A Trove of Golden Broadway Images, Stuck in a Tangled History
It was a modern-day Romeo and Juliet story set amid the rumbling gangs of New York, and Leo Friedman had an idea how he might capture it, grit, romance and all.
Half of a legendary Broadway partnership, Mr. Friedman, then a 38-year-old former war photographer, positioned the young lovers holding hands on a street of tenements, fire escapes and garbage cans near his studio.
“I’m going to make a mark on the sidewalk,” he recalled telling them. They were to run toward it. “When you hit that mark, look up,” he said, “don’t look at me.”
And so, after what the weary actress Carol Lawrence remembered as 300 tries, there came the picture that shouted “West Side Story.”
But now that 1957 photo and thousands of other famous images by Mr. Friedman — Rex Harrison looking over a shabby Julie Andrews in “My Fair Lady,” Robert Preston conducting his make-believe trombones in “The Music Man” — are in limbo, largely uncataloged, caught in a dispute between the photographer and the New York Public Library’s performing arts collection at Lincoln Center, to which he had the pictures sent in 1971.
At stake is an extraordinary theater archive: about 4,580 prints and 2,655 contact sheets representing 168 stage productions from the 1950s and ’60s, the golden age of the Broadway musical.
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Half of a legendary Broadway partnership, Mr. Friedman, then a 38-year-old former war photographer, positioned the young lovers holding hands on a street of tenements, fire escapes and garbage cans near his studio.
“I’m going to make a mark on the sidewalk,” he recalled telling them. They were to run toward it. “When you hit that mark, look up,” he said, “don’t look at me.”
And so, after what the weary actress Carol Lawrence remembered as 300 tries, there came the picture that shouted “West Side Story.”
But now that 1957 photo and thousands of other famous images by Mr. Friedman — Rex Harrison looking over a shabby Julie Andrews in “My Fair Lady,” Robert Preston conducting his make-believe trombones in “The Music Man” — are in limbo, largely uncataloged, caught in a dispute between the photographer and the New York Public Library’s performing arts collection at Lincoln Center, to which he had the pictures sent in 1971.
At stake is an extraordinary theater archive: about 4,580 prints and 2,655 contact sheets representing 168 stage productions from the 1950s and ’60s, the golden age of the Broadway musical.