The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is pleased to announce the release of the Dorothy Loudon Digital Exhibition.

Dorothy Loudon (1925-2003) was a Tony Award-winning Broadway star, cabaret singer, and television performer. She is best remembered for her performance as Miss Hannigan in the original Broadway cast of Annie and for the playing the leading role of Bea Asher in the 1978 musical Ballroom.

This online exhibit, funded by a generous grant from the Dorothy Loudon Foundation, provides researchers and fans with digital access to selections from her personal and professional papers, held by the Library since 2005.

Loudon, a thorough autobiographer, documented her own career in more than thirty detailed scrapbooks, all of which have been digitized and are accessible in the exhibition, along with selected items from Loudon's archive of letters and personal photographs. Rehearsal drafts of the script for Annie and its ill-fated sequel, Annie 2: Miss Hannigan's Revenge (with Loudon's handwritten notes) can be read in their entirety, and a compete audio recording of a young Dorothy Loudon performing in a 1959 variety show at the Poconos summer theater, the Tamiment Playhouse, can be streamed from the site.

This exhibition is the most recent in a series of digital exhibitions produced by the Library for the Performing Arts that has also included, in the past year, an exhibition of photographs of Noël Coward productions and an interactive guide to the Library's John Cage archive.