Pictures at an exhibition

London's singular Theatre Museum, a nearly 20-year-old institution tucked behind Covent Garden, past throngs of tourists and buskers, is reportedly going to close. The cause is lack of funding and the TM's inability to find large arts partners to help shoulder its financial burden. According to the Royal Opera House's head Tony Hall, there's a great deal of "moral support" for the musuem, but it hasn't translated into fiduciary clout. The Guardian's Michael Billington offers his thoughts here. Unfamiliar with the funding structures or arts politics of U.K. theater, I don't know how this situation came to pass, but it's a bad sign for the stateside attempts to create an American version. Sure, we have invaluable resources such as the NYPL located at Lincoln Center (not to mention the basement archive at La MaMa E.T.C. and privately held ones), but a theater museum serves a valuable purpose of recording the ephemeral artifacts and practices of stagecraft and theory on video and in pictures. There'll always be books and DVDs that the dogged reseracher/artist can track down, but an honest-to-goodnesss Museum has a physical, social, cultural cachet that a library lacks. Of course, you may associate the museum with dust, deadness, received notions and complacency.  I visited the Theatre Museum in August 2005 in the company of London critic-reporter James Inverne, who steered me kindly through several engaging exhibitions, including one about the Redgrave acting dynasty. Dioramas, large blow-up pictures of a set designer's work, parts of sets past, video docs in screening rooms...there was a lot of excellently curated material for the theater fanatic to lose himself/herself in for an afternoon. I remember it being yet another experience that left me a yet darker shade of green when I reflected on how we do things over here.