Triton recently received some original poster sketches from the estate of illustrator Frederic Marvin, who passed away in January.
Among the artwork was an unused submission that we cannot identify. We have attached the image here and are hoping that someone in the Broadway world might have a guess. (We have some guesses we'll share later). Based on the other sketches in the collection it is safe to date it sometime in the 1970's, maybe 1980's.
Are you sure this is a Broadway poster. The image seems very familiar to me. But my feeling is that I've seen some version of this on record album cover or a book cover.
Art has a double face, of expression and illusion.
Yeah, I don't get FINIAN'S RAINBOW. To me it looks vaguely turn-of-the-century, and seems to have something to do with jazz (or at least music of some kind).
DOCTOR JAZZ begins in 1917, and is the story of a black singer-dancer who goes from New Orleans to Harlem to Broadway, under the guidance of a white man. I can see all that in this design
The final poster seems to have been by the show's production designer, Raoul Pene Du Bois. Possibly that was a last-minute decision? That would also make a discarded design make sense.
The top female face looks rather Angela Lansbury-ish to me.
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." Thomas Pynchon, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW
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Hmm. It know it's from the estate of Frederic Marvin, but I think that's a red herring - I say it's an Al Hirschfeld design for the Finian's Rainbow movie, and the girl pictured is Petula Clark. An uneducated guess which probably doesn't make much sense, but it's a fun game.
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"The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors. Besides, the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet."
--Aristotle