African American Theater: Other NYPL Collections

Library for the Performing Arts' Theater on Film and Tape Archives houses video recordings of Broadway, Off-Broadway, indie theater and regional performances dating back to the 1970s. Recordings of productions from the Crossroads Theater Company, a Tony award-winning New Jersey-based company that has been on the forefront of shepherding new works by Black dramatists to the stage for decades, are contained in the TOFT.

The Billy Rose Theatre Division within the Library For the Performing Arts has unpublished play scripts, libretto, programs, reviews, photographs, posters, personal papers and a clipping collection. This division also has scholarly journals, books, periodicals, and a circulating collection.

Library for the Performing Arts' The Rogers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound holdings include classical music, operas, original cast albums, speeches, radio dramas and more. This collection contains more than 70,000 recordings and is one of the largest music repositories in the world.

The Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the Library for the Performing Arts boasts the world's largest comprehensive archive on dance. In this division researchers may access a moving image archive of over 25,000 titles, a dance audio archive, archival manuscripts, rare books, clipping files, programs, journals, ephemera and more.  

Researchers can find published play script texts and other resources in the General Research Division of the Schwarzman Library that may not be available at the Schomburg Center. 

David Cogan, Lorraine Hansberry, Lloyd Richards, Philip Rose and Sidney Poitier during rehearsals for the play A Raisin in the Sun. Friedman-Abeles Photograph Collection. The Billy Rose Theatre Division at the Library For the Performing Arts.