Jo Mielziner

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Mielziner, Jo (1901–76), designer. The leading scenic artist of his era, he was born in Paris but studied in America at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design. His first professional work in the theatre was as both an actor and designer for Jessie Bonstelle in Detroit and as an actor and stage manager for the Theatre Guild before creating the sets for their 1924 production of The Guardsman. Between then and his death, Mielziner designed the scenery, and usually the lighting, for more than four hundred Broadway plays. The word most often employed to describe his best work was “poetic.” He abandoned, especially in his later years, the detailed realism that was still in vogue when he began, as well as the fashionable expressionistic turn of such men as Robert Edmond Jones. Instead, he perfected the art of suggestive, skeletonized settings, evocatively lit. A complete list of even his finest work would include virtually all the best plays and some of the most successful musicals for the fifty years he was active, particularly after 1930. Representative of his work were his settings for Strange Interlude (1928), Street Scene (1929), Of Thee I Sing (1931), Winterset (1935), On Your Toes (1936), Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938), Pal Joey (1940), The Glass Menagerie (1945), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Mister Roberts (1948), Death of a Salesman (1949), South Pacific (1949), Guys and Dolls (1950), The King and I (1951), Tea and Sympathy (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Gypsy (1959), and *1776 (1969). Writing of his work for Winterset, John Mason Brown noted, “In his visualization of the bridge, Mr. Mielziner has provided Winterset with one of the finest backgrounds our contemporary theatre has seen. It is a setting of great majesty and beauty, and alive with a poetry of its own. . . simple, direct and impressive.” Biography: Mielziner: Master of Modern Stage Design, Mary C. Henderson, 2001.

Mielziner, Jo (1901–76), American scene designer, who was for a short time an actor. His first stage designs were done for the Lunts in Molnár's The Guardsman (1924), after which he was responsible for the décor of a wide variety of plays, among them Romeo and Juliet in 1934 for Katharine Cornell and Hamlet in 1936 for John Gielgud; Winterset (1935), The Wingless Victory (1936), and High Tor (1937) by Maxwell Anderson; The Glass Menagerie (1945), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), by Tennessee Williams; Death of a Salesman (1949), by Arthur Miller; and a number of musicals, including The Boys from Syracuse (1938), Finian's Rainbow (1947), Guys and Dolls (1950), and The King and I (1951). He was also responsible for the design of the Washington Square Theatre and for the décor of its productions of Miller's After the Fall and Behrman's But for Whom Charlie (both 1964); with the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen he designed the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at the Lincoln Center.

Jo Mielziner , 1901–76, American theatrical scene designer, b. Paris. Mielziner made his Broadway design debut in 1924 with The Guardsman. He designed sets, and usually the lighting, for more than 200 productions, including Strange Interlude, Carousel, A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the film Picnic, and the ballet Who Cares? The most influential set designer of his time, he often utilized scrims and multiple playing areas that allowed the action to flow seamlessly from one setting to another. During World War II, he was a camouflage specialist with the U.S. Air Force. Mielziner was, with Eero Saarinen , codesigner of the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York City's Lincoln Center.

Bibliography: See his memoirs, Designing for the Theatre (1965) and his The Shapes of Our Theatre (1970).