Ming Cho Lee, Legendary Set Designer, Teacher Dead A 90
Sad news. Ming Cho Lee died Friday. He was 90. I had the honor of interviewing him at his New York apartment a number of times over the past decade for several periodicals and found him to be as quietly compelling, as I imagined what his students felt, too, over the years
Here is one of those interviews, from 2014.
By FRANK RIZZO
NEW YORK CITY — The modest four-room East Side Manhattan apartment of Ming Cho Lee and his wife Betsy is quiet now, but in its day it was a hive of domestic and theatrical activity, the setting for not only raising a family but for creating some of the most dramatic designs for the American theater. "It was a circus and he was the ringmaster," says Lee's wife of 56 years of the decades when the apartment was filled with their three growing boys and Lee's design staff often working on several projects at the same time, not to mention meeting and socializing with producers, directors and students.
At age 84, and with his mobility limited, Lee is retired from designing productions for the stage but still teaches a class at Yale. He is also the subject of a recently published, handsomely illustrated book, "Ming Cho Lee: A Life in Design" (TCG, 336 pages, $75). The book's author Arnold Aronson spent countless hours over the same table where Lee is sitting on a bitterly cold winter afternoon over "pretty decent Chinese tea" to talk about his more than 300 designs for theater, opera and dance over the past 50 years, and about his more than 40 years as head of the design program at the Yale School of Drama.
Whether it's creating an icy slice of a mountain in his Tony Award-winning design for Broadway's "K2," or his nitty gritty set designed for "A Moon for the Misbegotten" at Long Wharf Theater and Hartford Stage or his explosion of pop and political imagery in the original "Hair", Lee's imagined worlds haunt audiences long after the show is over. Lee's set designs have a beauty and boldness that can also stand alone in their artistry and have earned him a place in the American Theater Hall of Fame. Lee's sketches and models have been exhibited at the New York Public Library, in Taiwan and Ningbo, China, and his native Shanghai and, most recently, last year at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery.
Lee's demeanor is gentle and graceful as the landscape water colors that he painted as a boy growing up in Shanghai. Smiling, soft-spoken with a serene calm, this "Designer Yoda'' radiates a zen-like authority. He also has a sly sense of humor.
"I had a hard time putting it down," jokes Lee of Aronson's hefty coffee table book.
