From Broadway To 52nd Street
The Band Wagon hit the stage on June 3, 1931 at the New Amsterdam featuring Frank Morgan, Helen Broderick and Fred and Adele Astaire in their 10th and final Broadway appearance together. This revue utilized for the first time on Broadway, a double revolving stage for both its musical numbers and sketches. Dancing In The Dark written and composed by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, remains a jazz standard.
The Story: The revue, which ran 260 performances, had Fred and Adele cast as two French children cavorting with hoops, riding a Bavarian merry-go-round and several other sketches.
Broadway History: Theater posters are probably as old as the idea of the poster, but they really blossomed as an art form during the Industrial Revolution, when lithographic printing was perfected and affordable. In Paris during the Belle Époque (1880-1914) such posters were everywhere, a feature of the city. It was then that theater posters first became popular as decoration and memorabilia at home. When color printing developed (chromolithography), poster artists became even more popular and individually famous – like artist Jules Cheret, whose beautiful poster-girls (literal pin-up girls) were called “Chèrettes.” More and more reputable artists started creating posters. Toulouse-Lautrec, for instance, created many famous ones – an important part of his career.
Since that heyday, artists have continued to experiment with posters, including posters for the stage. Posters are an interesting genre-blending fine art, illustration, graphic art, advertising, and typography – so poster design attracts artists from each of those fields, for a lively cross-pollination of styles and ideas. All of which make posters a particularly rich and exciting contemporary art form.
The poster is also a supremely timely and ephemeral art designed to be used this one time for this one show, making them a sort of limited-time-offer art. Added to posters’ artistic merit, their time-capsule quality and their commemoration of now vanished events (plus the inevitable rarity of a paper artifact surviving) make posters ideal collectibles.
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