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by Linda Cajigas
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
He just might steal the show if you do.
An elaborate set moves off the stage at the same time that another moves on to take its place. A huge turntable periodically revolves to reveal multiple settings in a single act. Backdrops fly in and out from the cavernous heavens above the boards. Trap doors, mirrors, projections, bee lights, fiber optics, and stunning costumes are more tricks from his bottomless bag.
Master Scenic Artist C. David Higgins has been the wizard behind over 150 renowned opera and ballet productions around the world for almost 40 years. He was appointed to the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music faculty in 1976 and currently serves as chair of the Opera Studies Department and principal designer for IU Opera Theater, where he designs both scenery and costumes for major new productions. “My job is to create an environment in which a story can be told,” he said.
Born in Bloomington, Ind., and raised not two blocks from the IU campus, this designing man is the son of an unassuming barber and a mother with a deep appreciation of the arts who worked for the university. Recognizing her son’s unique drawing ability after seeing the four-year-old’s creations, she encouraged his artistic interests and took him to see his first opera a few years later in IU’s East Hall, on the same site as the current Musical Arts Center (MAC).
Higgins found plenty more nurturing for his talent in the Monroe County school system, with instructors of Fine Arts Margaret Raab and Earl Graves being two key influences. Although he concentrated in Fine Arts in high school, he also started to study acting and dancing during that time and enrolled in IU in 1964 intent on pursuing both.
Higgins began dancing when he was 16 and spent six years as a ballet dancer at IU, performing such roles as Snow King and Arabian in The Nutcracker and Tybalt in Romeo
and Juliet.
He had also experienced a number of theatrical successes, including winning a scholarship to the American Theatre Festival, and came to IU through his drama teacher Gene Crane’s contact with Richard Scammon, a faculty scene designer in the Theatre Department. Among Higgins’ fellow students was Kevin Kline, who, ironically, began at the Jacobs School as a pianist before switching to Theatre.
Higgins had no idea how his life was about to change when a friend who was studying in the Theatre Department and interested in scenic design, David Gano, took him to the music school’s paint shop, where C. Mario Cristini, chair of the Department of Stage Design and Technical Production, was working.
“It was kind of one of those ‘Aha!’ moments,” Higgins recalled. “When we walked into the building, and I saw Cristini painting, I thought, ‘Wow, I want to do that!’”
While still studying acting, Higgins began taking classes from Cristini and became an apprentice. He began to pattern himself after Cristini and tries to emulate those qualities even today.
“A person with creative sensitivity has to have a mentor—someone who recognizes talent in you—and Cristini was that person for me,” affirmed Higgins. “I could have been a dancer or an actor, but he was the example of the person I wanted to emulate. At some point, one grafts onto something to become, and he has been a role model for me ever since. There was a sense of family—of connectedness—with all those around him that went beyond a student-teacher relationship. We felt that we were part of something larger than ourselves.”
Cristini returned to Italy after being diagnosed with terminal cancer and died in 1970. Andreas Nomikos, the other faculty designer, left IU shortly afterward, and the master’s paintbrush was passed to Higgins by Dean Wilfred Bain in the summer of 1971, coinciding with the opening of the MAC.
“Bain admired what Cristini could do, and I was known as his protégé, the one who could paint like he did—in a very Italianate, Romantic-Realistic style,” Higgins explained. “No one at that time thought that I would be a designer. I was very fortunate to be in an organization that valued my contribution and ability and gave me an opportunity to do stage design. People were treated as members of a family and given an opportunity to move up in the organization—to become all that they could be.”
Before Higgins began designing on a regular basis, Antonin Dimitrov brought his more experimental, Czech-influenced style to IU Opera and Ballet Theater productions. Harold Mack, technical director at the Musical Arts Center, also did some designs. But it was Max Röthlisberger, arriving in 1973, who had the second most important influence on Higgins and allowed him to design.
Fiddler on the Roof was Higgins’ first professional design, in 1972, but he cites Das Rheingold, in 1984, as his first real critical success and major pivotal moment.
“Looking back, I was surprised I was given it. It was a one-shot deal to prove my abilities,” Higgins remembered. “Tim Noble was Wotan.”
In addition to his design credits throughout the United States, his Indiana University productions have been seen across North America as rentals by major regional opera companies.
His many international credits include the Icelandic National Theater; Ballet San Juan de Puerto Rico; Korean National Opera; Seoul City Opera; Korean National Ballet; Dorset Opera (England); Teatro la Paz de Belem, Brazil; and the Teatro National de São Paulo, Brazil.
Higgins’ designs include the world premiere of Our Town (Ned Rorem), American premieres of Jeppe (Sven-David Sandström) and the revised version of The Devils of Loudun (Krzysztof Penderecki), and the collegiate premieres of Nixon in China (John Adams) and The Ghosts of Versailles (John Corigliano), as well as many other operas and ballets.
Few major operatic works have escaped his conjurisdiction.
Today, Higgins’ work is flourishing like never before. With the retirement of fellow Jacobs designer Robert O’Hearn, in February 2008, his creative cauldron is overflowing.
His new production of Massenet’s Cendrillon (Cinderella), in February 2009 at the MAC, was dazzling. Moving from Cendrillon’s cold and period-correct home to the gilded and opulent palace to the surrealistic and dreamlike woods and fairy sequences was well within his comfort zone said Higgins. And a perfect display of his prodigious talent.
After a new production of Swan Lake with the world premiere of My Eyes Opened for IU Ballet Theater’s Spring Ballet, the magician’s handiwork may next be seen in the collegiate premiere of Adam Guettel’s operatic musical, The Light in the Piazza, during the 2009 IU Summer Music Festival.
Higgins’ kinetic interpretation of this Tony Award-winning work will employ minimal scenery, while featuring dynamic architectural elements on a turntable and the approximation of period postcards through projections.
In November 2009, IU Opera Theater will present a new production of the old favorite Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). Higgins and guest director Tomer Zvulun have developed the concept of a symbolic magical box transformed with pop-up and 18th-century theater elements—such as sliding platforms and props moving on and off the stage—to reveal an array of unusual environments.
This significantly large show, boasting 13 different scenes, is a co-production with The Atlanta Opera. After the IU run, the same production will be mounted in Atlanta with a different cast.
Experiencing a production that C. David Higgins has designed is truly spell-binding, yet, when meeting him in person, one does not experience the inflated ego which often accompanies a person of such accomplishment. He is humble, like his father, and Cristini. “There are people who are very talented and expect recognition; Cristini was not that sort of person,” explained Higgins. “He was respected because he lived what he believed.” As is his protégé.
“One of the things I hope I’ve accomplished as a designer is not to fall into the trap of one style,” Higgins professed. “I can go outside of my comfort zone, but I am very comfortable with the box I came from.” Behind the curtain.•
Robert O'Hearn's Final Bow
When the curtain rose on the February 2008 performance of A Wedding, the third of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom’s operas to have its collegiate premiere at Indiana University, it revealed the final creations of esteemed set designer Robert O’Hearn, who retired following the opera’s run, at the age of 86.
O’Hearn also designed Bolcom’s two previous IU Opera Theater premieres—McTeague, in 1996, and A View from the Bridge, in 2005. With more than 80 designs to his name, O’Hearn evoked settings reaching across time and through countless regions during his career. His credits range from Hansel and Gretel at the Metropolitan Opera in New York to Swan Lake in Strasbourg, from Don Quixote in Salt Lake City to La Traviata in Miami. In his 20 years at IU, he created more than 30 designs, many of which remain in current rotation.
O’Hearn’s connection to IU began in the 1930s, when he enrolled as an undergraduate. Originally from Elkhart, Ind., he completed his degree in the Department of Theatre and
Drama in 1943.
By 1948, he had become a fixture at the Harvard University Brattle Theater, designing numerous productions there. Then in 1952, he left Brattle for New York City and became an assistant designer on Broadway, working on such legendary productions as Kismet, Pajama Game, My Fair Lady, and West Side Story in the ‘50s.
In the years that followed, he became one of the biggest names in set design, completing a total of 12 operas for the Met, many of them considered among its most important productions. Highlights from his Met productions include L’Elisir d’Amore (1960), Die Frau Ohne Shatten (1966), Der Rosenkavelier (1969), and Porgy and Bess (1985).
His other U.S. credits are quite extensive, including the New York City Opera, New York Shakespeare Festival, City Center Theater, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Boston Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, Houston Opera, Ballet West, Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, and the San Francisco Ballet.
O’Hearn’s international credits include the Vienna Staatsoper, Vienna Volksoper, Hamburg Staatsoper, Austria’s Bregenzer Festspiele, the Karlsruhe Opera House in Germany, and the Canadian Opera Company.
In addition to opera and ballet, he worked on musicals such as Annie Get Your Gun and Carousel for the Miami Opera and West Side Story and My Fair Lady for the Michigan Opera Theater.
As a teacher, O’Hearn shared his unparalleled expertise with students starting in 1968, when he became a professor for the Studio and Forum of Stage Design in New York. He was there for 20 years, but after a year at IU as a visiting professor in 1988, he decided to make Bloomington his permanent home, becoming the first American-born designer to serve as principal designer for IU Opera Theater.
Jacobs professor and designer David Higgins said, “There is no American theatrical designer more closely associated with the world of opera than Robert O’Hearn. His productions have been the benchmark of excellence both here and abroad. As the history of IU Opera Theater continues to be written, it will no doubt remember him as a key figure in the development of even higher standards of artistic achievement.”
In 2005, O’Hearn received the Robert L. B. Tobin Award for lifetime achievement in theatrical design. His sets and designs will remain in use throughout the country for many years to come.
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