Robin Wagner, set designer who won three Tony Awards, dies at 89
Robin Wagner, the inventive Tony Award-winning set designer on more than 50 Broadway shows, including the 1978 musical “On the Twentieth Century,” in which a locomotive appeared to race toward the audience with the actress Imogene Coca tied up in front of it, died at Monday at his home in New York City. He turned 89.
His daughter Christie Wagner Lee confirmed the death, but said she did not yet know the specific cause. She didn’t say what town he lived in.
Mr. Wagner designed sets on Broadway, Off Broadway and for regional theater, for operas and ballets, and, in 1975, for the Rolling Stones’ Tour of the Americas. His stage for those concerts was shaped like a six-pointed lotus flower raked backwards in a delicate curve upwards.
On Broadway, his work has included the sets for the transcendent 1968 rock musical “Hair” (in The New York Times, Clive Barnes described a “beautiful junk art setting”) as well as “The Great White Hope”, “Jesus Christ Superstar”, “42nd Street”, “Young Frankenstein”, “Jelly’s Last Jam, “Dreamgirls” and “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” and “Angels in America: Perestroika” by Tony Kushner.
Mr. Wagner’s set designs could be elaborate or simple, depending on the story and what the director wanted. He regarded landscape design as solving problems.
“When I read the script, I can see how it fits together and how you move 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.”
For the musical “City of Angels,” which premiered on Broadway in 1989, he created two-color schemes to match the interconnected stories that the show’s writer, Larry Gelbart, set in a world of mansions, sound stages, and solariums in 1940s Los Angeles. Sequences featuring an author turning his novel into a screenplay were all in color, while those featuring a private movie character were in black and white, befitting the show’s homage to film noir.
In his review in The Boston Globe, Kevin Kelly wrote that Mr. Wagner’s set design was “brilliant, with flats going on and off in a rhythm that is nothing but movie-like and with a final retreat to a Hollywood soundtrack that is Cecil B. De Mille breathtaking.”
Mr. Wagner won a Tony Award for “City of Angels,” his second for landscape design, following one in 1978 for “On the Twentieth Century.” He won a third in 2001, for “The Producers,” Mel Brooks’ hit about a scheming couple who attempt financial murder by purposely staging a Broadway flop.
One of his most enduring designs, which did not receive a Tony nomination, was his simplest. For “A Chorus Line,” producer Joseph Papp’s eventual long-running musical about dancers auditioning for a Broadway musical, Mr. Wagner’s design consisted only of mirrored walls, black velor curtains, and a white line on the floor.
“That was the result of two years of work by Michael Bennett and I trying to distill things,” Mr. Wagner told Playbill in 2007, referring to the show’s director and co-choreographer, which opened on Broadway in 1975. “We started with big things to visualize scenes, and as we went through the workshop period of the show, they got smaller and smaller.”
He added, “And then we knew we needed a black box, which represents theater, and we needed the mirrors, because they 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, who had emigrated from Denmark, was a maritime engineer and for a time the keeper of two lighthouses where the Wagners lived until Robin was 10. His mother was a pianist in New Zealand before moving to the United States where she was a housewife.
As a boy, Robin was enamored of Disney movies such as “Fantasia” and hoped to become an animator, creating the backgrounds of cartoons, not the characters. “I actually thought I was Pinocchio trying to make my way into some sort of real life, which sometimes I still think I am,” he said in a statement. oral history interview with Columbia University in 1992.
He made comic books in high school and after high school attended the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute) from 1953 to 1954. While there, and afterwards, he worked on set design with theater and opera troupes. , such as the Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco; built shop windows for a clothing store; and landed a paid summer stock design job at the Sacramento Music Circus.
Mr. Wagner moved to New York in 1958, where he became an assistant to one Broadway designer, Ben Edwards, and then another, Oliver Smith. From 1964 to 1967, he was the set designer for Arena Stage, Washington’s renowned regional theater.
When he returned to New York, he designed the sets for ‘Hair’, which Clive Barnes described in The Times as ‘masterful’.
George Wolfe, the director who worked with him on several shows, including the “Angels in America” productions, said Mr. Wagner had a knack for finding the essence of a story. He recalled one of Mr. Wagner’s small but effective passages on “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the 1992 musical about jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton.
“Jelly was dying in LA, and Robin created three jagged neon lines that looked like the image of an earthquake,” said Mr. Wolfe in a telephone interview. “It was so breathtakingly simple; it was along the lower part of the back wall.
He added: “Just those three lines, you knew it was LA”
But Mr. Wagner also had a complex engineering side, which showed in “Dreamgirls,” Mr. Bennett’s 1981 musical loosely based on the career of the Supremes. Mr. Wagner designed five aluminum floodlight-studded towers that moved in different configurations to create the illusion—with minimal use of props—that the setting was changing from a nightclub to a recording studio to a Las Vegas show palace.
“And all the light bars were basically platforms,” Mr. Wagner told Playbill, “so the actors could climb on those things and fly out, which they did.”
Mr. Wagner’s “Dreamgirls” design earned him a Tony nomination and one of his six Drama Desk Awards.
His last Broadway credit was for “Leap of Faith,” a musical about a fraudulent evangelist, in 2012.
In addition to his daughter Christie, he is survived by his partner, Susan Kowal; another daughter, Leslie Wagner; a son, Kurt; and a granddaughter. His marriages to Joyce Workman and Paula Kauffman ended in divorce. The train Mr. Wagner designed for “On the Twentieth Century” was one of his great creations, with its long, elegant, streamlined interior consisting of adjoining compartments that were open on one side to show the characters. Train exteriors that slid in front of the compartments allowed audiences to watch the actors from the outside, after looking inside.
“This gesture,” wrote the architecture critic Paul Goldberger in The Times, “is not only a remarkable improvement in the cinematic quality of the show – nothing is more cinematic than rapid transitions from inside to outside – it is also a gentle and pleasant game. to the traditional description of the stage set as a room with the fourth wall removed.”