Ransom Center Magazine

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Finding Henry Street: the Broadway Revival of Funny Girl and New York City Dramaturgy

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by BARRIE GELLES

My heart was racing because I had just bolted through the New York City theatre district. As far as I was concerned, there was an archival emergency. I recognize the absurdity and humor in claiming that I was having a musical theatre crisis, but the urgency felt real. Having a desperate need to discover the answer to my question felt simultaneously stressful and exciting. Sometimes, archival research is subdued and slow paced while you sit in a quiet room, carefully taking notes and collecting sources. But, some days, you find yourself frantically checking your research notes in the middle of Times Square, looking through two separate archives, and trying to find answers in between meetings with producers at a Broadway theatre. Some days, the connection between the “then” of an archive and the “now” of a theatre production is immediate. Some days, archival research is really quite thrilling.

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ABOUT BARRIE GELLES

Barrie Gelles is a theatre scholar, director, and educator. She writes about the aesthetics of musical theatre and approaches to pedagogy and practice within the academy with a focus on accessibility in classroom and production practice. Barrie recently defended her dissertation at The Graduate Center, CUNY and is an adjunct instructor at Baruch College, Marymount Manhattan College, and NYU Steinhardt. She directs theatre in New York City with a focus on new musicals and re-envisioned revivals of musicals. For more information, visit barriegelles.com

Summer Intern: Malachi McMahon

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This summer, the Harry Ransom Center’s Preservation and Conservation Department opened its doors to undergraduate interns in order to provide hands-on experience in the field. One of those interns is Malachi McMahon. A rising senior at Prairie View A&M University, McMahon is spending a month learning about preservation, conservation, digitization, and more.

There are few routine days on the job for McMahon, whose favorite days have included learning about the binding, design, and construction of 16th-century bibles and making isinglass, a natural glue made from gelatin and sturgeon bladders.

If you have any interest in fine arts or literature, history, this would be a great place to find a new experience and perspective.
—MALACHI MCMAHON

“I expected to do more paperwork, but I’m actually glad that I’m doing more hands-on training,” McMahon said. In addition to these new skills, McMahon says he will take other lessons back to school in the fall. “I learned how to be more professional and how to carry myself in a professional setting.”

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Collaborating To Conserve

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New initiative is designed to protect cultural collections across the UT campus

In the 140 years since The University of Texas at Austin was founded, valuable collections of books, manuscripts, photographs, art, and much more have come to the university through generous gifts and purchased acquisitions. These collections are composed of cultural objects—oftentimes unique and irreplaceable—that serve as resources for students, scholars, artists, and writers. More than 40 years ago, the Harry Ransom Center established one of the nation’s first conservation laboratories in a research library. In 2021, with the support of Executive Vice President and Provost Sharon Wood, the Center helped launch the Campus Conservation Initiative that already has resulted in more than 1,000 hours spent treating these iconic cultural objects, including a letter written by Thomas Jefferson; an artwork by Jacob Lawrence; two handwritten cookbooks made by Maria Austin, the wife of Moses Austin and the mother of Stephen F. Austin; and many more.

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Michael Gilmore’s Life in Objects

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Michael Gilmore’s tenure at the Ransom Center began in 1982, after a transfer from UT’s Perry-Castañeda Library on the advice of a friend. “That’s how I ended up over here with rare books and manuscripts,” he says. “It was just a delight.”

Through it all, he’s been a passionate advocate for the extraordinary objects in the collections. After eighteen years at the Center, Gilmore retired on June 16, 2023 from his role as Visual Materials Circulation Coordinator in the Reading and Viewing Room.

I asked Gilmore to show me his favorite item: a book from the collection of Ernest Hemingway, from a box of materials that was kept sealed until 25 years after his death. Gilmore was the one to catalog it.

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Archive of Poet James Fenton Acquired

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The Harry Ransom Center has acquired the archive of English poet James Fenton, whose body of work reflects on the political upheavals of our time, including the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the suppression of political protest in China’s Tiananmen Square, and Northern Ireland’s fratricidal bloodletting.

His papers include notebooks and loose manuscript and typescript drafts spanning his career as a journalist, critic, and poet. Letters within the Fenton papers document his lifelong friendship with his Oxford tutor, John Fuller, and with leading writers of his generation, including Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, Redmond O’Hanlon and Craig Raine, as well as with his partner, Darryl Pinckney.

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Fellowships Awarded to 52 Scholars

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The Ransom Center has awarded 52 fellowships for the upcoming year to postdoctoral, dissertation and independent researchers studying a wide array of topics, from Tennessee Williams’ visual self portraits to 1980s Hollywood Gothic, Deborah Hay and the choreographer as archivist, literary estates and copyright, the Nigerian Civil War and Nigerian contemporary art, and more.

Since 1990, the Ransom Center Fellowship Program has supported more than 1,250 research projects requiring extensive onsite use of the Ransom Center’s collections and resulting in the publication of books, journal articles and doctoral theses. Fellowships are awarded for projects that span the Center’s collections in literature, performing arts, film, photography, and art.
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