[book reviews]
Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance
Edited by Karal Ann Marling
Reviewed by Bradford Clark
Fifty Years of Fashion: New Look to Now
By Valerie Steele
Reviewed by Martha A. Marking
Designer Drafting for the Entertainment World
By Patricia Woodbridge
Reviewed by Bradford Clark
Technical Theatre for Nontechnical People
By Drew Campbell
Reviewed by Patrick Donnelly
Published in TD&T, Vol. 38 No. 2 (Spring 2002)
Theatre Design & Technology , the journal for design and production
professionals in the performing arts and entertainment industry, is published four
times a year by United States Institute for Theatre Technology. For information
about joining USITT or to purchase back issues of TD&T, please contact the
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Copyright 2002 United States Institute for Theatre Technology, Inc.
Book
reviews
Sylvia J. Hillyard Pannell
editor
Technical Theatre for
Nontechnical People
By Drew Campbell
New York: Allworth Press, 1999.
ISBN 1581150202, 212 pages, glossary, index,
$18.95 (softcover).
Motivations for writing an introductory text
about technical theatre vary widely, as widely
as the personalities of the authors. A dissatisfaction with existing books compels some,
while the desire for professional advancement
attracts others. If the writer has spent a large
part of his career in an educational environment, the didactic impulse usually influences
his pencil-sharpening. A few authors even create an amalgam of these reasons to help the
book along, to justify the effort to themselves,
their spouses, or their publishers.
Drew Campbell begins Technical Theatre
for Nontechnical People with an explanation
of his motive. He worked as a rental manager
for a lighting and sound company on the West
Coast, and many of the customers whom he assisted had minimal knowledge about things
technical. Faced with frequent phone calls and
visits from clients wishing to “rent some sound
for a party”, Campbell decided to write a book
to enable these neophytes to speak clearly
about their event support needs: “There are a
lot of people in the world who have no desire
to be technicians, no desire to go through the
years of training, mistakes, and experience
that are necessary to bond with things mechanical, electric, or electronic. These same
people, however, still need the technology…
They don’t want to master the technology; they
want to use it. They want to stand in the right
place on the stage. They want to communicate
with a designer or technician. They want to
walk into a rental company and know what to
ask for. They just want to survive backstage.”
The intended audience for Technical
Theatre for Nontechnical People includes
dancers, drama teachers, playwrights, actors,
fashion show coordinators, and ministers. For
persons wanting to become technicians,
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Campbell encourages other,
thicker volumes over his own,
and includes a recommended
reading list.
Campbell has taken the
standard technical theatre
manual and pared it down to
vocabulary and a modest
number of illustrations. As is
usually the case, scenery and
lighting get the lion’s share of
the attention, with adequate
nods to sound and stage management. Properties and special effects fare
poorly, while costuming almost disappears after a mention in the opening chapter. His
“Backstage Survival Guides”—how-to summaries—merit praise for their concision, and he
sweetens many pages with apt, real-life anecdotes. The bulk of the book discusses the execution of technical elements rather than their
design; however, it touches on the need for effective working relationships between craftsmen and the artistic team, and on the purpose
of illumination and scenery in relation to the
show as a whole. As an introductory text, Technical Theatre for Nontechnical People cannot cover any subject exhaustively. Still, it
contains a mass of data, more than most nontechnical people desire to know. The detail allowed many of the topics makes the volume
appropriate for all persons who have a focused
set of questions, and consequently, a reference
worthy of most technicians’ bookshelves.
The glowing weakness of Technical Theatre for Nontechnical People comes in its
compositional form. While a colloquial tone
and a sense of humor can aid the reader,
Campbell overdoes them, and thereby makes
his audience work harder. He regularly employs jargon, and includes asides that detract
from the narrative. The book too often flows
like a prose version of Paul Carter’s Backstage
Handbook: packed full of facts, but an awkward read from cover to cover. It works best
when dipped into for information.
Campbell deserves applause for including
two uncommon chapters in the text: “Touring
a New Space: What to Look For,” and “How to
Do a Show in a Hotel: Corporate Theatre.” Everyone, he implies, works in a venue for the
first time. While some persons will spend their
careers in that one place, others will move
down the road for a first time in another theater, and then another. In each
instance, the questions asked
about the space are the same:
Will my production fit? Can we
schedule the space according
to our needs? Is there a crossover? How many linesets? Do
you have a list of the lighting
inventory? Can all the performers use this dressing
room? The few books that do
raise these issues focus almost exclusively on touring
shows; the average introduction to technical theatre overlooks them, and rushes on to discuss stage
machinery. Yet they are recurring questions,
and the smart non-technical person must always prepare to ask them—or provide answers to guests who ask. As theatrical events
overrun meeting rooms, conference centers,
and other nontraditional spaces, these queries
have become all the more common. Professional associations, businesses, and civic
groups regularly assemble and entertain the
people attending their meetings; sometimes,
the entertainment itself is the event. Such corporate gatherings in multipurpose venues
raise a host of questions similar to those in the
“Touring a New Space” chapter: How large of a
stage should we build? Is any of the house
sound and lighting equipment of use to us? If we
have to bring in gear, how much? Is there an adequate power supply? Where can the performers
get dressed? Campbell provides some helpful
tables and rules of thumb with which to answer these and other uncertainties. Again, the
only guides that regularly address this deal
with touring a fixed production.
All readers would benefit from a second
edition of Technical Theatre for Nontechnical
People, albeit one with heavy stylistic editing. If
Campbell’s motive to help the uninitiated remains
strong, he could create a book that will dominate
the niche for years to come.
Reviewed by Patrick Donnelly,
Performance Hall Manager,
Central Michigan University.
Copyright 2002 United States Institute for Theatre Technology, Inc.
Designing Disney’s
Theme Parks
The Architecture of Reassurance
Karal Ann Marling, ed.
New York: Flammarion, 1997. ISBN:
2080136399, 224 pages, $50.00 (hardcover).
While much material has appeared in recent
years dealing with the cultural implications of
the Disney theme parks, previously only one
book, Disney Imagineering, has used extensive
archival materials to document the steps of the
design process. While the well-illustrated book
effectively celebrated the many technical and procedural innovations developed by the Imagineers,
it made little attempt to place the significance of
the parks’ design choices within a wider cultural
context. In contrast, Designing Disney’s Theme
Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance examines the parks from the perspective of architectural criticism, including both urban and
landscape planning, while paying close attention to the social and historical influences
that affected the various phases of design and
construction. Consequently, the two books
complement each other extremely well.
Published to coincide with an excellent
traveling exhibition, Designing Disney’s
Theme Parks was produced by the Canadian
Center for Architecture with the cooperation,
but not, apparently, the final editorial approval
of the Disney company. The exhibition and resulting catalog had access to the Disney archives in much the same way the “insiders” of
Imagineering did for their book, but the results are quite different. Designing Disney’s
Theme Parks clearly was written independently of the Disney corporate publicity mill,
and for a much more specialized audience. If
Imagineering provided a close-up view of the
parks’ conceptualization, the present book provides the long shot, placing their design within
cultural and historical perspective and approaching them primarily as highly significant examples
of twentieth-century public architecture. That in
itself is not a new approach; many articles and
at least one major collection of critical essays
have been written about the parks over the
years (these are discussed in Greil Marcus’ essay near the end of the book). But this catalog
strives to maintain a balanced perspective of
the whole Disney theming phenomenon.
As such, it is not always successful. If true
art is defined as being challenging, “edgy” and
risk-taking, the title of the book itself is not exCopyright 2002 United States Institute for Theatre Technology, Inc.
actly complimentary. In a time when postWWII angst and a rapidly changing society
filled middle-class Americans’ lives with tension, Disney’s new park in Anaheim provided a
kind of sanctuary, a time-travel experience
back to a gentler place which had never actually existed. In Designing Disney’s Theme
Parks, today’s visitors to the park are often referred to in ways that underscore their status as
passive, uncritical consumers. Disneyland and
the later parks continue to
successfully market this
comforting brand of revisionism, but many critics
(one of whom referred to
the French park as “a cultural Chernobyl”) apparently find escapism to be
inherently offensive, and
believe those who enjoy it
clearly lack intellectual fiber. While the parks are admired for their logistical and technical accomplishments, their
inherent artificiality seems to limit how much
respect may be accorded them. (Of course,
such criticism could just as easily be leveled at
other forms of entertainment and relaxation,
including many stage productions.) But while a
certain degree of casual condescension permeates the book (typical of scholarly writing about
all things Disney), the articles remain refreshingly free of academic polemic, although they
certainly establish clear, thoroughly reasoned
positions, both positive and negative.
Neil Harris provides a valuable historical
perspective, showing the development of
world’s fairs from the end of the nineteenth
century until the opening of Disneyland. Karal
Ann Marling’s fascinating cornerstone essay,
“Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks,”
documents the influence of film design and Los
Angeles architecture upon early conceptions
of the flagship park. She also shows how
Disney’s vaunted narrative techniques evolved
over time, as the parks incorporated freer
montage techniques over strictly linear narrative, emphasizing mood over immersion within
a particular storyline (often film derived). We
see how as each new park was built, with new
attractions added and old attractions renovated, the Disney view of the world shifted in
response to the desires of new audiences.
Marling provides each “land” in the Disney
parks with its own section, showing how de-
signs were shaped by both corporate desires
and the personal tastes of key personnel (in the
early days, primarily Walt Disney himself). Particularly interesting was the relative “struggle” for
domination between designers from backgrounds in film art direction and animation
(when the park was first being planned, in the
1950s) and those who trained primarily as architects and dominated
much construction during the EPCOT era and
beyond. At this time,
many structures were
conceived along fundamentally architectural
rather than dramatic
lines, and they consequently differ in their
emotional effect upon
contemporary visitors.
The contrast between
monumental architectural design and the park
equivalent of scenic design should be especially interesting to educators attempting to
help their students understand the differences
between research, interpretation and dramatic
expression.
Another essay focuses upon the cultural
roles that Disneyland played in the context of
the 1950s , while Yi-Fu Tuan’s “Disneyland: Its
Place in World Culture” draws parallels between perceptions of Disney parks as places of
extreme social engineering and even mythological concepts of paradise, examining its
role as a “promised land” not unlike America
itself. Greil Marcus’ “Forty Years of Overstatement: Criticism and the Disney Theme Parks”
provides a critical survey of previous writings,
offering valuable counterpoint perspectives for
some of the more negative views. As a finale, in
a short interview, architect Frank Gehry (designer of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao,
Spain) discusses his experiences working with
Disney, providing a kind of rolicking outsiderinsider’s perspective. As a result, the book
contains a variety of fundamentally balanced
articles which examine the parks from a variety of viewpoints.
Designing Disney’s Theme Parks, while
a handsomely produced catalog with many illustrations not contained within Imagineering, occasionally exhibits a shortfall in
contemporary book design. The elegant grid
used to lay out the book allows for plenty of
white space upon which to rest the eye, but
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many of the illustrations are scaled down to
the point where their details are lost. And for
some reason, illustrations cited in the text are
rarely placed on the same page as their references, so one must constantly flip back and
forth while reading—a small complaint, but
irritating, nonetheless.
Love them or hate them, dramatically
themed environments surround us, whether in
the form of amusement parks, video arcades
or shopping malls. Growing like architectural
kudzu, they evolved from their origins in the
pleasure gardens of Europe into the amusement parks and world’s fairs of the United
States, then were radically reinvented by Walt
Disney in the 1950s. Providing both entertainment and employment, theme parks are as
worthy of comment as any other aspect of design in the performing arts. Designing
Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of
Reassurance makes a worthy contribution to a
new and growing field of study.
Reviewed by Bradford Clark,
Bowling Green State University
Fifty Years of Fashion
New Look to Now
By Valerie Steele
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
ISBN: 0300071329, 167 pages, illustrations,
$45.00 (hardcover).
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Fifty Years of Fashion is a survey of fashion
from the New Look (1947) through the 1990s.
The author is the chief curator of the museum
at the Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.).
She has written several other books on fashion
history and edited Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture.
Fifty Years of Fashion seems to target
fashion designers and serious browsers of
fashion history and although this book is a survey it is very thorough, and would be a good
reference for the theatrical costume designer.
This book explores the six decades involved
succinctly and has many beautiful illustrations
from the F.I.T. collection. The photographs are
very clear and focus largely on high fashion.
Information concerning middle class clothing
during this time period is covered in the text
but photographs of middle class clothing are
sparse.
Ms. Steele’s opening chapter focuses on
the late 1940s when the New Look, championed by Christian Dior, was ushered in. World
War II had a high impact on clothing during
this period and the shortage of fabrics and notions resulted in the use of utility suits and the
practice of recutting men’s clothes to fit
women
The 1950s brought conformity for everyday wear. The author draws a parallel between
the uniformity of dress and the uniformity of
politics at this time. Ms. Steele defines the term
“wife dressing” and draws an interesting connection between the styles of automobiles and
brassieres. She reminds us that the invention
of the modern fashion doll (e.g. Barbie) happened during this time. The youth movement
spearheaded a more non-conformist ideal
which became even more influential as the
century wore on. As the global economy became increasingly important in the 1950s, so
did the rise of couture clothing.
During the 1960s “street fashion” was extremely popular and the couture houses,
thought of as being elitist, were under attack .
The Peacock Revolution and rock and
roll made this one of the most revolutionary
times for men’s clothing. Ms. Steele highlights
major fashion trends such as the “mod” and
the “baby doll” styles as options for the decade. The “flower power” fashions of the early
sixties were replaced with a more futurist look
later in the decade. The author mentions influences such as the exploration of space and
other scientific advances as the impetus for the
experimentation with non-traditional materials
like plastic, metal and paper.
Ms. Steele calls the 1970s “The Decade
That Taste Forgot.” As young people became
disenchanted with the establishment, they
chose to illustrate their discontent by wearing
outrageous fashions. These reflected retro fantasies, ethnic influences and the hippie revolution. This freedom of expression led them to
adopt diverse fashions such as granny dresses,
hot pants, micro minis, platform shoes and
boots, punk fashion, androgyny and deliberately ripped tee shirts.
The excess of the 1980s is brought to
light in the following chapter. Designer clothing reached its peak during the 1980s and a
new body consciousness had begun. Ms. Steele
points out that many man-made fabrics were
developed and that women’s fashions became
increasingly masculine as women entered the
work force in greater numbers than ever before. She mentions Calvin Klein, MTV, Gaultier
and Madonna as major fashion influences of
the eighties.
With the advent of the 1990s cultural influences played a greater role and racially diverse and ultrathin fashion models were
prevalent. Grunge and goth were two of the
more deviant styles that surfaced during this
decade along with retro fifties and retro seventies styles . Rap music, the Far East and techno
styles are all important influences for the later
part of this decade. The author states that in
the 1990s fashion has come from the street up
instead of from high fashion down.
The over leaf of this book states: “From
haute couture to hot pants, from glamour to
grunge the past fifty years have witnessed some
startling revolutions in fashion. This lively survey of postwar fashion not only describes the
great designers and their creations but also
places trends in clothing within their social
and cultural contexts.” I am pleased to report
the author does this, and more, with lively anecdotes to bring her theories to light.
Reviewed by Martha A. Marking,
Appalachian State University
Copyright 2002 United States Institute for Theatre Technology, Inc.
Designer Drafting for the
Entertainment World
By Patricia Woodbridge
Boston: Focal Press, 2000, ISBN:
0240804244, 372 pages, $44.95 (softcover).
Like many others, I have experienced the frustration of dealing with students who are convinced that the computer can substitute for the
acquisition of time-honored visualization
skills. The computer, for all its usefulness, is
not human. Even as an interpretive tool—
working from traditional hand renderings—it
prefers geometric solidity over expressive irregularity. This provides a partial explanation
for the many depressingly similar computerbased designs we’ve encountered—and I’m
speaking as someone who relies greatly on his
computer for all of his design work. Even as
digital technology becomes more accessible,
enabling the average scenic designer to produce images of tremendous subtlety, the human being at the keyboard still requires
trained eyes and hands to produce work with
the gentle nuances and /or curvilinear whimsy
we associate with the best designs. Designer
Drafting for the Entertainment World addresses this need with a vengeance.
Patricia Woodbridge, a professional art
director and veteran teacher of drafting at NYU
Tisch School of the Arts, argues that hand
drafting is simply a specialized form of drawing, and therefore a basic skill that every designer should have at his/her command. She
further argues that for some projects, the current state of CAD simply isn’t up to the challenge. And so, while CAD has certainly become
common, anyone who wishes to find employment across the entertainment industry in areas related to scenic design needs to be
familiar not only with professional standards
Copyright 2002 United States Institute for Theatre Technology, Inc.
of hand-produced architectural drafting but
how these standards vary between venues (including theatre, video, film, theme parks, and
others). Even when working with CAD applications, such knowledge proves invaluable. Observing that even USITT’s technical drawing
standards are not consistent with contemporary industry practice, Woodbridge intends
this book to provide a definitive guide. From
what I can see, she has succeeded.
Designer Drafting for the Entertainment World is a dense volume, divided into two
main parts. In the first, Woodbridge starts with
the basics—tools, basic projection concepts,
geometric construction techniques, lettering and
drawing composition. A concise chapter on perspective drawing (both drop-point and grid
methods) proves especially valuable, and another
section presents techniques useful for the drawing of forced perspective scenery. Later chapters
deal with specific applications, using reproductions to illustrate points in the text. She discusses
techniques used to plot out irregular sculptural
items such as rocks, boulders, and props. Other
sections show how to measure unfamiliar theatre
spaces, and even briefly discuss the use of surveying techniques in documenting film locations.
In the second part, Woodbridge presents
a wide variety of professional drawings from
realized projects, including plans, front elevations, sections, detail drawings and various
specialty views. Some venues fare better than
others; the section on theme part design
(which I admit is of personal interest) would
benefit from expansion in later editions. I
found the chapter on feature films especially
enlightening, since it discusses the advantages
and disadvantages between West Coast and
East Coast drafting styles.
Technical drawings rarely fair well in reproduction, either because faint lines are lost
in the printing process or the drawings are reproduced in such small scale that they can
barely be seen, let alone examined for detail.
Most texts get around this problem by using
plates that are simplified and do not reflect
professional layout and notation standards.
Having decided to rely heavily on drawings
used for actual projects, Woodbridge needed
to consider these issues carefully. She chose to
redraw most of the originals in ink; as a result,
the reproductions are crisp and precise. Scale
is still a problem—even when they fill a full
82″ x 11″ page, as most of them do, some details are difficult to see. But I am not criticiz-
ing. A larger format would have been cost
prohibitive, and most important details (and
certainly layout formats) can still be seen at
this size. She has also made the wise decision
to reproduce some drawings in their original
pencil half-tones (most notably those drawn
by Ming Cho Lee, whose technical drawings
are legendary) so that gentle tonal variations
and line textures remain.
This book functions as far more than a
textbook—it renews one’s love of drawing.
The author has assembled some beautiful
plates, including drawings from Tony Walton’s
wonderfully skewed Guys and Dolls, Ming
Cho Lee’s expressive Lucia Di Lammermoor,
a whole section on Ben Edward’s The Iceman
Cometh, and my favorite, the bulldog café
from the Disney film, The Rocketeer.
Although the book places its focus firmly
upon hand drafting, Woodbridge is not a
Luddite. Short supplementary sections also
focus upon the use of computers in CAD applications and the production of virtual environments. As the author points out,
software-related information is likely to be
obsolete by the date a book is published. So
she focuses on basic concepts, presents plates
produced by professionals using CAD, and
discusses some of the application programs
that have become standard, providing much
more up-to-date information than any other
book of its kind with which I am familiar. She
provides an especially valuable discussion of
standard file formats. A separate color section
contains renderings and computer generated
imagery, with black and white versions inserted within the main text for reference.
While it starts with the basics and proceeds to most specialized problems in technical drafting, this book may not serve the
needs of every classroom. The sheer density
of the material covered could conceivably be
daunting to a beginning student. While
Woodbridge clearly illustrates all principles,
there occasionally appear to be fewer step-bystep breakdowns than in some other texts.
Dorn and Shanda’s Drafting for the Theatre,
while more limited in scope, provides lesson
plans. But I believe Designer Drafting for the
Entertainment World will soon become the
standard text and professional resource that
designers will carry throughout their careers
and into a multiplicity of venues.
Reviewed by Bradford Clark,
Bowling Green State University
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