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Don Pasquale opera poster
Opera poster for Don Pasquale — classical stage commission preserved in Poster Child.
Byrd’s Don Pasquale opera poster appears in the Poster Child Theatre chapter — opera identity alongside Broadway musicals.
The Metropolitan Opera commission came with a producer’s veto: Byrd’s first design used hearts, and director John Dexter “hated” hearts. Byrd swapped them for spirals — and later admitted Dexter was right, calling the spirals “far superior.”
The production was Beverly Sills’s final appearance at the Met, which made the poster a keepsake of an era. Byrd’s own copy was water-damaged in his last Brooklyn years; the surviving print went to his longtime Manhattan friend Dorianne Beyer, in whose apartment it still hangs.
Sources: Poster Child · Theater (p. 118).