A trip to the library…
This has been quite the year and it’s only August! I’ve had the honor of directing two shows (The Importance of Being Earnest and Mary Poppins) and teaching at both A.C.T.’s Young Conservatory and the Summer Conservatory program at the SF Opera Guild. On top of mothering that would seem like enough, but not this year!
This year the StageStruck VI: Musical Theatre Conference was on Women in the American Musical so when I saw the call for papers I had to at least submit an abstract on Trude. To my great honor and delight I was accepted and got to present my paper at the Library of Congress in May. I was doubly lucky because the incredible Susanna Drewry Krebs (Trude’s grand niece) had just finished the arduous process of submitting all of Trude’s remaining papers to the Library of Congress and they were ready for viewing when I was accepted into the conference. So in all my spare time I jumped on a plane in January and spent 16 hours in the wonderful Performing Arts Reading Room at the LOC in hopes of finding new insight to add to my decades old research.
To say what the library now has is a treasure trove is an understatement. There are folders full of letters both personal and professional, contracts detailing exact amounts and dates for much of her musical theatre work, handwritten scores, and wonderful documents dating back to her youth in Germany. Through her correspondence especially, I was able to put together some new narratives. There is so much more to dig into but for anyone who may be interested here is the link to the finding aid detailing the contents of the collection.
The StageStruck conference was so much fun and so informative. It was an honor to present alongside so many incredible researchers. As an added bonus the library has just added video links to all the sessions (including a riveting Julie Taymor interview from the first day of the conference.) You can find my session at this link (my talk begins right around the 57 minute marker).
I’m so excited about all the folks championing Trude’s legacy. Everyone at the Library of Congress was so excited and so helpful. Dominic Broomfield-McHugh and Stacy Wolf, giants in this field, were so supportive. I got to meet Alexa Schulz in person (we’d been emailing) who is working on her own Trude research. And none of it would have been possible without the support and dedication of Susanna Drewry Krebs. It’s so exciting to uncover and share new details about Trude’s remarkable contribution to the musical theatre canon.
