The Record from Hackensack, New Jersey • 122

The Sunday Record "1 ft JUNE 1, 1986 Dining Out E-15 Movie timetable E-14 Soaps E-12 ft Fft ml 1986 TONY NOMINATIONS PLAY Celebrating the Shuberts "Benefactors" "Blood Knot" "Dm Houm of Bk Leave" "I'm Not Rappaport" MU8ICAL By Peter Wynne Drama Critic "Big DmI" "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" "Song Dane" "Tango Argentlno" REPRODUCTION "Hay Fever" "The Iceman Cometh" "Loot" "Sweet Charity" I ACTOR IN A PLAY Hume Cronyn Ed Harris Judd Hlrach Not 1 Jack Lemmon Day's Journey Into ACTRESS IN A PLAY Brooks McNamara, theater historian who has spent 10 years researching Shubert Archive. Staff photos by Mery A. Salter Above and below, Sam Zalud's creations for the Shubert revue. Rosemary Harris Mary Beth Hurt a Jessica Tandy Lily Tomlln Search for Signs of Intelligent Life In the ACTOR IN A MUSICAL Don Correla In the Oeavant Derricks Maurice Hlnes It's George Rose Mystery of Edwin ACTRES3 IN A MUSICAL stretched into more than 500 as he and Brigitte Kueppers, the professional archivist quickly hired to work on the project, spent a full decade preparing the collection for use by researchers. Help came from more than 60 NYU graduate assistants, working on stipends from the Shubert Foundation.

They put in an average 80 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, on cataloguing and categorizing and cleaning and conserving the materials, now valued at more than $5 million, that were literally arriving by the truckload at the Lyceum Theatre. "We have business papers correspondence and artist's contracts," McNamara said, "things that are invaluable to theater researchers and much rarer than the usual artistic items like play-scripts and designer drawings. Usually business records are thrown away. We also have thousands of files and boxes filled with the more usual theatrical items. "We have a whole file cabinet full of early comic sketches and those are extremely rare and about 600 manuscript musicals.

We have 8,000 sheets of plans for theaters and other buildings and 8,000 manuscript plays, many of them never produced, including a collaboration between Sinclair Lewis and Faye Wray. "We have 3,000 costume plates, dozens and dozens of scenic designs, and thousands upon thousands of production and publicity photographs. It's the greatest collection of Broadway documents in the world." The Shubert Archive is also unique in that it's a collection focusing on the activities of a single vast and vastly important theatrical enterprise, for the Shuberts were among the top American producers from the turn of the century through the end of World War II. In many ways, the history of the Shuberts has been the history of the American theater in the 20th Century, perhaps not the intellectual theater that fascinates most professorial types, but the mainstream, popular theater that has always involved the greatest number of artists and enjoyed the liveliest public interest. The documents in the Shubert Archive recount that history in a See SHUBERT, Page E-12 Debbie Allen Cleo Lalne Mystery of Edwin Tomorrow night, a group of young actors and musicians will get together to perform songs and scenes from dozens of long-forgotten musicals, and more than 200 top names from today's theater and academic worlds will be on hand to cheer.

That unusual but happy affair at a private club in New York will mark the opening of the Shubert Archive, the newest scholarly resource for people seriously interested in the Broadway theater. The archive, housed in the Lyceum Theatre on West 45th Street, opens officially Tuesday, but the business of getting it ready to open began 10 years ago when representatives of the Shubert Organization called theater historian Brooks McNamara, who's professor in the Performance Studies Department at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. "Can you help us go through and evaluate some papers we've accumulated over the years?" the caller asked, and McNamara, curious but busy with other projects, consented, putting aside two weeks for the Shubert job. A real shirt-sleeves historian, McNamara is not the sort to be fazed by a pile of dust-laden documents, but nothing had prepared him for the mountain of theatrical papers and memorabilia he was about to find 4 million pieces or thereabouts, enough to fill the equivalent of six floors of the Lyceum, a good-sized midtown building. What McNamara had discovered was that the late Lee, Sam, and J.

J. Shubert had been the theatrical versions of the Collier Brothers. The Shuberts never threw anything away if they could help it, and Shubert theaters in New York and other major American cities were jammed with materials of interest to theater historians. Stored in back rooms and closets for decades were such things as box office records, newspaper clippings, business and personal correspondence, and even some love letters that Sam Shubert had gotten from various starlets (Evelyn Nesbitt among them) in the early years of this century. McNamara's two weeks l-O Bernadette Petters (A 1 Chita Rivera FEATURED ACTOR IN A PLAY Peter Gallagher Day's Journey Into Charles Keating Joseph Manor John Mahoney House of Blue FEATURED ACTRESS IN A PLAY Stockard Charming House of Blue Swoosle Kurtz House of Blue Bethel Leslie Day's Journey Into Zoe Wanamaker FEATURED ACTOR IN A MUSICAL Christopher D'Ambolse John Herrera Mystery of Edwin 'D Howard McGlllln Mystery of Edwin Michael Rupert FEATURED ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL Pattl Cohen our Mystery of Edwin Bebe Neuwlrth ana Schneider Mystery of Edwin Elisabeth Welch Kern Goes to BOOK OF A MUSICAL Bob Fosse Rupert Holmes Mystery of Edwin Betty Comden and Adolph Green In the Jane Iredale In the SCORE Rupert Holmes, music and lyrics Mystery of Edwin Paul Schierhorn, music and lyrics Andrew Lloyd Webber, music, Don Black and Richard Maltby lyrics William Perry, music, Roger McGough and William Perry, lyrics the DIRECTOR, PLAY Jonathan Miller Day's Journey into Jose Quintero Iceman John Tlllinger Jerry Zaks House of Blue DIRECTOR, MUSICAL Bob Fosse WMford Leach Mystery of Edwin Richard Maltby Jr.

Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli ('Tango ml Some of those the Shuberts helped make famous: from left in the lower row, Gertrude Long and George HasseU, in "The Student Prince," Carmen Miranda in about 1940, and Imogene Coca and Danny Kaye in 1939. Far right, second and third from top, two photos of Eva La Gallienne in "L'Aiglon" in 1934; actor in lower photo is unidentified. earn B13 iii Director films his own clash of cultures Bowing out By Deborah Jerome Movie Critic By Michael Kuchwara Tht Associated Press lide in a happy dialectic. Each side is able to indulge in curiosity, fascination, and snobbery about the way the other half lives. "When I was a student here," says Wang, "I became aware of what it meant to be first-generation Chinese-American.

There's a feeling of incomplete life. That I don't belong here in this foreign country. You try to assimilate, and you feel American, but you're not seen that way because you look Chinese. After a while, rather than consider myself marginal in any way, I began to think of myself as bilingual and biculturaL That I wasn't less, but in some ways more. It's this perception that I want to transform into stories, plays, movies." The idea for "A Great Wall" came about when producer and co writer Shirley Sun got an agreement from a company in China to coproduce a film.

Wang "hacked out" a synopsis about unemployment in Peking, until he realized that he knew very little about the problem. Instead, that theme See CLASH, Page E-10 professor of electrical engineering at George Mason University. But two years ago, he decided to call it quits on academic life. The bright lights were beckoning. "Every American goes through a midlife crisis," says Wang.

"Why not me? My first love was always acting and theater. I helped Wayne Wang make 'Chan is and I co-wrote and starred in 'Ah Ying' a movie by Alan Fong that was shown in the 1984 New DirectorsNew Films festival. I had to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I didn't know what kind of life I'd run into as a film maker, a director, so I decided to do that" The result of that decision, "A Great Wall" focuses on a man not unlike Wang himself. Leo Fang, who's played by Wang, is a computer engineer who goes through something like a midlife crisis when a less-qualified Caucasian colleague is promoted to a job he himself should have gotten.

He decides to take his family to visit his sister's family in China. Predictably, the two cultures col Peter Wang doesn't like still photos of himself. "I look so ugly," he complains mildly. In the semi-converted SoHo loft that functions as his office, he positions his chair toward a mirror as he talks. Every so often, he checks himself and smooths his hair, not so much out of vanity, it seems, but almost as a reassurance.

Like the characters in his first movie, "A Great Wall," director-writer-actor Peter Wang has struggled with the contradictory pulls on identity that come from belonging to two cultures. "In the bottom of my heart, I'm more American than I'd like to admit," he says, summing it up. Wang, who is in his forties, came to the United States from Taiwan in the Sixties to study at the University of Pennsylvania. He got his PhD in electrooptics, worked for a time as a researcher at IBM in Pougnkeepsie, N.Y., and then became a Two decades ago, old Broadway reached Main Street in prime time. On Sunday, March 26, 1967, an hour-long awards ceremony was televised live from the stage of the Shubert The evening's entertainment featured excerpts from four Broadway musicals "Cabaret," "I Do! I "The Apple Tree," and "Walking Happy." It was classy and fast-paced, delighting TV critics bored by the long-winded presentations of the Oscars and Emmys.

More important, it was watched by millions of potential theatergoers who had never been to Broadway. See FAREWELL, Page E-7 I.