The Performing Set: The Broadway Designs of William and Jean Eckart

You've got to admire the husband-and-wife team William and Jean Eckart, leading stage designers of the 50s and 60s. They designed not only sets but also, frequently, costumes and lights, making them triple-perhaps even sextuple-threats. The handsome new book The Performing Set: The Broadway Designs of William and Jean Eckart, by Andrew B. Harris, is a worthy tribute to their art. It reintroduces some of us, and introduces others, to genuine artists in a field too easily overlooked.

Set designs, with rare exceptions, do not hang in museums, and designers, once their work is no longer current, are forgotten by most theatergoers. Yet the Eckarts were not only highly successful innovators in their own time; they also bequeathed a huge design legacy to their successors. Although the book concentrates on their Broadway work, it does not ignore their activities in other theatrical venues, as well as in film and television.

Designers depend to a large extent on the runs of the productions they work on. If a show is lousy, not even the greatest design can save it. A good show, however, could be greatly enhanced by an Eckart design, which, as Harris puts it, actually performs. The Eckarts got to work on a fair share of hits; but even their designs for flops were usually singled out for their excellence.

There were many outstanding, often revolutionary, features to their designs. Very often they smartly used ideas derived from painters such as Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Childe Hassam, Milton Avery and, their favorite, Piet Mondrian. But these were never slavish imitations. So, for instance, the central apple tree in The Golden Apple was made up of several diaphanous, rectangular, partly superimposed panels with appliquéd apples and leaves-very Mondrianesque. These contrasted strikingly with fluidly outlined rolling hills and charmingly sketched-in striped or polka-dotted fields in harmoniously related, never gaudy colors, forming a copasetic backdrop.

Eckart innovations were numerous. Flowing scene changes like cinematic dissolves, or, contrariwise, sets changed in full view by stagehands: whatever blended best with the dramatic movement. Two or more turntables, sometimes overlapping, often concentrically revolving in the same or opposite direction. To save money, actors in single costumes, changed by added or subtracted accessories. Lighting made more painterly by the use of scrims. Winches guiding set pieces across the stage on hidden tracks. Flying set pieces (mini drops) quickly and easily changing the scenic picture.

And much, much more.

Though doing fine work in plays, the Eckarts were especially distinguished in musical designs: The Golden Apple, Cinderella (on TV), Damn Yankees, Once Upon a Mattress, Fiorello!, She Loves Me, Flora, the Red Menace, Mame and Hallelujah, Baby! among others. All these owed a lot to the Eckarts' much-praised designs, as did a good many less memorable shows.

[IMG:L]How nicely the Eckarts complemented each other! Bill came from the colorfully folksy Louisiana bayous; Jean from megalopolitan Chicago and German Jewish ancestry. Bill had studied architecture and had a solid structural sense; Jean was a gifted painter and contributed much visual beauty. Finally, Bill's was a masculine, Jean's a feminine sensibility, the two blending, like their owners, in perfect harmony.

Eventually, the inevitable set in: Broadway embraced younger designers, even though the Eckarts' work was unimpaired. So Southern Methodist University, where the two had met as students, hired them as faculty, while allowing them time off at regional and summer theaters. Jean got involved also in psychotherapeutic social work, but still assisted Bill in sundry ways, until her death in 1993 at age 72; Bill, whose continued fine work is illustrated in the book, died at age 80 in 2000.

Albert B. Harris, who has worked in both professional and university theater and knew the Eckarts, now teaches at the University of North Texas, whose press brought out this elegant book. It has over 500 first-rate color illustrations, along with many black-and-white ones, including sketches of every Eckart-designed production, and includes a foreword by Carol Burnett, star of Once Upon a Mattress, and preface by Sheldon Harnick. Harris's writing is lively and informative, and rightly goes into non-design aspects of these productions as well. It is full of juicy anecdotes and revealing asides.

Regrettable only is the often faulty grammar and diction, misspelled names and too-frequent typos. Most amusingly, Harris attributes to the Eckarts the nickname of Frederic Brisson, Rosalind Russell's unpopular husband, not as "the Wizard or Roz," but as "the Lizzard [sic] of Roz." Lizards, like Liza, come with one Z.