NYT likes the makeover of the Ford Theater and museum
Museums are increasingly becoming like theaters, their once-staid display cases giving way to extended narratives and elaborate special effects. But now, after nearly two years of renovations, a theater has become more fully a museum. It is being incorporated into an expanding multibuilding exhibition that will recount a tale as resonant and dramatic as any ever staged: Lincoln’s presidency and assassination.
In February Ford’s Theater, where the murder took place on April 14, 1865, reopened as a fully functioning theater doubling as a memorial exhibit. The presidential box where Lincoln sat with his wife, Mary, watching a comic play as John Wilkes Booth put a bullet through his skull overlooks the stage and has itself become a permanent set, draped with flags and decorated as it was that evening.
On Wednesday a 7,000-square-foot exhibition space opens — Ford’s Theater Museum — through which visitors will proceed before emerging into the theater itself. Before the extensive renovation the museum simply displayed the extraordinary collection of objects belonging to the National Park Service, which is a partner with Ford’s Theater Society in the enterprise.
Many of these objects have been so well preserved because they were evidence in a murder investigation: the guns and knives belonging to the conspirators, Booth’s diary and confession written as he was on the run, his thigh-high boot, slashed open by a doctor (his name was, yes, Mudd) treating the leg that the assassin injured leaping to the stage from the president’s box....
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In February Ford’s Theater, where the murder took place on April 14, 1865, reopened as a fully functioning theater doubling as a memorial exhibit. The presidential box where Lincoln sat with his wife, Mary, watching a comic play as John Wilkes Booth put a bullet through his skull overlooks the stage and has itself become a permanent set, draped with flags and decorated as it was that evening.
On Wednesday a 7,000-square-foot exhibition space opens — Ford’s Theater Museum — through which visitors will proceed before emerging into the theater itself. Before the extensive renovation the museum simply displayed the extraordinary collection of objects belonging to the National Park Service, which is a partner with Ford’s Theater Society in the enterprise.
Many of these objects have been so well preserved because they were evidence in a murder investigation: the guns and knives belonging to the conspirators, Booth’s diary and confession written as he was on the run, his thigh-high boot, slashed open by a doctor (his name was, yes, Mudd) treating the leg that the assassin injured leaping to the stage from the president’s box....