The Robber Bridegroom Broadway poster

Poster Child shows the final Broadway poster for The Robber Bridegroom (1975), with concept sketches in the same chapter.

Byrd counted The Robber Bridegroom among his personal favorites. Producer John Houseman had already been through several artists but wanted Byrd, who read both Eudora Welty’s novella and Alfred Uhry’s script and — being a Southerner himself — took to the Mississippi rogue at the center of it immediately. He remembered Houseman as “a very lovely, sweet, intelligent person.”

The sketch, by Byrd’s account, was drawn in a bathing suit while sunbathing at Jones Beach with a thermos of margaritas. At the opening, star Barry Bostwick had a broken leg and turned his plaster cast into a running piece of stage business.

Sources: Poster Child · Theater (p. 125).