Justin Bieber: Steps to Stardom. John Kastner

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      STEPS TO STARDOM: THE EXHIBIT

      The Steps to Stardom exhibit at the Stratford Perth Museum that launched on the Family Day weekend in 2018 was several years in the making. Putting on a display about the Stratford native had been talked about for a number of years, but it wasn’t until I had a conversation with Justin’s grandparents, Bruce and Diane Dale, that it started to become a reality.

      That conversation took place in the summer of 2017; Bruce and Diane loved the idea and invited myself and Micaela Fitzsimmons to their house to look at their Justin stuff. On the way there, Micaela, who is our manager of collection and exhibits, and I agreed that this visit would determine if we were going to do an exhibit about the native son and one of the most popular music stars in the world.

      If there were just newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, and posters, the usual stuff that proud grandparents collect, we were going to politely pass. Instead, Bruce and Diane’s house was in and of itself a museum. There were Teen Choice surfboards, hundreds of running shoes, countless awards, great photos, stuff from his time as a little kid, personal laptops, backstage passes, a letter from a First Lady…

      Game on.

      We took pictures of everything, created an inventory of all the items, and then went about building the exhibit. Micaela and I began talking about concepts and the storyline for what was going to be a fairly modest one-room exhibit.

      As much as the grandparents were totally on side, we felt we needed Justin’s blessing. Justin sent a text: Go for it. That was good enough for us.

      Then emails went back and forth with Scooter Braun and his company to make sure there were no problems with playing Justin’s music, showing the movie Never Say Never, the use of images, and where we would get Bieber merchandise to sell in our gift shop.

      For the record, everyone was awesome to work with.

      Meanwhile, Galen Simmons from the local newspaper, the Stratford Beacon Herald, dropped by to see what we were doing for exhibits in 2018. It’s something they have done every fall when they are looking for copy on a slow day.

      We talked about our refreshed Stratford Festival exhibit.

      We were really proud of pulling together a partnership with the Monroe County Museum in Monroeville, Alabama, and we were going to have a travelling exhibit about Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. The Stratford Festival was presenting To Kill a Mockingbird in 2018.

      And then I mentioned that we were going to have an exhibit about Justin Bieber. It was literally the third thing I talked about.

      What happened next has happened dozens of times since: we were caught totally off-guard by the incredible public and media response to news of the exhibit. The Beacon Herald published the story online that afternoon. Within an hour, the phone began to ring off the hook: the Canadian Press, the CBC, CTV. I came into work Friday morning and there were television crews here. Friday night I was live on CTV and CBC.

      When I came into work Monday morning, the first thing I did was see Micaela, who along with our intern, Sara Zilke, was in the process of creating a small one-room exhibit. I said, “We’ve got a problem.”

      She responded right away. “I know. I just got off the phone with somebody from India that was asking about the exhibit.”

      “We can’t have people coming here from Japan and India to see a one-room exhibit,” said Micaela.

      Within a couple of minutes, we decided to move the exhibit into our largest gallery, and for the next few days Micaela and Sara, and occasionally myself, hunkered down to expand the exhibit by about 1,000%. We were in touch with Diane and Bruce, we scoured websites to get ideas from other museums, and we even built models of what the exhibit would look like.

      This is a museum that has never been flush with money, but from that day on money was almost no object when it came to this exhibit; we were ordering new display cases, Plexiglas hoods, projectors, monitors, even sheets of steel.

      The cornerstone of the exhibit is a re-creation of the front steps of the Stratford Festival’s Avon Theatre. It was there that Justin’s mom Pattie filmed Justin busking and posted the videos on YouTube.

      Museums are traditionally pretty quiet places, but the week before the exhibit opened was a week like no other in the hundred and some year history of the Stratford Perth Museum.

      We put tickets online for the opening, which was Family Day weekend (February) in Ontario. Again, we were caught off-guard when the weekend was completely sold out with days to go.

      With a day to spare, the exhibit was completely ready. We had 500 t-shirts in stock, two cash registers, lots of staff and volunteers lined up. The museum was to open at 10:00 a.m. on Sunday morning.

      At 7:00 a.m. I got a text from our custodian: Just so you know, there are people lined up at the museum. Bruce and Diane drove through and took a picture and sent it to me. Kayla Droog, our manager of education and programs, sent a text that said, You might want to get out here.

      I pulled up about twenty minutes later to see roughly 150 people lined up outside the door. It was -10C, the third weekend in February in Canada.

      Again, from that point on, nothing surprised us.

      In 2012, the museum had 853 visitors. For the year. On Family Day weekend 2018, we had over 1,000.

      In 2015, the Stratford Festival mounted the Diary of Anne Frank, so the Stratford Perth Museum hosted a travelling exhibit from the Anne Frank House. СКАЧАТЬ