Sitting in the Lyceum Theater for Broadway’s “Oh, Mary!’” the campy retelling of first lady Mary Todd Lincoln’s life, audience members know they’re in for a funny and wildly inaccurate ride through history.
What they may not know is that they are surrounded by Broadway history. High above the balcony is the office of The Shubert Archive and backstage are several levels that hold the archive itself.
Open for research and by appointment only, The Shubert Archive holds artifacts dating to Broadway’s early days, to the days of vaudeville and Daniel Frohman and the Shubert brothers, whose name is now synonymous with Broadway.
Researchers studying the Shuberts or Broadway history contact the archive team who will gather boxes of information for them to review. Archivists might even throw in some artifacts the researchers didn’t know they needed.
Seeing The Lyceum before ‘Oh, Mary!’
The Broadway Banner team visited The Shubert Archive and were greeted by archive director Mark Swartz and archivist Sylvia Wang, who were happy to show off the Lyceum Theater, Shubert’s oldest active Broadway house. Built in 1903, The Lyceum is the oldest Broadway theater in continuous use.
Swartz said the Lyceum is due for a major upgrade, which could take up to two years.
We were in the Lyceum minutes before a matinee of “Oh, Mary!” as the tech crew did sound and set checks.
A tiny door is a window into Broadway’s past
Swartz pointed to the back of the balcony, to the high back wall where there’s a ladder and a small door.
That tiny door, it turns out, opens to the apartment once owned by theater owner Daniel Frohman. It gave Frohman a view of the stage, and his actress wife, Margaret Illington. The story goes that Frohman would wave a white handkerchief to let her know she was overacting.
“It definitely was a way for him to keep an eye on what was going on on the stage,” Swartz said. “Frohman built this and had such an intense connection to it, we sometimes kinda feel his presence.”
We were then escorted upstairs to the archive where we were greeted by assistant archivist Amandine Benincasa and associate archivist Arielle Dorlester.
A ‘friendly and warm’ ghost abides in Shubert Archive
Benincasa made sure to let us know that she’s sure the place is haunted.
“My first week here, I was in the stacks and put the doorstopper (down). The door then slammed shut and that is impossible because that stopper was down and would have been lifted up to move,” she said.
“He’s very friendly and warm,” Wang said in the ghost’s defense.
Dorlester agreed.
“I’m a total scaredy cat and I always feel comfortable when I’m here by myself,” she said.
Wang said Frohman was a longtime president of the Actors Fund to protect actors, now known as the Entertainment Community Fund.
“Everybody loved him,” Wang said.
Show and tell at the Shubert Archive
The Shubert Archive holds floors and floors of paperwork and artifacts, accessed by the friendly staff who seem ready to make your research their research. They get genuinely excited about what they have.
They have a lot.
When The Broadway Banner visited, the team had pulled some fascinating artifacts. Among them:
- Building blueprints and renderings;
- Something called a “copy book,” which had onion-skin paper onto which correspondence was ironed, making a complete record of messages sent and received in the course of Shubert business;
- Costume and set designs;
- A piece of Manhattan schist, New York bedrock, found during a renovation;
- Countless photos dating back to the 1900s;
- A map that shows the Theater District’s bad-old days, when peep shows were prominent;
- And a chair that dates back to the times of Daniel Frohman’s fluttering handkerchief.
The team encourages young learners to dive deep into the history of Broadway and make an appointment.
Have you been in a Shubert Theater?
After a few more ghost stories we learned some Shubert history.
Originally from Lithuania, the Shubert family migrated to Syracuse to start anew. Before long the three brothers Jacob “J.J.,” Sam, and Lee got involved in the theater business, eventually building and maintaining their empire.
Jacob was the last to die, in 1963, but the Shubert’s theater legacy lives on.
The Shubert Organization now owns 17 Broadway theaters, six Off-Broadway theaters and more.
Have you been in a Shubert theater on Broadway?
They are The Ambassador (home of “Chicago”), The Barrymore (recent home of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone”), The Belasco (home of “Maybe Happy Ending”), The Booth (recent home of “Proof”), The Broadhurst (recent home of “CATS: The Jellicle Ball”), The Broadway (home of “The Great Gatsby”), The Golden (home of “Operation Mincemeat”), The Imperial (soon to host “Billy Crystal: 860”), The Jacobs (home of “The Outsiders”), The James Earl Jones (futuer home of “Wanted”), The Longacre (home of “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York”), The Lyceum (home of “Oh, Mary!”), The Majestic (the longtime home of “Phantom of the Opera”), The Music Box (future home of “Inter Alia”), The Schoenfeld (home of “Buena Vista Social Club”), The Shubert (future home of “Galileo”) and the Winter Garden (recent home of “Death of a Salesman,” future home of “Much Ado About Nothing”).
Khloe JeanBart is a senior at Park Slope Collegiate in Brooklyn.
Leave a Reply