Designer Profile: Ming Cho Lee
Posted by Sarah Wansley on November 26th, 2008 Ming Cho Lee |
Calling A Christmas Carol Set Designer Ming Cho Lee a prolific and talented theater artist is a bit of an understatement. Born in Shanghai, Ming originally moved to the States in 1949 to study art at Occidental College in L.A.. After falling in love with theater and receiving an M.F.A. in design from U.C.L.A., Ming’s career skyrocketed when he became an apprentice to designer Jo Mielzner. Only six years later Ming designed his first Broadway show, The Moon Besieged. Since then, Ming has designed over 20 Broadway shows including Mother Courage and her Children, King Lear, The Glass Menagerie and For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf and worked with McCarter’s own Emily Mann on the Broadway production of her play, Execution of Justice. Interestingly, Ming’s designs have often received critical and popular acclaim even when the shows themselves did not: Ming often jokes that he has “more Broadway flops than anyone!” With such an illustrious career, one may wonder how McCarter was lucky enough to snatch him up for A Christmas Carol. As McCarter Resident Stage Manager (and resident Christmas Carol expert) Cheryl Mintz tells the story, Ming was thrilled to design A Christmas Carol because despite the abundance of Christmas Carols across the country, no one had ever asked him before!
Ming’s set, which had its debut at McCarter over a decade ago, lives in four 48-foot trailers parked outside of the McCarter Shops during the off-season. Each year the Production department spends four whirlwind days loading in the set before A Christmas Carol technical rehearsals begin; the first two days of load-in alone require 35 people working from 8am to 10pm. Check out Adam’s blog from last year about the intense installation process. The set has four motorized units: Scrooge’s Bedroom, the Counting House, the Cratchit’s table, and Fred’s piano. There are also 14 scenic elements that fly in or out and 34 speakers throughout the theater. When the Counting House unit was originally built by a scene shop in Philadelphia, it weighed approximately 6,000 pounds. A few years ago the McCarter scene shop rebuilt the top of the unit with lighter material and shed 1,000 of those pounds. Loading the set is only the beginning of the Production department’s work—it takes 16 crew members to run the show each night.
Ming designed the set with a forced perspective, so that the units look deeper than they actually are. The outside of Scrooge’s house (which flies in), for example, has 11 vanishing points (this is when parallel lines appear to converge to simulate depth - check out Wikipedia for a demonstration). The original drawing was so detailed, the McCarter scene shop chose to print out the drawing actual size and build it from that. Ming’s use of perspective is also evident in the city backdrops, which feature St. Paul’s dome. He used a stock image of London from WWII as his source and broke the image into three parts for three separate drops. If you look closely, you can see what appear to be dirty piles of snow near the bottoms of the buildings—in the source image, these mounds were actually piles of debris from bombings during the war. Every year, audience members comment that the set appears to slant to one side. Have no fear, the McCarter scene shop did not accidentally create the next leaning tower of Pisa, Ming actually designed nearly everything in the set to slant in order to represent Scrooge’s skewed view of the world. Thanks to Chris Nelson (technical director), Steve Howe (stage supervisor) and Bill Kirby (sound engineer) for the fun facts about the production! Study up and you’ll do well on the upcoming A Christmas Carol trivia quiz!
Posted by Sarah Wansley, Directing/Producing Intern at McCarter Theatre.
