How much for the dress? Atlantic Highlands resident co-founds Museum of Broadway
The Ziegfeld Follies were lavish productions on Broadway from 1907 through the 1930s, but their glamour has long been diminished by the black-and-white photography of the era.
It’s a perception Diane Nicoletti would love to change. The Monmouth County resident got her hands on two dresses worn by Ziegfeld Girls – the chorus performers who anchored the revues – for display at the new Museum of Broadway, which she co-founded and opened last month in midtown Manhattan. The dresses were rescued from the New Amsterdam Theatre, which had decayed badly before a renovation by Disney in the 1990s.
“One is green and pink and one is blue, and they’re in amazing shape,” Nicoletti said. “When you think of Ziegfeld Follies, everything is in black and white. But not only was there color – it was very colorful. My perception was it was white and silver and gold, but that’s not true. It was very glitzy and really fun. It’s amazing the dresses held up this long.”
Nicoletti, who lives in Atlantic Highlands and spends time at a home in the Ocean Grove section of Neptune, has become a Broadway artifacts hunter of sorts. Among the items on display at the Museum of Broadway are a hippie jacket from the original 1968 production of "Hair," a human-cheetah hybrid puppet from "The Lion King," a wig worn by Patti LuPone in "Evita," a pair of silver candlesticks from "Les Misérables” and Meryl Streep’s first Broadway costume, from the 1975 production “Trelawny of the 'Wells.'”
The boots Lin-Manuel Miranda wore in “Hamilton” are there, too, on loan.
The competition for these things can be fierce. Nicoletti said her curation team dropped a bid for Carol Channing’s dress from “Hello Dolly1” as the price soared past $30,000. Instead, they secured costume pieces from later “Hello, Dolly!” stars - the headpiece worn by Bette Midler and the dress worn by Bernadette Peters.
“It’s amazing, how there are so many collectors out there,” Nicoletti said.
Some of the museum’s displays were commissioned.
“We worked with a German artist to create this chandelier that has close to 14,000 crystals,” Nicoletti said. “If you look at it one way, it’s a chandelier. If you look at it another way, it forms ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ mask.”
Famed Phantom composer Andrew Lloyd Webber toured the museum with co-founder Julie Boardman last month.
“He said it was brilliant,” Nicoletti said. “That was reassuring.”
Mother to four children ages 2 through 8, Nicoletti has taken her eldest two to see Broadway shows, and the family is a regular at the Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank. In 2009 she launched an event agency specializing in immersive entertainment and has worked with Disney and HBO on fan-experience pop-ups.
“Museum of Broadway is a souped-up version of that,” she said.
What would be her Holy Grail item for the museum?
“I get so fascinated with costumes,” she said. “Most of them are hand-beaded and take hours and hours to construct. The Phantom of the Opera ones are very ornate and heavy. The Red Death costume for Phantom is humungous.”
It reportedly weighs 140 pounds and cost $50,000 to produce. Yes, that would be a showstopper.
For more information on the Museum of Broadway, which is located at 145 West 45th Street in Manhattan, visit www.themuseumofbroadway.com.
Jerry Carino is community columnist for the Asbury Park Press, focusing on the Jersey Shore’s interesting people, inspiring stories and pressing issues. Contact him at jcarino@gannettnj.com.
This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Museum of Broadway co-founded by artifact-hunting Shore resident
