The Muny in St. Louis -- 100th Season

[Bookman George]

Not a production that I am in, but an announcement of sorts  ---

The Muny, the oldest and largest summer outdoor musical theater in the nation, opens its 100th season on Monday with a production of Jerome Robbins Broadway. I believe it is the first production since the touring company closed in 1991. It is a perfect opening for this centennial season, since every show included in the revue has played the Muny at least once.

I have been working as a volunteer in the Muny's archives for about four years. All our efforts have begun to pay off. It has long been possible on the website to get a list of all the shows that have played at the Muny and also to check a performer's name as see what shows he or she appeared in. But you couldn't see who played Dolly or Tevye in a particular production. Now you can. Check out the Muny's website, Muny.org. If you click on Shows and then on Archive, you can now see pages from the program for every Muny production for the past 99 years.  We are still working on adding photos of shows, bios and photos of performers, etc. Lots of work remains to be done. But this is a tremendous start to making a much better website.

And today a large and impressive exhibit called "Muny Memories: 100 Seasons On Stage" opens at the Missouri History Museum and runs for one year. Although the Museum staff put the exhibit together, we Muny archivists provided a lot of the materials. You can see more about the exhibit at http://mohistory.org/exhibits/muny-memories/
 

[KathyB]

I have been working as a volunteer in the Muny's archives for about four years. All our efforts have begun to pay off. It has long been possible on the website to get a list of all the shows that have played at the Muny and also to check a performer's name as see what shows he or she appeared in. But you couldn't see who played Dolly or Tevye in a particular production. Now you can. Check out the Muny's website, Muny.org. If you click on Shows and then on Archive, you can now see pages from the program for every Muny production for the past 99 years.  We are still working on adding photos of shows, bios and photos of performers, etc. Lots of work remains to be done. But this is a tremendous start to making a much better website.

Congratulations on this! The old programs are incredibly cool. I was looking at the ads in a program from a 1930 production of Maytime. I could get lost in these programs for a long time.

[Bookman George]

I have been working as a volunteer in the Muny's archives for about four years. All our efforts have begun to pay off. It has long been possible on the website to get a list of all the shows that have played at the Muny and also to check a performer's name as see what shows he or she appeared in. But you couldn't see who played Dolly or Tevye in a particular production. Now you can. Check out the Muny's website, Muny.org. If you click on Shows and then on Archive, you can now see pages from the program for every Muny production for the past 99 years.  We are still working on adding photos of shows, bios and photos of performers, etc. Lots of work remains to be done. But this is a tremendous start to making a much better website.

Congratulations on this! The old programs are incredibly cool. I was looking at the ads in a program from a 1930 production of Maytime. I could get lost in these programs for a long time.

Kathy, they are wonderful. We are in the process of scanning one entire program for each season. What we have done so far is just the part that changed from week to week, for each show. The rest of the program stayed pretty much the same the whole season, including lists of donors, information about the facilities, etc. Lots of really interesting ads in those pages. They will go up sometime this summer, I think.

[Chris L]

God, I wish all theaters would do that. Or maybe they do and I just haven't checked yet. What the Internet needs is a database of these things, sort of like IBDB but for regional productions and touring companies. I'd love to learn what actors I saw in some of the shows I went to as a kid. (I remember a lot of them, but I'm sure there were ones I just wasn't familiar with at the time.)

[scenicdesign71]

@Chris L - This isn't exhaustive by any means, but abouttheartists.com is meant to be just that: a database of productions, worldwide and seemingly going back as far as anyone cares to, all searchable (like IBDB) by title, person, venue etc.  Since it relies entirely on user input, it's not complete, and probably never will be.  But I have seen some surprisingly old/obscure/otherwise random productions listed there, so there clearly are some people out there with the time and inclination to contribute old program credits to the site.

[AmyG]

@Bookman George that's so impressive. You must feel very satisfied and proud of your efforts for both the web archive and the exhibit.  The program scans are so nice and clean and readable, even on the really old productions -- at least on the few I checked.

LA Opera used to have a database of all of their productions (at least recent ones) but they took it down years ago and it never came back. I never did find out why. It was really cool. LA Phil also used to have something similar where you could look up an artist or composer and there would be a sidebar where you could see every related LA Phil concert. It's gone too. Perhaps they need volunteers to help get it going again. 

@scenicdesign71, thanks for that link. I have been looking for something like that for years. I have almost all my old programs but I think I'm missing a few and besides, it's really hard to find one when I need it even though they are in mostly chron order. When I want to recall a production I've seen (or maybe I one I didn't see) this will be a big help.

[Chris L]

Thanks, Dave. I looked at the site you linked to and it's almost overwhelming. A quick examination didn't turn up anything I'd actually seen, but there must be a ton of information there. I assume it's counting touring companies as well as regional productions.

[Bookman George]

@Bookman George that's so impressive. You must feel very satisfied and proud of your efforts for both the web archive and the exhibit.  The program scans are so nice and clean and readable, even on the really old productions -- at least on the few I checked.

Thanks so much for that comment, Amy. We spent a lot of time cleaning them up because in some cases, the originals were in pretty bad shape. I am glad you found them "clean and readable" --- that was our goal. I will pass you comment on to my fellow archivists!

[Hester Jean]

Here's a still of George which is from a piece we did about the Muny's 100 year Birthday.[attach name=George+at+Computer.png type=image/png]370[/attach]

[Chris L]

It's nice to see another gray-haired guy sitting at his computer.  

[Bookman George]

Connie, thanks for posting that photo. It was taken in the small office that is our center of operations. It is on the second floor of the main administration building and overlooks the fountains that are in operation at the front of the whole complex during the summer season. Because the Muny is an outdoor theatre and so big, it really is more of a campus than a building.

During the summer, we are pretty much confined to that office. Our actual files are mostly in what is known as the vault, but it really is just a sort of store room. Not at all state of the art. We have taken a lot of field trips to other archives in the city and always envy them their special shelves and cabinets in climate controlled rooms. But we are in our infancy compared with most of them. Many of the files had not been touched for 80 or 90 years until we started working on them in 2014.

During the rest of the year, we can spread out into the office next door, which is used by the stage managers during the season, and into a room known as the Music Room, which is a rehearsal space, complete with numbers on the floor and a wall of mirrors. It used to be used a lot more than it now, since newer and more modern rehearsal space has been built in the last 20 years or so. Now it is still used for some small groups -- a couple of years ago, the barbershop quartet from The Music Man rehearsed there all afternoon one day when I was there, and just this week, the woman playing Dorothy in The Wiz next week was working with a coach for an hour or so.  

Up until about 1995, the Muny hired a dancing chorus and a singing chorus for the whole season. They used to do 10 or 11 shows a summer, but it has been 7 for quite some time. Until maybe 5 years ago, every show opened on Monday and ran for seven nights. The chorus members performed every night and rehearsed for the next week during the day. At midnight each Saturday night, they held the only dress rehearsal on stage, which ran until about 3 a.m. The chorus had Sunday off but had to be back for a performance Sunday evening. If it rained on the midnight rehearsal, they opened Monday evening anyway. It was a grueling schedule, but the few people I know who actually did it said it was very exciting and a lot of fun. Now a different ensemble is hired for each show; some performers appear in more than one show during  the season. And for the last five years or so, there has been at least one dark day between shows, when they have the dress rehearsal. That's much better for the cast and crew, but somehow not quite so magical as the old system.

That is, I am sure, more than you ever wanted to know about the Muny.