technology could be used to, much as the text of a musical is
brought to life in performance, animate archival holdings to create a rich archival
presentation that brings researchers as close as possible, short of time travel, to the aura
and the experience of the original. Some theorists posit that performance disappears and
thus is undocumentable, and others claim that the legacy of a work is the document of the
51
performance. I argue instead that a layered media presentation that reconstructs moments
of movement within a production and represents its performances, staging, and design –
using enduring and ephemeral assets that already have been preserved in archives –
evokes more of the missing aura of the original than studying the fragments separately,
while retaining the standard of authenticity that scholars require.
As I have shown, technology exists that make this vision of immersive digital
archival presentations of original productions in performing arts archives feasible. As
time goes by and original productions of these central works of the American Musical
Theater repertory become more distant, the need to use this technology to preserve this
cultural heritage has become urgent. Just as modern technology has rapidly become
sophisticated to the point that a large portion of humanity takes for granted that they carry
a high-functioning multipurpose personal computer in their pockets, stagecraft has
advanced to resemble the cinema, video games, and high-tech music concerts. The
stagecraft, performance styles, and storytelling methods of pre-1970 Broadway musicals
likewise will seem increasingly different. We could, as a culture, forget what the
experience of watching shows produced in this manner felt like and the emotional and
intellectual impact of it.
To address this issue, I call on memory institutions and their leadership and
funders, technologists, and rights holders to spearhead pilot projects that would
eventually make this virtual solution a reality. At stake is the ability to preserve and
remember the details of these uniquely American and globally impactful artworks as well
and fully as possible, and to be able to closely analyze the craft and skill of those who
created the shows and those who brought them to life before audiences. With that
52
impetus, perhaps memory institutions can convince foundations, tech companies, and
others who care about the American Musical to support the mission to preserve, organize,
and make available this important cultural history for generations to come in new,
technology-enabled formats (I have suggested VR, AR, and hologram technology as
possibilities) that present archival holdings in evocative, engaging ways worthy of the
vibrant storytelling genre.
53
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