This year’s honors for triple Tony Award-winning set and costume designer Desmond Heeley include the USITT Distinguished Achievement Award in both Costume Design & Technology and Scene Design (the first time the Institute has given both awards to one designer) and the Robert L.B. Tobin Award for Sustained Excellence in Theatrical Design at the 2013 TDF/Irene Sharaff Awards.
Heeley made his Broadway debut designing the sets and costumes for Twelfth Night in 1958, was a double Tony winner for sets and costumes for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1968, and took home his third Tony in 2011 for the costumes of The Importance Of Being Earnest. Over the decades, he has worked at Covent Garden, The Metropolitan Opera, Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival Theatre, and La Scala, Milan, to name but a few, and designed for a galaxy of stars from Laurence Olivier to Mikhail Baryshnikov.
“My favorite early Desmond memory is while I was lighting a production of The Matchmaker at the Guthrie Theatre in 1976,” recalls lighting designer Duane Schuler. “I had lit a few productions with Desmond prior to this production and had a good working relationship with him. We had just upgraded all of the fixtures at the Guthrie from incandescent to quartz lamps. Brighter, cleaner, sharper light—what could be better? We started cueing, and I could feel Desmond being disappointed by what he was seeing. He was always too polite to say it directly, but I knew that somehow what he was seeing was not what he wanted.”
During the coffee break after the first few hours of cueing, Schuler asked Heeley what was missing for him. “He looked at me and asked, ‘What happened to all of the friendly lights?’ Only Desmond would suggest that a quartz lamp was less ‘friendly’ than an incandescent source. He has an amazing feel and sensitivity for the quality of the light. He knew something felt different but had no idea what it was. I can’t even imagine trying to light one of his drops with a three- or four-color LED fixture; it just would not work,” adds Schuler.
“Desmond’s designs always consider what would ‘catch’ the light and how the light could fill the air on stage between his scenic pieces. Who else do we know that uses broken CDs to make a winter tree sparkle or builds an entire chandelier out of plastic champagne glasses and plastic spoons? He has a style that in some ways looks freehand and almost easy. But a visit to his studio with the piles of cut paper, masking tape, clear tape, coat hangers, and water putty beside the model box makes you realize how carefully every detail is considered,” concludes Schuler. “There is nothing freehand or loose about it.”