Tales from The Social Club: Lights, Camera, Action!
Meeting Date and Time: Tuesday, July 9, 2024 from 5 PM to 6:30 PM
Meeting Location: Museum of Broadway, 145 W 45th St, New York, NY 10036
Website Link: Museum of Broadway
Views of the Museum of Broadway Outside of the Entrance
For this event, we got to explore the rich history of Broadway from its early roots from 1732 to the present time. The museum starts with a video that goes through an overview of this history starting with the fact that Broadway itself actually began in the downtown area of NYC as indicated by the map below.
Gradually, the Theater District moved North to its current location in and around Times Square to take advantage of cheaper real estate. We also learned that Broadway closed for a record amount of time for COVID-19 Pandemic (18 months) starting in March 2020.
After viewing the video, we got to visit individual exhibits which corresponded to different Broadway plays. The exhibits start with an overview of the timeline of Broadway, a term which originally took root in the late 1800s/early 1900s.
I also found fascinating the role black people played in telling a stories about African American life before, during, and after the Civil War.
I also really enjoyed going through a mock corn field from the musical Oklahoma.
I also learned that Oklahoma played a key role in people getting through the difficult times of World War II which you can read more about below.
Moving on to the West Side Story set, one of my fellow Social Club members enjoyed pretending to sell items from a store.
My favorite exhibit of this museum was the crossword puzzle featuring Stephen Sondheim musicals.
Each clue for this puzzle is a musical that Sondheim wrote. In order to solve the puzzle, the all capital letters of the bolded words need to be unscrambled.
It was particularly satisfying that we successfully solved the puzzle. Also, as an added twist, note that the letter at each intersections of all of of the two words going from left to right and top to bottom following the across words spell Sondheim's name (for example, West Side Story and Sunday in the Park with George both share the letter S).
It was also around the time we solved this puzzle, we got a warning that the museum was closing in 30 minutes (it was 6 PM and the museum closed at 6:30 PM). So the rest of our visit went a bit more quickly than I would have liked.
Next up, we visited a wall which had the names that paid tribute to the people in the theater community who died of AIDS Epidemic.
You can read more about how HIV/AIDS has impacted the theatre community and how the community responded to it below. I find their activism to be very inspirational.
I would highly recommended picking up this payphone to listen to a detailed description of the Rent Musical.
The last thing we saw was a description of the life cycle of a musical.
I really like this description because it emphasizes that the journey a show undergoes from an idea to an opening night performance is different for every show. It also describes how a lot of people are involved in the process and how only a few ideas every make it to opening night.
In conclusion, I really liked the museum because of the rich history this museum presents about Broadway. The downside is, as I said earlier, 1.5 hours is not nearly enough time to view everything and that is something I hold the museum accountable for because their last ticket is sold at 5 PM and the place closes at 6:30 PM.
That being said, my recommendation to you would be to give yourself at least 3 hours to fully take in the experience. The museum is a chronological timeline and it is a path that goes in one direction giving you the opportunity to view everything. This is in contrast to some other museums where you can visit multiple exhibits multiple times in the same visit but I find with these museums that there is so much there you could never view it all in one visit (no that this is a bad thing, it is just different).
The time crunch aside, all is all, this was a great social club outing.
