It’s been a lazy summer. Only a few shows have opened. I took no trips. No out-of-town guests came to visit. My husband K and I just spent most of our time lolling around on our terrace and occasionally going out to a favorite restaurant with good friends. So once again Labor Day weekend has sneaked up on me, signaling that it’s time to get busy again—and time to post my annual Labor Day tribute to some of the folks who work hard to make the theater we all love.
To paraphrase the familiar saying, it takes a village to make a show and as longtime readers will know in past Labor Day posts I’ve celebrated actors, playwrights, stage managers, casting directors, drama teachers, musicians, ushers and even dramaturgs. And now this year I want to salute the people who literally build the world in which shows come to life: set designers and their crews.
Designers’ names appear prominently on the Playbill and there are lots of awards—Tonys, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Obies—that celebrate their work but they don’t have the kind of high profiles that actors, directors or composers do. I mean when is the last time you heard someone say "I can’t wait to see the new Scott Pask show" even though Pask's scenic designs have been nominated for 10 Tonys over the past 20 years and won twice.
But recognition is beginning to pick up. The Cooper Hewitt museum here in New York just completed a nine-month exhibit devoted to the work of the innovative British designer Es Devlin. And a museum in Tucson is scheduled to begin a tribute to the designer David Korins this September.
It's about time that set designers get their—ahem—props because they’re among the first people hired for a production. It’s their job to create a show’s physical environment by deciding whether to follow the script directions exactly or to create a more metaphorical representation that reflects the show’s mood and themes.
And while set designers obviously need to collaborate closely with a show’s director, they also need to work well with the scene shops that build the sets, the scenic painters or video designers who create backdrops for them and the stage crews who move all of it into, out of and around the theater. As I said, a village.
Some designers’ names will be familiar to devout theater lovers. Jo Mielziner whose iconic sets for shows like Death of a Salesman are so revered that some revivals have replicated them wholesale; Boris Aronson who won six Tonys, half of them for his smart spins on the Stephen Sondheim concept musicals Company, Follies and Pacific Overtures; Ming Cho Lee who in addition to designing over 30 productions for the Public Theater, taught generations of future designers during his five decades at the Yale School of Drama; John Lee Beatty whose exquisitely detailed sets regularly draw applause as soon as the curtain opens; Mimi Lien, the MacArthur genius winner who, as she did with Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, has led the way in immersive designs that encompass an entire theater.
Luckily, some of the best designers working today are also as gifted when it comes to words (or at least at choosing co-writers) as they are at creating images and over the past couple of years, three of them have published terrific books that delve into their craft and why they so love what they do.
David Rockwell grew up with a mother who was a dancer and choreographer who often cast her son in community theater productions. He went on to study architecture and now heads an international firm that specializes in hotels and restaurants around the world but Rockwell never lost his love for the theater and over the past two decades, he’s designed the sets for over 30 Broadway shows, transformed the Hayes Theater into Second Stage Theater's Broadway home and curated the artifacts and spaces in the Civilian Hotel, which has become kind of a clubhouse for the Broadway community. His lavishly illustrated book, “Drama,” explores how his love of the theatrical informs all of his projects.
Beowulf Boritt’s career got a big boost when he met Hal Prince and the legendary director and producer introduced him to his daughter Daisy who was looking for a set designer to work on a show she and Jason Robert Brown were putting together called The Last Five Years. Since then Boritt has worked on dozens of Broadway shows, won two Tony awards and forged close partnerships with some of the leading directors in the business. So it makes sense that his book “Transforming Space Over Time: Set Design and Visual Storytelling with Broadway’s Legendary Directors” should center around his conversations with five of them—James Lapine, Kenny Leon, Hal Prince, Susan Stroman and Jerry Zaks—detailing how he came up with his visions for their shows and the steps he took to bring those ideas to life.
If he had designed nothing else, Derek McLane would probably still be remembered for his extravagant—and Tony-winning—design for the still-running musical Moulin Rouge but McLane has created sets for some 350 other shows around the world and he’s written “Designing Broadway: How Derek McLane and Other Acclaimed Set Designers Create the Visual World of Theatre,” an appreciation of some of the most iconic sets in Broadway history along with case-study examples of the different approaches he and his designer peers have taken to create the look of a show.
Like a jeweler, a scenic designer provides the setting for the jewels—in this case the story and the actors—to shine. These hard-working creative artists and their books provide an up-close look at the efforts that go into making the jewels glow, which is the kind of work we should all cheer. So Happy Labor Day to them, and to you.
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