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{ 171 } BOOK REV IEWS The Performing Set: The Broadway Designs of William and Jean Eckart. By Andrew B. Harris. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2006. 256 pp. $37.95 cloth. With the use of floating, flying, rolling, and rotating scenery, the husbandand -wife design team of William and Jean Eckart created scenery and choreographed scene changes for nearly fifty years of American theatre. Andrew Harris lauds the Eckarts’ scene shift as part of the theatrical performance: hence his adoption of the term“performing set”to describe their unique achievement in American scenic design. Harris’s major purpose is to recognize the Eckarts’ contribution to American theatre, a contribution heretofore neglected. Although their work has been the subject of occasional newspaper and magazine articles and an occasional mention in the memoirs of notable theatrical figures, Harris’s book offers the most thorough (and only book-length) survey of their careers. Not to be taken as a coffee-table book (though it is a feast for the eyes), this career retrospective is a serious study of a theatrical collaboration that flourished in the golden age of American musicals of the 1950s and 1960s. Relying on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including an interview with the Eckarts’ son, Peter, Harris chronicles the Eckarts’ path from their meeting at Tulane University through their final professional collaboration in 1970 and Bill’s last production in 2000. Harris recounts the lows as well as the highs, the failures as well as successes, that the Eckarts experienced as set, costume, and lighting designers. In the process he crafts a subtext that is never far from the surface: the fight for survival in an uncertain profession. Following a foreword by Carol Burnett and a preface by Sheldon Harnick, the book is organized in chronological sections, each covering significant career developments during a particular year or span of years. The ninth section’s title, “Riding the Broadway Roller Coaster,” offers a metaphor that could perhaps represent their career as a whole—a career that Harris illuminates with verbal descriptions, photographs, interviews, and anecdotes featuring such theatre luminaries as Harold Prince, George Abbott, Jerome Robbins, Stuart Ostrow , Cheryl Crawford, Robert Lewis, Michael Kidd, Theron Musser, Mary Rogers , and Carol Burnett. In the first section, “Getting Together,” Harris surveys the Eckarts’ meeting at Tulane University in the late 1920s, their time together at Yale immediately following World War II, and the beginnings of their career through 1953. \ { 172 } BOOK REV IEWS As protégées of Robert Edmond Jones and Donald Oenslager, they embraced Jones’s credo that a designer should give expression to the essential quality of a play, its dramatic core (10). Of their work at Yale, Oenslager observed, “Jean worked practically while Bill had the quality of the visionary” (11). According to Harris, the melding of practicality and vision was a powerful combination, and their combined achievements strongly influenced the evolution of theatrical scenery: “They saw scenery as integral, not decorative, and they saw themselves as storytellers. . . . With storytelling in mind, they experimented with, developed, and perfected a variety of innovative scene change systems . . . and the adaptation of a minimalist style which utilized a sophisticated modern art shorthand for communicating ideas” (2). From 1951 through 1953 the Eckarts designed sets and lights for ten significant productions, including Cheryl Crawford ’s production of Oh Men! Oh Women! Harris devotes the second section to the Eckarts’ first musical, The Golden Apple, which was also the first musical to move from off Broadway to Broadway, in 1954. Harris includes a fourteen-page homage to the Mondrian and Grant Wood–inspired set, quoting Harold Clurman’s assertion that “great credit is due to the airy, delicate, and precise coloration of William and Jean Eckarts’ settings—which employ some of the decorative discoveries of the non-objective painters with handsome theatrical effect” (36). Harris allocates four sections to the Eckarts’ Broadway projects in 1955 and 1956, including an unsuccessful Broadway vehicle for actress Jennifer Jones (Portrait of a Lady), the 1956 production of Li’l Abner, and the 1955 hit Damn Yankees, which marked their first collaboration with director George Abbott and producer Hal Prince. Damn Yankees was also...

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