About the Museum: The Museum of Performance & Design is the first museum in the country dedicated exclusively to the performing arts and theatrical design. The Museum’s mission is to educate people of all ages about the impact and value of the performing arts in their lives through exhibitions, programming, and research. In addition the Museum collects, preserves, and makes accessible performance and design materials that reflect our diverse culture.

 

About the Library: The Museum of Performance & Design Performing Arts Library is dedicated to collecting, preserving and making available to the public materials documenting a broad spectrum of the live performing arts and theatrical design.

Started by Russell Hartley in 1947, this collection has grown to more than three million items in our Archives, Reference Collection, Special Collections, and Theatrical Design Research Collection to include books, periodicals, playbills, clippings, photographs, posters, sheet music, plays and libretti, radio interviews, videotapes, musical theater recordings, oral histories, theatrical design research materials, costume and set designs, personal papers of performers and patrons, as well as the archives of several local organizations.

 

Upcoming Exhibition : Star Quality: The World of Noël Coward

April 17-August 29, 2009
Opening Celebration – Thursday, April 16, 2009
Museum of Performance & Design

“Star Quality: I don’t know what it is, but I’ve got it,” said Noël Coward with his inimitable style, cigarette in hand and twinkle in his eye. The Museum of Performance & Design is proud to celebrate this extraordinary figure in its next exhibition, Star Quality: The World of Noël Coward.  

For many Coward is known purely as a playwright, creating such classics as Private Lives, Blithe Spirit, Hay Fever, and Design for Living, or as the composer of such timeless songs as “Mad About the Boy,” “I’ll See You Again,” and “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.”  Star Quality is the first exhibition to show the full extent of his prodigious talents as a director of plays and movies, actor, cabaret artist, wartime patriot, painter, and patron of charitable causes, as well as his knack for celebrity and his gift for sustaining warm and enduring friendships.  

With unparalleled access to the Coward Archives and drawing on public and private collections in Europe and the U.S., the exhibition brings together dozens of rare photographs, drawings, paintings, original manuscripts, letters to and from a range of luminaries, sheet music,  posters, playbills, set and costume designs, personal memorabilia, audio and video clips, and original costumes, including several of the silk dressing gowns that became Coward’s trademark.