Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2007 - 65

book

reviews
Designing Modern America
Broadway to Main Street

By Christopher Innes; New Haven and London,
Yale University, Press, 2006. 320 pp. ISBN
0300108044, cloth, $40.
Reviewed by Jody Blake

THEATRE

DESIGN

Christopher Innes's comparative study of Joseph
Urban and Norman Bel Geddes is aptly titled.
These two theatre designers made an impact on
American culture reaching far beyond their sets
and costumes for Broadway productions. According to Innes, "During the 1920s and on into
the 1940s, people in New York City, Chicago, or
Florida were increasingly likely to go through
their lives surrounded by objects Urban or Bel
Geddes had created and in décor inspired by
them." Indeed, as the author convincingly explains, the impact began ﬁrst thing in the morning, when many a couple woke up in a bed that
Urban had designed for Mallin and listened to
the news on a Patriot radio designed by Bel
Geddes. From Broadway to Main Street may
also predict the wide audience for this readable
and well-illustrated book, which encompasses
aspects of design history from department store
windows to automobile assembly lines and addresses issues such as consumer marketing and
urban utopias.
Readers whose primary interest is in Urban and Bel Geddes's work in the theatre may
be disappointed that Innes devotes relatively
little space, in terms of text and illustrations,
to this aspect of their careers. Urban has, of
course, been the subject of monographs emphasizing theatre design (See, for example,
Randolph Carter and Robert Reed Cole, Joseph
Urban: Architecture, Theatre, Opera, Film , Abbeville Press, 1992), but admirers of Bel Geddes will have to wait for comparable treatment.
Innes argues rightly that Urban and Bel Geddes
deserve credit for the New Stagecraft, along with
Robert Edmond Jones and Lee Simonson, and
he calls attention to their innovations in lighting
and sound design and in stage machinery. Innes
pays even more attention to their contributions
to theatre architecture, such as Bel Geddes's
transformation of The Century Theatre into a
Gothic cathedral for Max Reinhardt's The Miracle in 1924 and Urban's proposed design for
the Metropolitan Opera House in 1927 including ofﬁce and apartment towers. The author's
overall emphasis, however, is on connections
between designs for the theatre and their ac-

tivities in other areas. For example, Innes traces
Urban's delicately romantic 1933 bedroom for
the 16-year daughter of a Chicago lawyer to his
stage sets for the Ziegfeld Follies. The set for the
1930 Lysistrata is presented as a model for the
minimalism and functionalism of Bel Geddes's
kitchen appliances for GE and Electrolux.
Innes's primary goal is to demonstrate
that for Urban and Bel Geddes theatre was a
springboard for designing the environments of
daily life. In a chapter on "Theatrical Fashions,"
he discusses the rooftop cabaret that Urban
designed above the New Amsterdam Theatre,
home to the Ziegfeld Follies, in 1918. Innes
describes how dinner theatre audiences, wearing fashions inspired by the Follies, danced in
the same space as the costumed performers.
Conversely, Ziegfeld featured rooftop theatre
scenes in a number of revues. Innes concludes
that "Lifestyle merged with theatrical display on
every level." In "Riding Into the Future," Innes
discusses Sidney Kingsley's 1935 Dead End, a
play resulting in social reforms, for which Bel
Geddes designed convincingly gritty sets and
sounds. According to the author, "It was a short
step . . . to designing the physical and cultural
context for society outside the theater," for example in the form of Bel Geddes's Futurama at
1939 World's Fair.
Innes takes pains to argue that Urban and
Bel Geddes represented a uniquely American
phenomenon, that nowhere else did theatre
designers exert such an impact on architecture and design. However, in Couture Culture:
A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (MIT Press,
2003), Nancy J. Troy has examined the role of
theatricality, including fashion shows and fancy
dress parties inspired by the Ballets Russes, to
Paul Poiret's couture empire. Key players in the
Paris fashion world, Lady Duff Gordon and Erté,
would also collaborate with Urban on Broadway. In an essay in "Performing Modernism,"
in Modernism: Designing a New World (Victoria
and Albert Museum, 2006), Tag Gronberg argues that in the 1920s theatre was a vehicle for
bringing about change in the environment and
in society. In addition to the German Bauhaus
Copyright 2007 United States Institute for Theatre Technology, Inc.

TECHNOLOGY
WINTER

2007

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2007