A painting caught Phyllis Hall’s attention as she was exiting Baton Rouge’s Manship Theatre, though she mistook it for a print. The art piece hung on a wall in the Shaw Center for the Arts, home to the theater where the Catahoula resident had attended a local music performance.
“The print was credited to Gene Callahan, and the label next to it said it was his concept for a scene in the movie, ‘Funny Girl,'” Hall said. “It said Callahan was from Baton Rouge, which made me interested in learning more about him.”
Hall is correct. Callahan’s native home is Baton Rouge, where he was born Eugene Fenton Callahan on Nov. 7, 1923, graduated from Catholic High School and attended LSU between 1941 and 1948.
Though he didn’t graduate from the university, he began learning set design there by working with the university’s opera department, and in 1982, LSU awarded Callahan an honorary doctorate degree in fine arts.
A piece of “Funny Girl” in Baton Rouge
In 1969, he donated his set designs for “Funny Girl” to the Louisiana Art & Science Museum after attending a gala, museum curator Tracey Barhorst said. The three scenes that hung in the Shaw Center are paintings among the museum’s collection of Callahan’s 18 original set blueprints and 28 production paintings for “Funny Girl.”…