Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2013 - 55

dress business. He designed two more movies and an episode of the Perry
Mason television series before leaving the industry completely.

corA mAcgeAchy
Cora MacGeachy (c.1885-1960) designed or co-designed forty-three
Broadway musicals and revues between 1907 and 1930. She designed at
least two non-musical: her first production appears to have been J.M Barrie's The Admirable Crichton in 1903; and her 1923 production titled One
Kiss was described as a "play with music."
Abstracting from information from various sources, however, we can
glean that as a professional designer she was at the center of Broadway
activity for twenty-three years. She designed for every major producer:
George White, Florenz Ziegfeld , the Shuberts, George M. Cohan, Lew M.
Fields, Klaw and Erlanger, and Weber and Fields. She designed for some
of the major composers and lyricists of the period: Sigmund Romberg,
Rodgers and Hart, Al Jolson, Buddy DeSylva, Jerome Kern, Victor Herbert,
and Irving Berlin; and she collaborated with some of the most well-known
designers of her time: Erté, Charles Le Maire, James Reynolds, Ernest
Gros, Joseph Urban, Homer Conant, Mme. Haverstick, Willy Pogany, and
William Henry Mathews.
As was the custom during this time, producers would hire multiple costume designers for their productions, especially on the revues.
MacGeachy worked as a part of a team of costume designers on twentyseven productions. She was hired as the single costume designer sixteen
times, mostly early in her career.
Heavy demands were placed on costume designers during this
time, and MacGeachy had multiple productions in the design, building, or rehearsal process simultaneously throughout her career. For example, from February 4, 1911, to November 30, 1912, she opened ten
productions on Broadway for six different producers. Any designer this
busy must have a system to keep everything straight, and we know a bit
about MacGeachy's system. Barbara Cohen-Stratyner, Rosenberg Curator for Exhibitions at the New York Public Library for the Performing
Arts, has discovered that for the Shuberts, MacGeachy encircled every
costume sketch with an oval.
MacGeachy also designed for motion pictures, but documentation
is scanty. She is listed in the Internet Movie Database as having designed
the costumes for Irene in 1926 where, unfortunately, she was listed as
Cora MacCreachy. Deborah Nadoolman Landis, in her book Dressed: A
Century of Hollywood Costume Design, identifies MacGeachy as having designed the costumes for Ella Cinders in 1926. Landis also quotes
MacGeachy speaking of her work as a designer:

by a very busy Broadway designer: elegant evening dresses, teasingly short
revue costumes, swimwear, schoolgirls' uniforms, and baby dolls, as well as
delightful nightdresses and the much-loved national costumes-including the
drawing shown here of a Tyrolean boy wearing lederhosen. There are countless
variations of such drawings, but, thanks to the fantasy and creativity shown by

I always endeavor to make the execution of my designs as simple as possible.
One of the first principles of costume designing, as well as women's attire, is to
understand the process of elimination. I never draw a drapery, for instance, that
means nothing. Everything I put into a sketch of a costume can be duplicated
in materials by the modiste. Femininity is the quality everyone loves in a woman
and in my work I do everything to accentuate it. (Landis 2007, 58)

Steiner-Strauss notes:
Around 440 designs by Cora MacGeachy are preserved in the collection of the
Theatre Museum, a fact that which makes her the female costume designer
most heavily represented in the Vienna collection. All her drawings are
signed "Cora MacGeachy." They demonstrate the entire spectrum covered

Costume design by Cora MacGeachy.
Courtesy the Theatre Museum, Vienna, Austria.

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