Miles Kreuger

Miles Kreuger (born March 28, 1934) is the Grammy Award nominated president and founder of the Institute of the American Musical. He has been called "the foremost expert on the American musical" and his Institute of the American Musical has been referred to as "a national treasure" and "one of the nation's most important cultural resources." the son of a mink coat manufacturer and fashion illustrator and designer. He saw his first show on Broadway, a musical biography of Gilbert and Sullivan called Knights of Song, when he was four years old. As a child, he became fascinated by film archives and explored those at the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the City of New York.

At 16, he attended Bard College where he studied theater and literature and dreamed of becoming a director. For his senior project, he directed a version of William Butler Yeats’ Deirdre. After graduation, he directed "one or two showcase projects off-Broadway" but was "too shy, too passive" according to composer Sheldon Harnick. “To protect himself he started to build a wall between himself and the directorial world.”

He began his career as a critic in 1959 with a well-received essay on Cole Porter. Kreuger also worked on a WBAI radio program about the theater called “Opening Night” and for Columbia Records impresario Goddard Lieberson.

Kreuger has continued to publish works about the American Musical and has appeared in numerous documentaries about the subject, including 2003's Broadway: The Golden Age, by The Legends Who Were There.

Among the holdings are donations from composers Rodgers, Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen, acting teacher Bobby Lewis and MGM. The collection also holds the Ray Knight pirated films of classic American musicals on Broadway, "probably the only record of much that made American comedy great." In addition, the collection houses "200,000 photographs from movie musicals dating back to 1914, every Broadway cast album, sheet music and recordings dating back to the 19th century, wax cylinders of popular as well as show music, published and unpublished scripts, playbills, scores, sheet music and posters." Show Boat: The Story of a Classic American Musical. Oxford University Press 1977. Souvenir Programs of Twelve Classic Movies, 1927-1941. New York, Dover Publications 1977. The Warner Bros. Musical: (1933–1939). Stanford Theatre Foundation 1990.

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