Designs of David Mitchell

Today we tip our hat to only our third set designer represented on Travalanche, the two-time Tony winning David Mitchell (1932-2011). Set design is far from our bailiwick. We’ve only done two similar posts before related to scenic designers (out of 7,000); those were on Tony Walton and Eugene Lee. But we’ve good reason to do so today. Mitchell designed My Dinner With Andre, which I wrote about only yesterday. And we’ve had the honor of collaborating with his daughter Jenny Lee Mitchell on numerous occasions. She is one of my favorite living performers: clown, actress, opera singer, musician, character comedian, director, teacher, translator, and I’m sure I left some things out. Anyway a friend mentioned her dad just now with respect to yesterday’s post and I happened to notice that today happens to be Mitchell’s birthday. Seems foreordained, n’est ce pas?

I thought I would take this opportunity to note some of the the three dozen shows Mitchell designed for Broadway, because many of them are my cup of tea. His two Tonys were for the original productions of Annie (1977) and Barnum (1980), the latter being one of my favorite modern Broadway shows for obvious reasons (the pic above depicts one of the production’s show stopping moments — those elephant legs moved and walked across the stage). He also designed the original production of The Gin Game (1977) with Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy; the original production of La Cage Aux Folles (1983), Michael Stewart’s show about Harrigan and Hart (1985), Legs Diamond (1988) with Peter Allen, Tru (1989) with Robert Morse, and Neil Simon’sBrighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985), and Broadway Bound (1986), not to mention the 1985 all-lady revival of The Odd Couple with Sally Struthers and Rita Moreno. He also designed for opera, and live stage shows in Las Vegas, as well as the original off-Broadway production of David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971) and a 1967 Hamlet starring Martin Sheen, both at the Public.

He also designed the 1980 Paul Simon movie One Trick Pony. Thank goodness he wasn’t involved with The Capeman!

For more on show business history please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous. And stay tuned for my next book Vaudeville in Your Living Room: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, coming November 2023.