Backstage at New York’s Broadway Legends Shoot

ABLUpdated 2 weeks Ago2 Mins read4

For New York Magazine’s annual “Yesteryear” issue, we invited some of Broadway’s greatest legends to revisit the generation-defining performances that had, for years and sometimes decades, held New York audiences captive: Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice, Nathan Lane as Nathan Detroit, Patti LuPone as Evita. The final 29 performers wouldn’t merely channel their former roles through costumes and set pieces — they would actively reprise them. Taking inspiration from Richard Avedon’s Performance, Mark Seliger set out to photograph them as they, quite literally, performed — many for the first time in decades.

So commenced the wrangling. Led by photo director Jody Quon, for three months, New York’s team relentlessly called and followed up, scheduled and rescheduled, until the final cast — spread out between New York and Los Angeles — had come together. Some took more convincing than others: After Dick Van Dyke declined to participate, Seliger sought him out in person at a benefit for Los Angeles firefighters where Van Dyke, 99, was performing a cappella with his band. “I pulled him to the side and, you know, slowly coerced him onto our set,” says Seliger.

Styling was critical. Some, like André De Shields, wore their original costumes; his, from The Wiz, had remained untouched for over 40 years. For others, stylist Daniel Edley sourced modern and vintage pieces to approximate characters, or, occasionally, re-create them entirely — as in the case of Whoopi Goldberg, for whom Edley was able to find an exact replica of the Yohji Yamamoto shirt that she wore onstage as Fontaine. Harvey Fierstein’s iconic crochet bunny slippers from Torch Song Trilogy seemed nearly impossible to procure. They were on display at the Smithsonian, and besides, Fierstein said, he had crocheted them himself for the original production. “And so Daniel goes, in his very gentle way, ‘Oh, well, I actually crochet.’ Everybody laughed, thinking he was kidding,” says Seliger. “And then on Monday morning, he shows up with a replica that he’d crocheted himself.”

The big day was, in fact, 11 days, during which Seliger, Quon, and some very lucky members of their teams were treated to what were essentially private performances. “Some people sang along to the music they had originally sung,” says Seliger. Lin-Manuel Miranda belted “In the Heights”; Idina Menzel, in her original costume, powered through “Take Me or Leave Me” — over and over and over again. Donna McKechnie “came alive,” says Quon, when they put on “The Music and the Mirror.” Upon hearing “Memory,” Betty Buckley began to cry.

“A lot of them remembered exactly what the magical moments were from each of their roles,” adds Quon. To capture Lincoln’s iconic collapse into a chair in Topdog/Underdog, for instance, Jeffrey Wright insisted on not having anyone break his fall and letting the $150 Salvation Army chair hit the ground. “He said, ‘I need to be able to fall backwards,’” Seliger recalls. “He did it about 15 times.”