Saturday Night Live isn’t finished celebrating its impact on music history. The show has teamed up with The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to stage a new exhibit at the Cleveland museum.
The Rock Hall just announced “SNL: Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of Music,” an exhibit that will take visitors through the fifty years of music history seen on SNL, both through musical guests and sketches.
It coincides with Questlove’s similarly named documentary highlighting SNL’s influence on music (and vice-versa), which premiered on NBC in January to widespread acclaim. According to the Rock Hall, the exhibit will be supplemented by hourly screenings of an exclusive 20-minute edit of that documentary.
The exhibit will place visitors in a recreation of Studio 8H, with the immersive experience “mirroring the flow of the show, beginning with the cold open and moving into the home base stage where the hosts announce the musical guests,” and culminating in an homage to SNL’s show-closing “Goodnights” segment, a press release says. The showcase will utilize “state-of-the-art video installations and a first-ever virtual experience.”
The exhibit will also feature costumes and props from the show, including wardrobe from The Blues Brothers, D*ck in a Box, and the Sweeney Sisters. Musical guests who will be represented include Blondie, RUN-D.M.C., Mick Jagger, Miley Cyrus, Sabrina Carpenter, and Billie Eilish.
The experience will also feature displays of SNL’s famed bumper photos (shot by Edie Baskin and Mary Ellen Matthews). And SNL fans who have been dreaming of their own bumpers can now make that a reality, as a custom-built SNL50 photo booth will allow visitors “to leave the exhibit with portraits of themselves in select bumper formats.”
(Those wanting the most authentic experience may want to channel Mary Ellen Matthews’ recent demonstration of a bumper shoot on The Tonight Show.)
Rounding out the experience, visitors will be given a “a specially curated” guidebook with a foreword by former SNL player and music aficionado Fred Armisen. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s on-site store will also offer exclusive merch.
“SNL: Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of Music” opens at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland on Friday, May 23. Ticket information is available via the Rock Hall’s website.
With all due respect to the RnRoll Hall and SNL, fifty years of guests simply aren’t that big a deal. Consider in fifty years, most of these acts did lots of touring, so this was simply another gig, a much shorter set than usual (e.g. one or two songs). Sure the Swifts were orgasmic and a few other acts had fans tuning for a glimpse, but most of whatever history they made was because of acts like Sinead O’Connor’s ripping a phot of the Pope, not their extraordinary vocals or instrumentals.