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In Honor of Hamilton, See American History Onstage Through the Legendary Pen of Al Hirschfeld!
In Honor of Hamilton, See American History Onstage Through the Legendary Pen of Al Hirschfeld!
In celebration of The New-York Historical Society's special exhibition "The Hirschfeld Century: The Art of Al Hirschfeld" and the new book "The Hirschfeld Century: Portrait of an Artist and His Age," published July 7, Playbill presents a look back at some classic Al Hirschfeld drawings.
20 PHOTOS
Annie Get Your Gun
William O’Neal, Kenny Bowers, Betty Anne Nyman, Ethel Merman, Lubov Roudenko, Ray Middleton, and Harry Bellaver, 1946
Irving Berlin’s classic musical brought Anne Oakley back to center stage.
Jelly’s Last Jam
Gregory Hines, Tonya Pinkins, Stanley Wayne Mathis, Keith David, Savion Glover, Allison Williams, Stephanie Pope, Mamie Duncan Gibbs, and Brenda Baxton, 1992
Based on the life of composer and self-proclaimed inventor of jazz Jelly Roll Morton, this musical explores the African American experience in the first half of the 20th century.
Joseph Buloff in Oklahoma! , 1946
Buloff, as the peddler Ali Hakim, personifies Oklahoma! as it makes history by passing Hellazapoppin’ as the longest running musical in Broadway history. A record it would hold for eighteen years.
Ragtime
Jim Corti, Lynette Perry, Judy Kaye, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Audra McDonald, Lea Michele, Peter Friedman, Mark Jacoby, and Marin Mazzie, 1998
Ragtime tells the story of three groups in the United States in the early 20th century: African Americans, upper-class suburbanites, and Eastern European immigrants. The musical also features appearances by real historical figures such as Houdini, Booker T. Washington, J. P. Morgan and Emma Goldman.
Angels in America
Marcia Gay Harden, David Marshall Grant, Kathleen Chalfant, Ron Leibman, Ellen McLaughlin, Stephen Spinella, Joe Mantello, and Jeffrey Wright, 1993
Roy Cohn was brought back to life by Ron Leibman in Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony winning play.
The Piano Lesson
Lisa Gay Hamilton, S. Epatha Merkerson, Lou Meyers, Charles Dutton, Carl Gordon, Tom Hollis, & Rocky Carroll, 1990
In August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, an African American brother and sister argue over the fate of a family piano that is a record of their grandparents’ slavery.
The Show is On
Paul Haakon and Evelyn Thawl, 1937
Dancer Paul Haakon played Casanova in this musical revue with songs by the Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, Vernon Duke, Rodgers and Hart, and Harold Arlen. Conceived and directed by Vincente Minnelli.
The Unsinkable Molly Brown
Tammy Grimes, Harve Presenell, Edith Meiser, and Mitchell Gregg, 1960
Meredith Wilson’s musical is a fictionalized account of the life of Margaret Brown, played by Tammy Grimes who won a Tony for the role, who survived the sinking of the Titantic.
Raymond Massey in Abe Lincoln in Illinois , 1971
Raymond Massey was so convincing as the 16th president in Robert Sherwood’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize winning play that George Kaufman reportedly said that "Massey won't be satisfied until someone assassinates him."
Bernadette Peters in Annie Get Your Gun , 1999
Peters gave audiences the sun in the morning and the moon at night when she breathed life into a revival of Irving Berlin’s classic.
Assassins
Debra Monk, Victor Garber, Jonathan Hadary, Terrance Mann, Annie Golden, 1991
Stephen Sondheim made a musical of murder when he brought together a cast of presidential killers in his controversial Assassins.
Walter Huston in Knickerbocker Holiday , 1938
This musical, with music buy Kurt Weill and lyrics and libretto by Maxwell Anderson was loosely based on Washington Irving’s "Father Knickerbocker’s Stories" about life in 17th-century New Netherland (old New York). The musical numbers include "September Song", now considered a standard.
Mayor
Lenny Wolpe, Kathryn Mcateer, Keith Curran, Ilene Kristan, Doug Bernstein, Ken Jennings, and Nancy Giles, 1985
Warren Leight and Charles Strouse’s musical based on New York Mayor Ed Koch’s memoir, depicts a single day in the life of the city's leader
Peggy Ashcroft and company in High Tor , 1937
Maxwell Anderson’s stage fantasy was inspired by the real life controversy over quarrying the palisades along the lower Hudson River. It also includes a cast of ghostly Dutch Sailors that Anderson first encountered with Washingt0n Irving’s short stories
The Nine Old Men of the Supreme Court in I’d Rather Be Right , 1938
The Supreme Court is made into a comic chorus in Kaufman and Hart’s and Rodgers and Hart’s musical comedy that gently satirized Franklin Roosevelt while the President was in office.
Indians Over Broadway
Helen Tamiris, Ethel Merman, Harry Bellaver, Beatrice Lillie, and Jack Haley, 1948
Oklahoma!
Jessica Boevers, Aasif Mandvi, Shuler Hensley, Andrea Martin, Justin Bohon, Patrick Wilson, and Josefina Gabrielle, 2002
The sixth revival in New York netted Shuler Hensley a Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Musical.
Teddy and Alice
Len Cariou, Nancy Hume, Richard Blake, Sarah Reynolds, Seth Granger, Robert Cavanaugh, and John Daman, 1987
This musical about President Theodore Roosevelt and his daughter was set to music by John Phillip Sousa yet failed to rouse much interest in the public and closed after 77 performances.
Margaret Colin in Jackie: An American Life , 1997
An affectionate satire about the life of Jackie Kennedy from which only its heroine emerges unscathed.
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Emily Yancy, Patricie Routledge, Ken Howard, Guy Costley, and Gilbert Price, 1976
This legendary misfire (it ran seven performances) was a surprise since it had a score by Leonard Bernstein and book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. The music would live on as Bernstein’s posthumous White House Cantata .
"The Hirschfeld Century: The Art of Al Hirschfeld " is the first major retrospective of the acclaimed portraitist, who immortalized celebrities and Broadway productions with his iconic drawings for nine decades. On view at The New-York Historical Society through Oct. 12, the exhibition features over 100 original drawings from the artist's early work for Hollywood studios to his last drawings for the New York Times. Highlights include classic portraits of Charlie Chaplin, Carol Channing , Ella Fitzgerald , Jane Fonda , and Ringo Starr, as well as cast drawings from such landmark productions as Fiddler on the Roof , West Side Story and The Glass Menagerie .
The book "The Hirschfeld Century: Portrait of an Artist and His Age," published by Alfred A. Knopf and featuring biographical text by David Leopold, is currently available exclusively at The New-York Historical Society exhibition, and will be available in bookstores around the country July 7. The artist's extraordinary career is revealed in more than 360 of his iconic black-and-white and color drawings, illustrations, and photographs. Hirschfeld's influences, his techniques, and his evolution from his earliest works to his last drawings, are all chronicled.