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The exhibition is curated by historians Amy Henderson of the Portrait Gallery and Dwight Blocker Bowers of the National Museum of American History, who have also collaborated on a companion book and a set of recordings. It is divided into five chronological sections that cover the history of American musical theater from its infancy in 1866 to the influence of the great impresarios in the early 1900s, from the decades of the great Broadway and Hollywood creations to its fragmented voice from the 1960s to the present. "What we try to do is recapture the energy that audiences at the great shows must have felt," says Bowers.
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