SETPIECE Independent critical review Skip to content Issue 07 / 26

Award record

1984-1985 award record

Categories
4
Honoured
4
Nominated
19

4 awards were given across 4 categories, chosen from 19 nominated entries listed below. The entries have been checked line by line against published records.

Four craft categories, and the design awards split three ways across three different productions. Big River took two of the four, the only production that season to win more than once here.

Nineteen further names were shortlisted across the same four headings, roughly five nominees per award — a ratio that stays fairly steady through the 1980s. Sound design was still the newest craft on the list, added five seasons earlier.

Big River, which took two of the season's four craft awards, opened on 25 April 1985 at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. It sets Mark Twain's 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to music and lyrics by Roger Miller, and won seven Tony Awards including Best Musical.

The two awards it takes on this page are for Heidi Ettinger's set and Richard Riddell's lighting — a river and a raft being, in practice, a lighting problem as much as a scenic one.

The other two awards went outside Big River entirely: Alexander Reid took costume design for Much Ado About Nothing, and John DiFusco took sound design for Tracers. It is only the third season in which sound design appears as a heading at all.

The one name on the page the record picks up again is Heidi Ettinger's — she returns in three later seasons, in 1990-91, 1992-93 and 2000-01.

Sources: Big River

A bare stage photographed from the deck, with an overhead lighting rig throwing coloured beams down through haze and a scaffolding tower standing at the right.
A rig loaded over a bare stage — the decade the craft categories settled. Photographs on these record pages illustrate the period; they do not depict the productions listed.

Outstanding Costume Design

Winner

  • Alexander Reid Much Ado About Nothing

Also nominated

  • Ann Roth Design for Living
  • Carrie Robbins The Octette Bridge Club
  • Patricia McGourty Big River
  • Rita Ryack Digby
  • Robert Morgan The Loves of Anatol

Outstanding Lighting Design

Winner

  • Richard Riddell Big River

Also nominated

  • Jennifer Tipton Whoopi Goldberg
  • Ken Billington Grind
  • Kevin Rigdon Balm in Gilead
  • Ron Wallace Requiem for a Heavyweight
  • Terry Wuthrich Tracers

Outstanding Set Design

Winner

  • Heidi Ettinger Big River

Also nominated

  • Clarke Dunham Grind
  • James Leonard Joy Digby
  • John Lee Beatty The Octette Bridge Club
  • Kevin Rigdon Balm in Gilead
  • Marjorie Bradley Kellogg Requiem for a Heavyweight
  • Ralph Koltai Much Ado About Nothing

Outstanding Sound Design

Winner

  • John DiFusco Tracers

Also nominated

  • John Malkovich Balm in Gilead
  • Much Ado About Nothing
  • Nigel Hess Cyrano de Bergerac

Outstanding Lighting Design is one of 3 design and art-direction headings carried this season. How the design categories developed →

Who else on this page appears elsewhere in the record

13 of the 22 names on this page appear in at least one other season held here. Reading a person as a run rather than a single entry is the point of an index like this one. A designer's work shows up under two or three different category names as the headings were renamed.

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