Kansas City Public Library: New Folly Theater Collection Now Open To Researchers

Press release from the Kansas City Public Library:

February 10, 2022

If archival items can be called juicy, the Folly Theater Collection, now housed in the Kansas City Public Library’s Missouri Valley Room, contains quite a few. In the Folly’s storied, 120 plus-year history, it’s been an X-rated movie house, a burlesque and vaudeville theater, and a Shakespearean playhouse, among other things.

However, the historic material that the theater put in the Library’s care in 2014 is largely business-related, and much of it dates to the 1980s.

Joanna Marsh, a librarian/archivist in the Missouri Valley Room, recently completed the more than three-year project of archiving the artifacts into over 300 boxes.

“The collection is kind of split in two sections,” says Marsh. “There’s the vintage portion, the first half of the 20th century. Then, after the (theater’s) restoration in the 1980s, there's more recent materials, which is probably the bulk of the collection.”

This press release was produced by the Kansas City Public Library. The views expressed here are the author’s own.