Ransom Center Magazine

Research + Teaching

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

The Knickerbocker Theatre Collapse

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by HANNAH NEUHAUSER

In the 1980s, the Harry Ransom Center received a scrapbook from John and Vera Hills along with an extraordinary unpublished account of their survival of the Knickerbocker Theatre roof collapse in Washington, D.C. on January 28, 1922. The scrapbook and testimony are available for research in the Ransom Center’s Reading and Viewing Room. Graduate assistant Hannah Neuhauser offers these insights on the material.

We started out for an hour’s walk that was to last seven months and almost an eternity…
—FROM JOHN HILLS’S TESTIMONY

Vera Kreger Hills did not wish to go out on the evening of January 28, 1922. It was cold, brutally cold, and a whirring blizzard encased Washington D.C in over two feet of snow.

The weather did not deter her husband, Captain John Huntington Hills, however. He thought it “would be fun to take a stroll through the heavy snow.” After a few blocks, they passed by the Knickerbocker Theatre on 18th Street and Columbia Road. That night the theater was featuring a silent comedy, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, that heralded good reviews.

Vera Kreger Hills preferred to finish their walk rather than go to the theatre, but consented to her husband’s idea. They had not been in the theatre for over a year. They bought their tickets for 25 cents and took their familiar seats under the balcony in the second row. Unbeknownst to the couple at the time, their seating arrangement would save their lives.

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ABOUT HANNAH NEUHAUSER

Hannah Neuhauser is a PhD musicology student at the Butler School of Music at The University of Texas at Austin. She is a Pathways Fellow serving as a Curatorial Assistant at the Harry Ransom Center in the 2022-2023 term.

A Greek fragment is the first-known New Testament papyrus written on the front side of a scroll

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by GEOFFREY S. SMITH

A Fragment Makes History

A few months ago, I received a much-anticipated email that read, “The courier is scheduled to deliver the Willoughby Papyrus to the Ransom Center tomorrow.” The next morning, I anxiously watched as members of the Center’s conservation staff carefully removed from the oversized shipping package a small black archival box, no more than 8 inches square. They slid off its sleeve, opened the protective cover, and placed the object on the table in front of me for inspection. Mounted between two plates of glass was an ancient papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John, no larger than a credit card.

The manuscript was fragmentary, and some of the Greek letters were not easy to make out, but it had not suffered any damage since I had last seen it in person, nearly seven years earlier. I could finally breathe a sigh of relief. The “Willoughby Papyrus,” as it is known, had made it to The University of Texas safe and sound.

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ABOUT GEOFFREY S. SMITH

Geoffrey S. Smith is Associate Professor, Fellow of the Louise Farmer Boyer Chair in Biblical Studies, and Director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins (ISAC) in the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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