Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 1985 - 7

throw of the government. In the South, 94% of the black
students were in segregated classes. The hit movies were Psycho, Exodus and The Apartment. Equity closed New York's
theatres with a ten-day strike. Brooks Atkinson was the
Times critic, not a theatre. Seats at a musical topped at $8.60.
Ted Williams retired and Casey Stengel was released by the
Yankees. The FDA approved the sale of the birth control pill.
The minimum wage was $1.00. Harvard's tuition was $1300.
A suite at the Plaza was $130 a week. The British pound was
worth $2.80 and there were 625 lira to the dollar. The Dow
Jones high for the year was 685.
The American Educational Theatre Association (AETA)
was the organization for theatre people and its annual convention was the major meeting. In August of 1960 the convention was on the University of Denver campus and, to the
dismay of many, no liquor was permitted. The exhibition was
the prime showcase for companies offering products to the
theatrical market and all the leaders were there. Technical
articles appeared infrequently in the AETA's Educational
Theatre Journal, but the only technical publications were the
BTR in Germany, a Czech journal and Tabs, a publication of
Strand Electric in England.
In 1960 1 was already in the gel business. 1 had come to
Rosco in 1958 as instant president, director of marketing,
advertising manager and shipping clerk. In 1960 we were
located in Williamsburg-not scenic Virginia, but Brooklyn
-between a live poultry market and a bodega. At noon on
Wednesday, 1 would go into the city to call on electricians
before the matinee. I'd visit on the sidewalk on 44th or 45th
Street and then go inside when it was time to get to work. As
they pulled dimmer handles, I'd push gels.
1 was still learning the ways of the world. One Friday we
were waiting in the plant to strip a batch of gel for a show
loading out of Duwico. It was humid and the gel was drying
slowly. The electrician kept calling and 1 kept holding him
off, but it was getting late in the day. Finally, 1 suggested that
we would save him a lot of time-we'd cut the sheets to frame
size on our guillotine. There was a long silence and then he
sighed and patiently explained that they were paid to cut gel
and graphically and explicitly described what 1 could do with
my offer of assistance.
I was still less than certain that there was a future in the
business. Then, Sir Tyrone Guthrie's autobiography A Life
in the Theatre was published in 1960 and 1 read: "In the
United States, it is customary to filter the light through a
number of different pale-coloured mediums. I entirely see
the advantages of coloured light in certain' contexts. But on
Broadway, hundreds, even thousands of man-hours per season are spent setting up elaborate combinations of pale rose
pinks, salmon pinks, 'surprise' pinks, gold, pale gold, old
gold, greeny-blue, pinky-blue, steel and grey-blue, in order
to light very ordinary interior sets for very ordinary little
comedies. 1 hate to think of the money all this costs; and 1
hate to look at the result, which is as if the stage were bathed
in a weak solution of apricot jam."
And I had chosen a career in gels. , . ?
The Broadway season saw such long-running hits as The
Tenth Man, Toys in the Attic (Howard Bay, sets and lighting),
Bye Bye Birdie (Peggy Clark), Miracle Worker (George Jenkins, sets and lighting), and Sound of Music (Jean Rosenthal
and Oliver Smith). Fiorello! (sets and lighting by the Eckarts)

won the Tony and a Pulitzer Prize. But such stars as Bette
Davis, Lucille Ball, Jack Lemmon, Henry Fonda and Charlton Heston all flopped. Louis Kronenberger noted in Best
Plays 1959-60, "We have entered a new Broadway era-an
era of high costs that makes for a theater of hits and flops
with little room for what lies between." The sentiment has
echoed and re-echoed through the 25 years!
Although my salary was now up to $125 per week and I
was having my first cash flow problem, I became an angel, an
investor. Through clever wheeling and dealing, my $200 was
pooled with others and 1 became a backer of a Frank Loesser
musical. The man who had brought Broadway Most Happy
Fella and Guys & Dolls was going to make me rich. The show
was Green willo w. It ran 97 performances. 1 never invested
again.
That season Jean Rosenthal lit eight shows, Paul Morrison lit seven, Tharon Musser six, Peggy Clark five, Howard
Bay five and Jo Mielziner four. Lee Watson did an offBroadway hit, U.S.A., and an aptly-named show, Lovely
Light. It toured, but ran 17 performances in New York. Later
in the year All the Way Home came in. Jean Rosenthal lit
Taste of Honey, Joe Davis did Irma la Douce, Peggy Clark
did The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Abe Feder did Camelot.
When he started working on Camelot, Abe called me.
"Miller? . ,You want your stuff on this show? Get down here
with some sheets. , .."
ow, it was still a Cinemoid world
and 1 wanted Roscolene on his sho\v so 1 went ... running. He
had Oliver Smith's renderings and 1 went up and down the
ladder changing colors in the lights as Abe experimented.
Although the range was extensive, there weren't enough Roscolene colors for Abe to light the show! That night he developed double and triple densities that became 843, 861, ...
The show was a hit and Abe's design was beautiful.
The companies supplying the industry at this time were
staffed with a remarkably capable group of people. The indomitable Ed Kook ran Century Lighting with entrepreneurial fire. Sonny Sonnenfeld, Chuck Levy, Rollo Gillespie Williams and Mitch Miller were in New York and George Gill
managed Century's Florida office. Herb Kliegl had taken
over when his father passed away and Joel Rubin and Bert
More were at Kliegl. Ariel Davis was making patch panels
and PAR Arielites in Salt Lake City. Al Koga was at Hub,
Paul Tyler at Grand and Ross Major at Major in the MidWest. Holzmueller and Otto K. Olesen were in California.
Steve Skirpan was at Ward Leonard and Ned Lustig at Vickers in St. Louis. Charlie Altman was working with his brother
Eddie at Capitol Stage Lighting.
Well, we've come a long way from 1960. This is certainly
true when we look at the developments in technical theatre
over the twenty-five years. From incandescent lamps, resistance and autotransformer dimmers, gelatine, and animal
glue cooking in the paint shop ....
Certainly the development of the quartz lamp has had a
major impact on stage lighting equipment design over the
years. General Electric introduced the linear filament quartz
iodine lamp in 1961 and Sylvania followed with the compact
Period pha fOgraphs and illustrations for this article were generously supplied from the archives of Electro Controls, Kliegl
Bros, and Strand Century, fllc.

USITT / Fall 1985'/Theatre Design & Technology

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