If you love musicals, an exhibition has just opened in the Theatre and Performance galleries of the V&A that celebrates the musical with a display of items in the museum’s collections that will intrigue and dazzle and spark off memories. There are costumes and costume designs, set models, scores, technical drawings, props, posters and record sleeves even a simulacrum prompt corner where you can try your own hand at calling the cues through your headset with the prompt book before you and screens showing conductor, full stage and fly floor as well as your own view of the stage.
There are 100 separate items on display that represent productions from the original staging of My Fair Lady to shows currently running such as Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, SIX and Frozen, plus a giant video screen to watch life-sized extracts from many of the shows in the museum’s archive of digital recordings.
They aren’t arranged chronologically: curators Simon Sladen and Harriet Reed have taken a thematic approach. One section explores how musicals have drawn on literature, existing plays and films: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, inspiring West Side Story or & Juliet; L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz both screen and stage adaptations (the first was in 1902), then The Wiz and Wicked.
Another group is of those based on actual history Hamilton and 1776 with their very different approaches to presenting American gaining its independence, the attitude to war in Oh What a Lovely War, Miss Saigon or Hair; to treatment of Tudor history in SIX the Musical or Kings and Clowns.
A further section groups biographic subjects. A glitzy costume from A Chorus Line, which was based on real dancers’ lives, stands next to the denim and diamanté costume worn by successive performers as Jamie in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, all of whom signed their names on its collar.
Musical theatre isn’t just the West End and the Theatre and Performance Collections represent the whole country. Jamie, for instance, began in Sheffield and many other musicals are created outside London by theatres ranging from Chichester’s Festival Theatre to Hope Mill in Manchester (the set model for their revival of The Wiz is an exhibit) or in fringe theatres such as Southwark Playhouse: the nitty gritty of mounting a show demonstrated by technical drawings for their production of Operation Mincemeat.
These who put in such hard work away from the bright lights are featured here too in miniature figures that represent the costumiers, wig makers and other skilled workers whom you can find in our pictures to the left of the Annie costumes and the right of Catherine of Aragon’s.
From the simple red dress Bunny Christie designed for Bobby in Marianne Elliott’s revival of Company (which made the role female) to Cecil Beaton’s beaded gown for Julie Andrews’s Eliza Doolittle, it is probably the costumes that attract immediate attention or the graphics of posters and record sleeves, but take time to see what the alterations to a music score can tell you about the production process, keep your ears open for information that is part of the sound and allow time for the 20-minute compilation of video extracts for the finale.
This isn’t one of the V & A’s blockbuster shows, but it is a totally free one that for any theatre lover. It is on from now until 27 November and is supported by a family trail and interactive events across the October half-term.