Robin Wagner, the seminal set designer who won more than 50 Tony Award-winning Broadway shows, including the 1978 musical “On the Twentieth Century,” starred actress Imogene Coca strapped in front of a locomotive. It appeared to be sprinting toward the audience. He died at his home in New York City on Monday. he was 89 years old.
His daughter Christy Wagner Lee confirmed the death but said the exact cause was not yet known. She didn’t say what district he lived in.
Wagner designed sets for Broadway, Off-Broadway, regional theater, opera, ballet and, in 1975, the Rolling Stones’ US tour. At these concerts, his stage was shaped like a six-pointed lotus flower, delicately curving and rising toward the back.
On Broadway, his work included a 1968 transcendent stage set. Rock Musical “Hair” (In The New York Times, Clive Barnes described it as a “beautiful junk art setting”), as well as “The Great White Hope,” “Jesus Christ Superstar,” and “42nd Street.” , “Young Frankenstein”, “Jerry’s Last Jam”, “Dreamgirls”, “Angel in America: Millennium Approach” and “Angel in America: Perestroika” directed by Tony Kushner.
Mr. Wagner’s stage designs can be elaborate or simple, depending on the story and the director’s wishes. He sees landscape design as problem solving.
“When you read the script, you see how it fits together and how it moves from one scene to another.” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. “I think that’s what makes designers designers. They visualize things in a certain way.”
In the musical “City of Angels,” which opened on Broadway in 1989, show writer Larry Gelbart adapted a series of interconnected stories set in the world of 1940s Los Angeles mansions, sound stages and solariums. I created two color schemes. Whereas the scenes involving the writer of the novel were all in color, the scenes involving the characters in the Private Eye movie were in black and white, a fitting homage to film noir.
In his book review for The Boston Globe, Kevin Kelly wrote that Wagner’s set design was “awesome, if not cinematic, with a flat rhythm that moves from one to the next, and finally pulls you back into a Hollywood soundstage. Cecil B. DeMille is breathtaking.”
Wagner won a Tony Award for “City of Angels,” his second win in the landscape design category after 1978’s “About the Twentieth Century.” In 2001, he won third place with Mel Brooks’ hit The Producers, about two conspirators who deliberately make money from a failed Broadway production.
One of his most enduring designs didn’t win a Tony Award nomination, but it was the simplest. In the eventual long-running musical “A Chorus Line,” about dancers auditioning for a Broadway musical by producer Joseph Papp, Wagner designed mirrored walls, black velor curtains, and floors. It consisted of only white lines of
“This was the result of two years of research in which Michael Bennett and I tried to boil things down.” Wagner told Playbill: “We started with big things to visualize the scenes, but they got smaller and smaller as we went through the show’s workshop period.”
He added, “And we found that we needed a black box to represent the theater. We also found that we needed a mirror to represent the dance studio.”
Robin Samuel Anton Wagner was born on August 31, 1933 in San Francisco to Jens and Phyllis (Smith-Spurgeon) Wagner. His father, a Danish immigrant, was a maritime engineer who at one point was the keeper of the two lighthouses where the Wagner family lived until Robin was ten years old. His mother was a pianist in New Zealand before moving to the United States. she was a housewife
As a boy, Robin was obsessed with Disney movies such as ‘Fantasia’ and wanted to be an animator creating backgrounds for cartoons rather than characters. “I actually thought I was Pinocchio trying to find my way into some sort of real life, and I still think that sometimes,” he said. Oral history interview with Columbia University in 1992.
He created comic books in middle school, and after high school he attended the California School of the Arts (later the San Francisco School of the Arts) from 1953 to 1954. While he was in school and even after that, he worked on the sets of theaters and operas for his group. , like the Actors Workshop in San Francisco. He made a window display for a clothing store. He then landed a paid design job at the Sacramento Music Circus summer session.
Wagner moved to New York in 1958, where he became an assistant to Broadway designer Ben Edwards and then to another designer, Oliver Smith. From 1964 to his 1967, he served as his designer for the set of the Arena Stage, Washington’s famous regional theater.
Returning to New York, he designed the set for “Hair,” which Clive Barnes of The Times described as “fantastic”.
Director George Wolfe, who has worked with Wagner on several shows, including “Angel in America,” said Wagner had a knack for finding the essence of a story. He recalled Mr. Wagner’s small but effective touches on the 1992 musical “Jerry’s Last Jam,” about jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton.
“When Jerry was near death in Los Angeles, Robin created three jagged neon lines that looked like an earthquake diagram,” Wolfe said in a phone interview. “It was breathtakingly simple. It was along the bottom of the back wall.”
He added, “You could tell it was LA just by those three lines.”
But Wagner also has a complex engineering side, revealed in Bennett’s 1981 musical Dreamgirls, loosely based on the career of the Supremes. Wagner designed his five aluminum towers studded with spotlights, minimizing props to transform the setting from a nightclub to his recording studio to Las Vegas’ Show Palace. I moved in different configurations to create that illusion.
“And every light bar was basically a platform,” Wagner told Playbill. “The actors could climb onto them and pop out, and they did.”
Wagner’s “Dreamgirls” design was nominated for a Tony Award and won one of six Drama Desk Awards.
His last Broadway appearance was in the 2012 musical Leap of Faith, about a swindler.
In addition to his daughter Christie, he is survived by his partner, Susan Cowall. Another daughter, Leslie Wagner. my son’s cart. and his granddaughter. Joyce Workman’s marriage to Paula Kaufman ended in divorce.
Wagner designed the train for About the 20th Century, one of his greatest works, with a long, elegant and streamlined interior consisting of adjoining compartments open on one side to reveal the characters. I was. A train exterior that slides in front of the compartment allows the audience to see the actors from the inside and then from the outside.
Architectural critic Paul Goldberger told The Times, “Not only does this gesture remarkably improve the cinematic quality of the show, there is nothing more cinematic than a quick cut from inside to outside, but it also makes a difference to the building. It’s also a calm and fun game,” he wrote. A traditional description of a stage set as a room with the fourth wall removed. ”
