They clean up nice!
Bronx dry cleaners will receive Tony Award for their costume sprucing
AND the Tony goes to . . . Ernest Winzer Cleaners? Spot on!
On June 10, the Bronx dry cleaner that’s kept Broadway freshly pressed for 110 years, will receive an award for Excellence in the Theatre.
“The cleaners, the ushers . . . they’re as much a part of our world as the superstars we’re lucky to work with,” says longtime producer and Tony committee member Paul Libin, who wrote the letter that snagged Winzer the award.
Libin says he’s known about Winzer since 1956, when he was an assistant stage manager for “Happy Hunting” and something spilled on Ethel Merman’s costume. Winzer’s whisked it away after the matinee and brought it back in time for the evening show.
“When you have an emergency, you dial 911,” Libin says. “It’s the same with Winzer Cleaners. Something happens, some- thing spills — they come and get it and get it back.”
Costume designer William Ivey Long seconds that emotion. “They deal with clothes that were rode hard and put away wet, and return them in incredible shape,” says the six-time Tony winner, who’s entrusted Winzer with everything from the Chrysler Building dress he made for “The Producers” to Roxie and Velma’s glitzy “Chicago” jackets
Winzer Cleaners opened in 1908, but there hasn’t been a Winzer there since 1952, when Bruce Barish’s grandfather, Al Steinhorn, bought the business from Ernest himself. Since then, the shop passed to Barish’s father, Miles, and then to Bruce, who schleps in from Park Ridge, NJ, most mornings at 4 or 5 a.m. to join his 20-person crew in the sprawling, mostly unair-conditioned building in Morris Heights, across from the Major Deegan Expressway.
“We see stuff the average cleaner would never know what to do with — beaded stuff, hand-painted stuff,” says Barish. The 53-year-old Pace graduate started working at Winzer when he was 7, doing whatever little things needed doing be- cause “my dad was always here, and this was the only way I could be around him.” Neither of his own two kids are interested in the drycleaning business, says Barish, but his wife, Sarah, works with him, in an office lined with theater posters.
Their busiest time is Sunday night, when their trucks pick up items from all those shows that are dark on Mondays. Barish and some of his crew members get to work at midnight, cleaning and sometimes mending, before the pressers arrive at 6.
Occasionally, the cleaners get more than they bargained for. During the heyday of “The Producers,” Matthew Broderick’s people once smuggled the star out of the theater and past the stage-door crowd by having him crawl into a big, canvas-covered basket.
“They asked my driver to put Matthew in there and wheel him out past the crowd,” Barish says. “Then he got in a car and was gone.” (“Sounds true to me,” says Long, who worked on the show.)
So what will the Barishes wear to the Tonys? “Haven’t a clue,” says Sarah, while Bruce is going in a tux.
They won’t be making a speech that night — the award will be bestowed during a commercial break — but if Bruce did, he knows exactly what he’d say.
“I’d thank my grandfather and father, who aren’t here to see this, and the 20 people with us who are part of our family. There’s no way we could have done this by ourselves.”