The Performing Set: The Broadway Designs
of William And Jean Eckart
by Andrew B. Harris
Book Review by Alan Gomberg
 At one time the husband-and-wife design team of William and Jean Eckart were
celebrities, at least among New York theatregoers. Reviewing Once Upon a
Mattress, for which they designed the sets and costumes, the critic for
Cue magazine suggested that "a growing number of theatre buffs ... go to
musicals primarily to see the Eckarts' sets." In Dressed to the Nines,
a Julius Monk revue, a song titled "The Hate Song" included the lyric: "I hate
Eileen Heckart / Jean and William Eckart / I hate Gregory Peck-art, too." And
yet the Eckarts seem a bit forgotten today in comparison with some other
great set designers of Broadway's Golden Age. Perhaps Andrew B. Harris's lovely
new book, The Performing Set: The Broadway Designs of William and Jean
Eckart, will change that.
The Eckarts may have been somewhat underappreciated even in their heyday.
While their designs often inspired encomiums from the critics, they were
nominated for Tonys only twice, for Fiorello! and Mame. Were they taken
for granted in comparison with other designers? Did they make it look too
easy?
Ray Walston (Applegate) and Gwen Verdon (Lola) in Damn Yankees. The Eckarts first imagined Applegate as a tightwad Devil, living in a fleabag hotel. When they realized that this wouldn't work for the show, they thought of him instead as a player in Washington politics, perhaps a highly paid lobbyist with questionable taste. (Eckart Collection, New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts)
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The Eckarts' Broadway career was relatively brief but prolific. Between 1951
and 1970, they designed the sets for 34 Broadway shows, three of which started
Off-Broadway, as well as seven other Off-Broadway shows and five shows that
started rehearsals for Broadway but never opened there (including two legendary
titles, Reuben Reuben and A Mother's Kisses). For 16 of their
Broadway shows, they also designed the lighting; for four, they also designed
the costumes. (After their first child was born in 1960, they decided to no
longer design both sets and costumes.) In addition, they designed several major
regional productions and tours, three films (The Pajama Game, Damn
Yankees, and The Night They Raided Minsky's), and several television
productions, including the sets and costumes for Rodgers and Hammerstein's
Cinderella. They produced Once Upon a Mattress, as well as designing its
sets and costumes. Some of the other famous shows they designed: The Golden
Apple, Damn Yankees, Li'l Abner, Never Too Late, She Loves Me, Anyone Can
Whistle, and Oh, Dad, Poor Dad. Harris supplies useful and interesting
information on each show. There is a wealth of Broadway history here.
Once Upon a Mattress, with Carol Burnett (Princess Winifred) glaring at Ginny Perlowin (The Nightingale of Samarkand). (Eckart Collection,
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)
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The Eckarts were best-known for designing musicals. While most earlier
designers tried to hide scene changes in musicals, the Eckarts believed that "[i]f
the audience could accept the improbability of characters expressing their
emotions through song and dance, then they could also accept sets changing in
front of their eyes. ... With storytelling in mind, [the Eckarts] experimented
with, developed, and perfected a variety of innovative scene change systems: a
winch-driven device that guided set pieces silently across the stage on hidden
tracks; mini-drops (or flying set pieces) that occupied only a small section
of the stage area; a series of turntable systems that sometimes moved
concentrically, sometimes in opposition; and the adaptation of a minimalist style
which utilized a sophisticated modern art shorthand for communicating ideas. The
Eckarts became known not just for designing but for choreographing set changes
and making the changing of scenery part of the performance."
The Golden Apple with Priscilla Gillette (Penelope) and Stephen Douglass (Ulysses), in front of the Eckarts' stylized apple tree, created of
geometrically framed layers of translucent scrim panels. The design was influenced
by Mondrian. (Photofest)
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In Harris's account, the Eckarts took an unconventional approach in the first
musical they designed, The Golden Apple (the first musical to move
from Off-Broadway to Broadway). In comparison with the sets for most Broadway
musicals of the time, The Golden Apple sets were stylized and had a
lightness to them; there was no attempt to create an illusion of reality. Faced for
the first time with the task of designing many locales in each act, the
Eckarts decided to not hide the mechanics of the design. Scenery moved on and off in
full view of the audience, and the ropes from which the show's many
translucent scrim panels were hung were clearly visible.
Harris's illuminating discussion of the Eckarts' work on The Golden
Apple might have been even more interesting if he had placed it in the
historical context of other Broadway designers who had earlier attempted to achieve
greater fluidity and theatricality in scene changes, such as Jo Mielziner, Albert
R. Johnson, and Harry Horner.
Another early show on which the Eckarts did innovative work was a play,
Mister Johnson, Leo Rosten's adaptation of a Joyce Cary novel set in Africa.
Rosten's episodic script required 40 set changes. The Eckarts' solution was
to cover the stage with a deck and use winches to move set pieces on and off.
They'd had problems on previous shows with stagehands placing scenery in
slightly different positions at each performance, affecting both lighting and
sightlines. In addition to making the set changes fast and smooth, winches ensured
that the set pieces would be in exactly the same position at each performance.
(Harris says that the use of a deck and winches was virtually unknown on
Broadway at the time.) I wish that the book had more photos of Mister Johnson. There are
three, but they don't really illustrate what was so special about the sets.
She Loves Me: The Eckarts' sketch for Amalia's bedroom, and Daniel
Massey (Georg) and Barbara Cook (Amalia) onstage in the set. (Photofest)
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When the book moves into the period when the Eckarts were regularly designing hit shows, we see how they tried to find fresh solutions every time,
including a complex use of turntables in Fiorello! and turntables in
combination with winch-driven wagons in She Loves Me. Harris perhaps drops the
ball a bit when it comes to discussing how the Eckarts later used the
innovations they helped pioneer in The Golden Apple and Mister Johnson. Or
did they simply not reuse some of those design techniques very often? It's
not clear.
Visually, as you might expect, the book is often captivating. Each of the hit
musicals designed by the Eckarts gets its own chapter. Those chapters are
illustrated not only with sketches but also with photographs, many in color.
(Some of the earlier color photographs appear faded, as is often the case with
color photographs of Broadway productions before the 1960s.) Even the flops (two
or more to a chapter) are covered in some detail, though they tend to be
illustrated with few or no photographs, only sketches. This is a bit disappointing,
as it is often especially interesting to compare a rendering with the
finished product. Perhaps few good photographs exist for some of the shows or perhaps
there were rights problems in some cases. Whatever the reason, it's somewhat
frustrating.
I also wonder if Harris might have found some
photographs that would have better illustrated the things that were special about
the Eckarts' sets for Mame. There
are some attractive photographs here, but they give little sense of how the
sets really looked. And with two pages devoted to sketches and descriptions of
Mame's living room as it changes over the years, it would have been helpful to
have at least one photograph of that set.
Speaking of Mame, the biggest hit designed by the Eckarts, it was
after that show that their Broadway career went downhill. Not that they weren't
designing Broadway shows. In fact, they were extraordinarily busy some of the
time - designing flop after flop. And then the offers stopped. The Eckarts would
later wonder if they hadn't finally fallen into the trap of repeating their own
clichés. When an offer to teach at Southern Methodist University came along,
they took it. They came back to Broadway just once, for the 1974 production of
Of Mice and Men.
Though the book doesn't go into great detail about their post-Broadway
career, at the back we get either a sketch or photograph illustrating every show
they designed from 1951 till William's final set, for a production of
Macbeth in 2000. (Jean had died in 1993.)
Harris's writing is a bit awkward at times. There are occasional loose ends,
a few repetitive passages, and some factual errors, along with some
misspellings of names and other typos. Also, the notes at the back sometimes fail to
clarify sources for quotations.
Though The Performing Set might have been a better book, it's still a
good one. Indeed, I imagine that many people will find it fascinating, even if
they might wish that it sometimes delivered a bit more. The Performing
Set gives us a chance to revisit the design esthetics of an earlier time on
Broadway and it is a delightful trip.
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The Performing Set: The Broadway Designs of William And Jean Eckart