‘Confidence, technique and vision’: Houston theater world recalls Heeley
The performance world was saddened to learn of the death of legendary theatrical designer Desmond Heeley, 85, who died June 10 in Manhattan.
In Houston, the news hit especially hard.
Heeley, winner of three Tony Awards, was one of the great scenic and costume designers of the second half of the 20th century. His career took him from his native England to the celebrated opera houses of Europe, the Stratford Festival in Canada and the stages of Broadway. Along the way, he collaborated with some of the greatest artists of the 20th century: from Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh to Dame Edith Evans and Joan Sutherland.
But in Houston, Heeley is perhaps most remembered as the man who showed a generation of the city’s children what Christmas looks like. His beloved production of “The Nutcracker” bedazzled them with images of flying cooks, dancing sugar plums in bright-pink tutus and Christmas trees that magically grew 40 feet high.
With his silver hair, gray beard and the jolly glint in his eye, Heeley even looked like Santa Claus.
From 1987-98, Houston Ballet emerged as Heeley’s artistic home in America.
Ben Stevenson, then Houston Ballet’s artistic director, commissioned four lavish, large-scale productions and a one-act ballet from him. Heeley repaid the company’s loyalty by giving it two of its most popular works — “The Sleeping Beauty” and “The Nutcracker” — which it has danced to packed houses for three decades.
The Stevenson/Heeley “Nutcracker” enjoyed an astonishing 28-year run following its debut in 1987, introducing over a million people to ballet. It also brought more than $40 million to Houston Ballet’s coffers, emerging as the city’s undisputed holiday blockbuster, due in no small part to Heeley’s theatrical wizardry. Houston Ballet most recently revived the Stevenson/ Heeley “Sleeping Beauty” in March, and over the past 26 years, it has generated more than $2 million in single-ticket sales.
Heeley played a key role in Houston Ballet’s development in the 1990s, not merely by giving it a series of cash cows but by helping to lift it to an international level through the sophistication of his designs for staples of the company’s repertory.
“With his extraordinary reputation, he brought Houston Ballet in line with major companies with the quality of his work,” Stevenson says.
“Three British designers created the theatrical look of Houston Ballet over three decades, beginning with Peter Farmer in the 1970s and David Walker in the 1980s,” says Houston Ballet managing director emeritus C.C. Conner. “As the company moved into Wortham Theater Center in 1987, Desmond Heeley created the designs for many of Ben’s new stagings of the full-length repertory, setting a new standard for design.”
Heeley’s glamorous trajectory is even more remarkable given that he endured a childhood that was almost Dickensian in its bleakness.
Born in London in 1931, of Italian-Irish parents whose whereabouts he never knew, Heeley grew up in a foster home, raised on welfare. “It was stigma the likes of which you didn’t want to know about,” he recalled to Playbill in 1997.
“When I was 14, I won a scholarship. It was a sort of competition in which my schoolteacher entered a sketchbook I had made. I won 50 pounds. Nowadays, that would be a hundred bucks, but to me it was a fortune! It was enough to get me into a local art school for all of three months — one semester.
“I felt like Dorothy in the Land of Oz. That was the only time in my life I was exposed to anything like teaching. They were wonderful teachers, and in my book, they should be framed in gold because they do shape people’s lives.”
Another turning point came at age 15.
“Once upon a time, running away to the theater was the most exciting thing you can do to make your parents mad,” Heeley recalled in an emotional interview with the Theatre Museum Canada. “My foster parents said, ‘If it goes wrong, don’t come back.’ And they weren’t joking either.
“But when I got there, I found the most wonder- ful, wonderful ghetto in the world, Stratfordupon-Avon. There were very peculiar people. Nowadays, it wouldn’t be allowed. But I was beautifully looked after. I was cared for.”
He had found a home, and a tribe of people, who would sustain him for the next seven decades.
“Desmond was a master of perspective and light,” says Thomas Boyd, who produced five of Heeley’s designs during his three decades as director of production at Houston Ballet.
“He didn’t design objects or environments as much as the effect those things have on the viewer when presented in various ways; points of view, when revealed with light, and so on. His design sense was realistic without being obvious; impressionistic without being too abstract; and always a wonder. He was truly inspired, he would say, by the legacy he inherited and nurtured. But I always suspected that it was divine intervention.”
“What impressed me most about his work was the mystery in each costume,” says the Tony Award-winning Broadway costume designer Jess Goldstein, who serves as a professor adjunct of design at the Yale University School of Drama. “Because of the layers of fabrics, trims and painting, I couldn’t quite see how things were made. But what was more miraculous, the final result was utterly effortless! It all added up to a delicacy and lightness that was never overwhelming to the total look or to the actor wearing the costume.”
In the late 1980s, Heeley undertook what was the grandest of his works for Houston Ballet, spending two years planning and nine months executing a 100th-anniversary production of “The Sleeping Beauty.”
Inspired in part by Oliver Messel’s seminal 1946 production of the work for The Royal Ballet, it burst into view in 1990 with a price tag of $757,000, and featured 225 original costumes and 33 handpainted backdrops. “I call a production like this the ultimate collage,” he remarked before the opening. “It’s a juggernaut, a glorious ballet to do, but it could break you.”
“I will never forget watching Desmond paint the Act 1 backdrop for ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ at English National Ballet scene shop in London,” Boyd said. “John and Allison Hardy had just completed the background of dappled sky and foliage, beautifully painted over a week or so of meticulously drafted images. The day I was in the shop, Desmond came on to the paint deck with a large fisk and a bucket of white paint, and started drawing/painting freehand, in pure white, literally splashing the paint onto the cloth.
“Although I’m sure they had seen it before, John and Allison were a bit in shock, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. In less than 45 minutes, there began to appear before our eyes a balustrade, two fountains — one large in the foreground, one smaller off in the distance — with various columns and archways tying it all together. And this was a cloth 40 feet high by 65 feet wide. It was a spectacular display of confidence, technique and vision.”
Conner says one of the more fascinating aspects of Heeley’s work was how painterly it was.
“His sketches looked like works from the great Impressionists. Yet the scene shops and the costumes shops knew exactly how to translate these designs,” Conner says. “And the same could be said for the finished products. If you looked at the costumes up close, it was like looking at suits and dresses in a (Diego) Velázquez painting. Yet from the audience, the painting and dying on these costumes looked like intricate, sewn detail.
“His sets were the same. In ‘The Snow Maiden’ in 1998, instead of making actual reproductions of Russian structures, he used plastic wrap and tin foil, things like compact discs to make the onion dome spires of the castle, and plastic spoons to create reflectors in chandeliers. I remember the first time the Russian ballerina, Nina Ananiashvili, who created the lead role, saw the stage setting. Her shocked question was, ‘Is this professional?’ Up close it did not necessarily look like it, but from the audience it was not only realistic but magical! “
Any reservations about the professionalism of the design evaporated when the curtain rose on the premiere.
“Desmond Heeley’s beautiful décor has created a true spectacle, a winter wonderland of silvery tones, Russian ice palaces and icicles,” wrote Anna Kisselgof, chief dance critic for the New York Times. “The ending is so visually stunning that one can well sweep away any reservations about a production that occasionally loses its narrative thread and metaphorical essence.”
“Once I put on one of his costumes, the magic and fantasy of the character felt like part of my skin,” said Houston Ballet star Lauren Anderson, who wore many of Heeley’s creations during her 23-year career with the company. “He had a child’s imagination.”
Andrew Edmonson was the director of marketing and public relations for Houston Ballet from 2000-14. He currently serves on the advisory board of The Oral History Project, which is capturing and preserving the personal stories of those affected by the AIDS crisis in Houston and Harris County.