Future of the Museum of Broadway — Page 2

ErmengardeStopSniveling said: "The Museum of Broadway is better and more informative than I expected it to be, buta for-profit museum is just a fool's errand. I particularly liked the backstage simulations by David Rockwell.

The Academy Museum in LA or the Museum of Moving Image in Queensis the gold standard for this kind of museum, and they're much bigger than the MoB. Both those institutions also have theaters and coffee shops within them: another revenue stream and another way to engage the public.

Someone donating a quarter of a billion to the NYPL Performing Arts Library to expand it and create large, permanent public exhibitions about Broadway and NYC theatre would really be the best way to do this type of museum."

Great suggestion. Key point: tie it to a non-profit institution.

Kad said: "The big advantage that the NYPL has is its large archive that it has been building for decadesand its team of archivists, historians, researchers, and other staff. And if the NYPL is lacking in certain materials, it can easily work with peer institutions to obtain them to create an exhibit.It has legitimacy, experience, and collections that the MoB just lacks as a for-profit."

Exactly. I believe the Film Academy had also been collecting artifacts & bequests for years, or buying things from estate auctions, prior to the museum. To the MoB's credit, they have done some partnerships with the NYPL, Library of Congress, TDF, Costume Collection, Goodspeed, and other nonprofits to borrow or rent items. But it just doesn't go far enough.

They also just don't have the space and financial bandwidth for major revolving exhibitions, which would encourage return attendance by New Yorkers.

For me, the big missed opportunity is that they haven't leaned into what we sometimes derogatorily call "museum pieces": Recreation. Like..."we recreated, designed, & filmed 4 dance numbers from old Broadway shows that flopped, using the original design plans & choreo notes. You can only see them here. And in the next room you can see piece by piece how we put that together." But that's not cheap and it's not going to appeal to the general population.

Updated On: 10/27/24 at 01:00 PM

I think the challenge of the current MoB is that they wanted to straddle both worlds: they have instagrammable stuff, and they have some inside-baseball stuff to appeal to people like us, but there's not quite enough to satiate either group.

Paraphrasing Logan Roy and a current presidential candidate "these are not serious people."