As teachers and students return to school this fall in a variety of, and often difficult, circumstances, the Billy Rose Theatre Division is here to help provide you with the resources you need for the study of stage, film, and television. While (as of this writing) our building is not yet open for in-person visits, our staff are all working full-time, and we are ready to help you get the materials you need.

Several theatre librarians and other staff have created a guide for using our collections remotely. This guide includes links to the many databases that would usually be accessible only on site but which our vendors have generously permitted us to make available to anyone with a library card. These databases include news archives, academic articles about theatre, as well as e-books of plays and books about theatre. 

Of particular interest to students and teachers may be Digital Theatre+. This service offers streaming access to professionally recorded videos of live theatre including the 2016 recording of Roundabout Theatre’s revival of She Loves Me from BroadwayHD and Digital Theatre’s own recording of London’s Regent Park production of Into the Woods (which transferred briefly to the Delacorte Theater in Central Park with a largely different cast in 2012).   

There are also hundreds of thousands of digitized items in NYPL’s own Digital Collections. The Theatre Division owns the copyright to the photographs produced by most of the major theatre photography studios of the 20th century including White Studio, Florence Vandamm, Friedman-Abeles, Kenn Duncan, and Martha Swope. We have digitized large portions of these collections with the result that one can find at least a few photographs of most major productions that happened in New York City between 1900 and 1985. For our recent Harold Prince exhibition, we digitized almost all of the photographic negatives related to a few of his shows, so students interested in West Side Story, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Fiddler on the Roof, Flora the Red Menace, It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman, Cabaret, Baker Street, or Company could virtually reconstruct the show from photographic documentation.

Students may also be interested in our blog posts. Several years ago, I curated a series called Musical of the Month which regularly published a libretto of (mostly older) musicals including The Black Crook, The Wizard of Oz, and Shuffle Along. More recently, our Theatre on Film and Tape Archive staff have launched a series showcasing video interviews with theatre makers recorded for the archive. 

Last semester, students from Florida State University researched the Baker Street photos and a set of digitized objects from the papers of producer R.H. Burnside and wrote a series of essays about them which we published. Teachers may wish to consider a similar project with our other digital collections. Of particular interest for a future project might be our collection of Ed Kleban’s lyric drafts for the musical A Chorus Line.  

Finally, the staff of the Theatre Division are here to help you. We can digitize portions of our collections for your research use on demand. You can make an appointment to speak via Google Hangout with one of our experts. Or, if you want someone from our division to speak to your class, we are happy to make virtual class visits. Email us as theatre@nypl.org and let us know how we can help!