Ming Cho Lee Dies at 90

Ming Cho Lee, who greatly influenced several generations of stage designers, died on October 24, 2020, just three weeks after his 90th birthday. He was born in Shanghai, China on October 3, 1930.

Professor Emeritus and Donald Oenslager Chair in Design at Yale School of Drama, Ming Cho Lee designed nationally and internationally for over 50 years for opera, dance, Broadway, and regional theater. He was the recipient of the National Medal of Arts, the highest national award given in the arts. Other awards include the Mayor’s Award for Arts and Culture; Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, Outer Critic’s Circle and Drama Desk Awards; the TCG Theatre Practitioner Award; many others from the theater and Chinese communities; and five honorary degrees.

His work was shown in a retrospective at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, in Taiwan, and in China, as well as at the Yale School of Architecture and other locations in 2013-2016.The book Ming Cho Lee: A Life in Design, by Arnold Aronson was published by Theatre Communications Group in the spring of 2014.

Ming Cho Lee serves as a member of the Board of the New Forty Second Street, Inc., as well as that of the Alliance for the Development of Theatre Artists, Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts, and many others.

A (slightly edited) note from David Maxime on Facebook: "I was saddened to learn that Ming Cho Lee has just passed away. He was co-chair of the Design department at Yale School of Drama where he taught for 48 years. He celebrated his 90th birthday a couple weeks ago.

While Ming was of course essential and instrumental in the classroom for three years, I am even more grateful for the two years I spent as his lead-assistant in NYC, drafting and building models. One of my great pleasures was restoring and rebuilding models from some of his most important shows for a major retrospective exhibit in the mid-'90s.

I will share a couple other memories . . .

I went to NYU for my undergrad degree and I was terrified of my Yale interview and meeting Ming. When I got to New Haven, I was informed that Ming was away, and I'd have to go see him in NYC at his apartment to show him my portfolio.

When I got to his apartment I was welcomed in by his wife Betsy and shown into the living room where Ming was waiting. Ming looked through my portfolio, he said little, grunted a few times. On one large rendering, he paused and tapped his finger at the top of some columns and asked where I'd gotten such research. I told him it was from a Maxfield Parrish painting and he said, something like, "Hmmm... he made that capital up, you need better research there." Finally, Ming stood up, hoisted up his always-baggy pants , scratched his head and finally just said, "We are accepting you." I was high for weeks!

The other thing he did was teach me to watercolor in 20 minutes! I had always loved water-coloring but I was very tight. One day Ming did a demo for the class. he did the most minimal pencil sketch, barely an outline. He laid in a quick blob and swish of a skin tone, blocked in a dark blue shape for clothing, paying attention only to the silhouette. I think most of the class thought "What is Ming doing? There's nothing there!" But Ming added some very free and abstract shadows to the face, he lifted off a high-lite on the dark clothing area, and Voila! a lovely little watercolor costume sketch in about three minutes!

Lastly, Ming is the person that introduced me to "bootleg" opera recordings. Toward the end of my last year at Yale, Ming and Michael Yeargen were sharing some recent purchases of "bootleg" MET CDs and I was fascinated. I was soon hooked. In the couple years I worked for Ming in NYC, he and I would sometimes go to the large HMV Records a couple blocks from his apartment, and browse the "secret stash" of bootleg MET CDs in boxes under the display racks. As designers, Ming and I were Professor/Student or Designer/Assistant; as opera-lovers we were friends.

Rest in Peace, Ming. I hope Jussi Bjorling will now sing for you personally."

When "Ming," who was revered by many generations of students and designers, won TDF's Robert L.B. Tobin Award in 2010, award-winning scenic designer Douglas Schmidt reminisced:
I met Ming for the first time on March 9, 1964. I was interviewing for a summer position as his assistant at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, and as I really wanted the job, I was anxious to make a good impression. Planning on taking the early 1am milk train for my appointment, I made my way to Boston’s Back Bay Station in a ferocious early spring snowstorm that delayed the train to the point that I feared all was lost, and I might spend the rest of the night, if not all of March, in an unheated rail car stalled on a track in central Connecticut until spring thaw. Miraculously, I made it to his apartment door on the Upper East Side, standing in a puddle of my own snowmelt and flop sweat, with not a moment to spare.

I didn’t know it then, but I would spend more time in this small, but grand, and chaotic apartment in the next three years than any place I would live between 1964 and 1967. The moment I walked in, I felt overwhelmed by the intensity of Ming and Betsy’s family life and intimidated by the astonishing craft and art of his designs. Picture this: a three-room apartment crammed with three young boys (the youngest, David, a babe in arms having just been born), a design studio piled high with drawing tables, models, and rolls of drafting paper, and somewhere under all the clutter, a large bed, since the studio doubled as their bedroom at night! The boys shared another small bedroom, and the living room, when not in use as an extension of the studio, served as conference room, Betsy’s office, and a storage/display area for Ming’s incredible set models piled vertiginously one on the other covering every surface. In short, this was my introduction to a life in the theatre, and I was immediately drawn in, made to feel an indispensable member of this family, and set on a course that would define me as an artist in my own right.

For three years, Ming designed operas, ballets, plays, and musicals, and I, along with one or two other assistants—we happy few, we band of brothers and sisters—learned our craft in the benign shadow of Ming, who was, himself, honing the skills he would bring to bear educating generations of design professionals only a few years hence.

Through Ming, I got my first professional jobs, met designers, directors, producers, and technicians who would become lifelong friends and collaborators. Most importantly, I learned the respect for craft, attention to detail, and skills necessary to navigate the treacherous shoals of quirky personalities, divergent points of view, and practical considerations required to successfully bring a design to port in one coherent piece.

The micro-world of stage design is one of the last vestiges of the medieval concept of the apprentice system. There are direct lines to be drawn in our profession from the past to the future. Robert Edmund Jones, considered by most the father of American stage design, begat Jo Mielziner who begat Ming Cho Lee, whose artistic offspring number in the hundreds, thanks to his influential and long-lived commitment to the Yale School of Drama and educational theatre throughout the country. Those lessons I learned in his studio I find I am forever passing on to my own assistants and in turn, they onto theirs. In addition, we have Ming and his wife Betsy to thank for the long-running hit, The Portfolio Review (aka: Ming’s Clambake), drawing the best graduate-level design students to a meeting of professionals and their future competition at an annual event that will always be associated with their untiring generosity of spirit and comity to the theatre community as a whole.

The true essence of show business is ephemeral. Our achievements are, at best, temporary, and our failures often the stuff of legend but truly live only in the moment of performance. The part, however, that lasts is the influence our work has on future generations, and, in this respect, Ming’s legacy is forever insured. I, for one, am eternally grateful for that March snowstorm that blew me into Ming and Betsy’s home and for their patience and generosity in welcoming me into their life and setting me on my career path, grounded and prepared for whatever was to come.

Many of us only knew "Ming" from his Memorial Day weekend "clambakes," or portfolio reviews in New York City, but his reputation and talent were huge. He was honored in his home city, when his retrospective was seen in Shanghai; and an article appeared in China Arts at the time.

A little video about Ming by Vicente Ruiz Pérez: