Photos of Josephine Baker in 1936, Carmen Miranda in 1941, and a bevy of beauties portraying dabs of paint arranged around a huge painter’s palette in 1924; a costume design for CATS in 1981 and the Wizard of Oz… in 1903; a window card for David Bowie in 1980, and a flyer for Mae West in 1928. These are among the treasures at The Shubert Archive, which has just launched a new website, where you can see these and other examples of records, scripts, scores, designs, photographs, some odd memorabilia and much else dating back to the 1890s.
Click on any entry to see it enlarged and read the caption supplied by the archivists.

Josephine Baker performing at the Folies Bergere in 1926. Based on her Parisian triumphs, the Shuberts hired her as one of the stars for their ZIEGFELD FOLLIES OF 1936. Unfortunately, she found a lukewarm reception on Broadway, and remained with the show for only a few months. In her book “The Many Faces of Josephine Baker” (2015), biographer Peggy Caravantes points out that Baker was the first and last black woman ever to appear in a Ziegfeld Follies.

Design for a giant water wheel with maidens and storks, designer Hugo Baruch & Cie, unknown production. Baruch was the leading theatrical design firm in Berlin in the late nineteenth through the first two decades of the twentieth centuries. In addition to costume and set designs, the firm also supplied fabrics, trimmings, jewelry, ornaments, and all manner of historical and contemporary stage props and furnishings. Although they had a New York office for a time, they have few official Broadway credits. The Shuberts often imported design sketches, and even costumes themselves, from Europe, so it is possible that this is one such import.

Audience of schoolboys, Winter Garden Theatre, 1916. The original design for the Winter Garden interior was meant to evoke an actual winter garden, hence the exposed cast iron ceiling, the trellis effect on the rear wall of the orchestra, and the garlands and floral motifs throughout. Most noteworthy was the runway that extended down the center aisle. This was dubbed the “Bridge of Thighs” in honor of the scantily clad chorus girls that paraded up and down it. Between 1922 and 1923, the Shuberts asked Herbert Krapp to remodel the theatre using his more traditional Adamesque style.

Orchestra, proscenium, boxes, Belasco Theatre, 2010. Photo by Whitney Cox, 2010. The renovation of the Belasco included the restoration of the original Tiffany Studios fixtures and the murals by artist Everett Shinn. All seventeen of Shubert’s Broadway playhouses are full of interesting, and often whimsical, decorative details.