During the Golden Age of Broadway, theater photographer Leo Friedman used his specialized still camera to capture image after image of show after show. The action on stage was rarely still, and neither was Leo; he shot in rapid sequence.

Those bursts of images by Friedman and his partners at Friedman-Abeles studio are being put to innovative use in an exhibition opening this Friday at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center entitled “Reanimating Theater: The Photography of Friedman-Abeles.” A sequence of images are digitally combined to simulate animation in scenes from each of seventeen Broadway productions that opened between 1954 and 1970 — which were the years when Leo Friedman, Sy Friedman (no relation) and Sy Abeles worked as Friedman-Abeles, the premiere New York firm for theatrical photography. Many of these moving images are in color. Four of them are presented below as gifs.

I asked Doug Reside, the exhibition’s curator, how the Friedman-Abeles photographs in particular affected the Broadway repertory (since Reside is the author of “Fixing the Musical: How Technologies Shaped the Broadway Repertory“)  “I think they definitely defined the iconic image for a lot of shows. A good example is West Side Story.” See below

The exhibition, which runs through September 25, uses photographs that are part of the Friedman-Abeles archives, thousands of images from some 800 productions, which are now part of the Library’s Billy Rose Theatre Division.

This was a promotional shot of Carol Lawrence and Larry Kerr, the stars of the original Broadway production of “West Side Story,” from 1957.  “It isn’t actually a shot from the stage,”Reside told me. “But it’s become so iconic that image has come to stand for West Side Story even in productions that followed it. They re-created that image for the film poster with Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer and is on the cover of several non-English versions of the DVD.”

Camelot, 1960

Bye Bye Birdie, original Broadway production. 1960-61

Purlie, original Broadway production. 1970-71.

The other photographs in the exhibition are from the following plays and musicals:

Baker Street
Black Picture Show
The Boy Friend
Cabaret
Carnival
Company
Do I Hear A Waltz
Fiddler on the Roof
Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Great White Hope
Jesus Christ Superstar
No Place to Be Somebody
Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window