Legendary Tony and Emmy Award-winning scenic designer Eugene Lee, who was the production designer for Saturday Night Live since its debut in 1975, passed away at the age of 83 on February 7, 2023. Lee was also the resident scenic designer at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence RI since 1967.
Related content:
By Design: Chatting With Eugene Lee (Live Design Online)
Eugene Lee—An Admiring Remembrance (Live Design Online)
Lee won Tony Awards for Bernstein's Candide, Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, and Wicked. Other New York theatre work includes Ragtime, Show Boat, Merrily We Roll Along, Bright Star, Amazing Grace, Glengarry Glen Ross, Alice In Wonderland, The Normal Heart, Agnes Of God, Ruby Sunrise, Bounce, and A Number. He also won Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Set Design for Candide, Wicked, and Show Boat. Additional awards: Lucille Lortel, Elliot Norton Award for Sustained Excellence, Pell Award, and DesignxRI Lifetime Achievement Award.
His film credits inlcude Coppola's Hammett, Huston's Mr. North, and Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street, while his television production work also comprises The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and Late Night with Seth Meyers.
His work on the musical Candide at the Chelsea Theater Center of Brooklyn and on Broadway are chronicled in great detail in Davi Napoleon's book, Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater. The book also describes his work on Slave Ship, and other productions at the Chelsea. Lee is also a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame, having been inducted in 2006.
Read David Napoloen's interview with Eugene Lee for Live Design Online.
Lee's work influenced and inspired generations of designers:
"We have lost an icon of theater and television," says lighting designer Herrick Goldman of HGLD and Evoke Cooperative.
"The period of my career spent at Trinity Rep in the 80's was some of the very best, most iconic, most ESSENTIAL theater I have ever participated in," says Bob Bonniol, chief creative office of MODE Studios. "Oh what a bar to set for the beginning of a very lucky young man's career. Eugene was fairly silent at focus. There would be no plot. We would prepare ourselves at the edges of the grid, and when he pointed, the closest hand would race out with a fixture. Best served to bring a 5k. A 2k if we ran out of 5ks. As this happened, Colleen Bonniol would draft and circuit the plot. That lighting, and the sets it illuminated, would be EXACTLY what was required to create moments of love, and rage, and magic, and utter perfection—no more, no less."
Sadly Adrian Hall, founding artistic director at Trinity Rep (who retired from the company in 1989) passed away at the age of 95 on February 4, 2023, a few days before Eugene Lee.