Desmond Heeley papers, 1884-2018, bulk 1946-2016

Creator:

Abstract:

Three-time Tony-award winner Desmond Heeley (1931-2016) was a British-American costume and set designer who worked primarily in theater, ballet, and opera. His productions have graced the stages of major theaters in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia, and Europe, including the Royal Opera House, the Metropolitan Opera, Houston Ballet, the National Ballet of Canada, Australian Ballet, and the Stratford Festival in Ontario. This collection contains Heeley's sketches and designs, along with production documents, photographs, correspondence, audio recordings, and other memorabilia relating to his life and work.

Extent:

32 Linear Feet 62 boxes (52 document boxes, 5 flat boxes, 2 tall document boxes, 1 paige box, 2 tube boxes), 2 folders in a mapcase

Language:

The collection is primarily in English, with a small number of items (mostly newspaper clippings and correspondence) in German, Greek, and Danish.

Scope and content:

This collection comprises a range of personal and professional material, spanning the full length of Heeley's theatrical career. His creative process is documented through numerous labeled and unlabeled sketches (encompassing various theatrical productions), along with loose pieces from Heeley's set models. Many sketches are arranged into "production bibles," grouped together with fabric samples, design notes, and logistical documents.

A significant number of (mostly unlabeled) photographs - in the form of slides, negatives, contact sheets, prints, and tintypes - provide a visual record of key aspects of Heeley's life: set construction, costume fittings, his designs, his architectural inspirations, his travels, his doll collection, his social engagements, and his cats.

A large portion of this collection is devoted to Heeley's personal correspondence, including cards, letters, and faxes from various friends and colleagues. His correspondence with the theater designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch, who also worked at the Stratford Festival, is kept separately, along with other memorabilia relating to her career. Likewise, personal communications with Heeley's partner, Lance Mulcahy, have been kept with other material relating to Mulcahy's life and work.

This collection houses assorted administrative and professional documents, including Heeley's notebooks and scrapbooks and a small amount of professional correspondence. It also contains souvenir programs and newspaper clippings (of reviews, interviews, profiles, etc.) relating to his production designs. Finally, the collection contains several audio recordings - mostly of music composed by Lance Mulcahy - on audiocassettes, compact disks, and reel-to-reel tapes.

Biographical / historical:

Desmond Heeley (1931-2016) was a Tony-award-winning set and costume designer for theater, ballet, and opera. Heeley, a British national, lived much of his life in New York City; however, his career was truly international, spanning three continents and lasting over six decades.

Born in Staffordshire, England, Heeley began his career as a workshop apprentice at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1947, where he gained the attention of the director Peter Brooks, whose support helped to launch Heeley's design career. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Heeley worked mostly in England, designing productions for the Sadler's Wells Theatre, the Old Vic, the Glyndebourne Festival, and the Royal Opera House (including the premiere of Benjamin Britten's ballet The Prince of the Pagodas).

In 1957, Heeley's work at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre landed him a job at the recently founded Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada - then managed by Heeley's long-time collaborator, director Michael Langham. That year, Heeley's production of Hamlet inaugurated Stratford's newly built auditorium, marking the start of Heeley's long and fruitful association with the Festival: he would go on to produce forty different productions for the Festival, culminating in his 2009 production of The Importance of Being Earnest, which earned him his third Tony Award when it transferred to Broadway in 2011.

Heeley won his first two Tony Awards for the same production - the premiere of Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - which was awarded for both set and costume design after it transferred to Broadway in 1967. Heeley designed a number of Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, including the acclaimed 1981 Broadway revival of Camelot. Two of Heeley's Broadway productions (Teibele and Her Demon and Cyrano) were transfers from the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, for whom Heeley designed several productions.

Heeley's ballet productions achieved a particularly global reach, having been performed by the American Ballet Theater, the Houston Ballet, the Australian Ballet, the National Ballet of Canada, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the Stuttgart Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, and the Deutsche Oper Berlin. His 1975 production of the ballet adaptation of Léhar's The Merry Widow has received a number of revivals, including a high-profile New York run starring Margot Fonteyn. Heeley's work has appeared in some of America's most prominent opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Diego Opera, and New York City Opera, for whom he designed revivals of the musicals South Pacific and Brigadoon.

Heeley passed away in New York City at age 85 on June 10, 2016. His partner, the Australian-born composer Lance Mulcahy, died in 1995. Heeley's designs were at once unabashedly glamorous and painstakingly veristic: he became known for crafting opulent renderings of historical settings on a low budget, using everyday materials to capture the visual intricacies of the period.

Acquisition information:

Gift of Philip Caggiano, July 2023.

Custodial history:

Following Heeley's passing in 2016, these materials were collected from the designer's New York residence by Philip Caggiano, who then donated them to the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Processing information:

This collection was processed by Callum Blackmore (GSAS, 2024). Finding aid written by Callum Blackmore in November 2023.

Generally, materials have been rehoused in the order in which they were donated. However, some interventions have been undertaken in order to aid access and preservation. For example, Heeley's sketches were generally kept in loose piles, often set apart from the folders which originally housed them: in these instances, sketches that obviously once belonged to the same grouping (by dint of their labeling, style, or materials) have been foldered together.

In some cases, Heeley's annotations suggested a correlation between sketches (i.e., sketches in a similar style labeled "Prospero," "Miranda," and "Ferdinand" were likely produced for a production of Shakespeare's The Tempest). However, Heeley's career spanned over six decades, and he was inevitably hired to produce designs for different productions of the same work (for example, Heeley designed productions of The Tempest for the Stratford Festival in 1962 and 1982). Thus, sketches that merely relate to the same work (and not necessarily to the same production) have not been removed from their donated order (unless they clearly derived from the same production or were found in obvious proximity to each other).

Heeley's press clippings in Series III, which were originally piled loosely in boxes, have been generally reorganized thematically - by theater or by production.

Prior to processing, Heeley's sketches (Series I) were generally stored loose and piled into paige cartons. These have been rehoused in document boxes or flat boxes. The larger sketches, many of which had been folded for storage, have been rehoused in oversize boxes and mapcases. Heeley's "production bibles" have been removed from their original ring binders and organized into folders, with the original page order maintained.

Heeley's slides, which were generally stored in plastic containers, have been organized into plastic slide sheets and then into folders - their original order largely maintained. Heeley's negatives, which were generally stored in envelopes, have also been rehoused in folders; however, some envelopes of negatives have been stored in boxes, described as individual items.

Letters, cards, and photographs have generally been stored alongside the envelopes that they were sent in. However, Heeley kept some envelopes (or parts of envelopes) aside to serve as his address book, and these have been stored separately and can be found in Series II. Other materials included in correspondence (such as photographs, clippings, poetry, etc.) have been kept with the letters that they were attached to; however, some biological materials (pressed flower petals) have been deaccessioned.

There are a number of audiocassettes, compact disks, and open-reel tapes which have been set aside for digitization. These materials can be found in box 51.

Series I contains a number of fabric samples used by Heeley in planning his designs. These fabric samples were often affixed to his sketches using sharp metal pins, which, if left intact, would hinder the preservation of these designs. These fabric samples were unpinned from the sketches that they were attached to, placed into an envelope, and re-affixed to the same designs using plastic clips. Generally, the location of these clips on the paper - along with the groupings of fabrics within the envelopes - reflects the original layout of the pinned samples on the design.

Generally, Heeley's original folder or item labels have been maintained in the container list, with a few alterations to aid accessibility. This is especially true for item-level description of the photographs in Series V and the audio-visual materials in Subseries IV.2: the labels for these materials have been fully transcribed in the container list. Notably, initialized play titles were written out in full where appropriate (for example, "H.V." was changed to "Henry V," as this label appears to refer to the Shakespeare play). Numbers in play titles have generally been written out, unless they are roman numerals (for example, "12th Night" was rewritten as "Twelfth Night"). In general, other abbreviations of play titles have not been expanded, in order to avoid labeling errors (i.e., "Merchant" could feasibly refer to Shakepeare's The Merchant of Venice, but it could also refer to Shylock the character, a merchant character from a different play altogether, or a real-life merchant with whom Heeley had business; therefore, it would be inappropriate to tacitly expand this label to "The Merchant of Venice"). Some spelling errors were tacitly corrected (i.e., "Julius Ceasar" was adjusted to "Julius Caesar").

Several boxes of financial documents and a few folders of medical records were deaccessioned for privacy reasons. Heeley's set models remain unprocessed. They were originally stored loosely in boxes, occasionally grouped in plastic bags: these have been temporarily rehoused in new boxes to avoid damage, but a more permanent housing system is yet to be devised. Many set model pieces are in poor condition: torn, bent, unglued, or deteriorating due to wear and tear. Others are very delicate and may be damaged if they are crushed or moved around in transportation. The set model components come in a range of sizes: larger model pieces are generally bulky and three-dimensional, which could make storage difficult. Others are very small, and could easily be lost or damaged. Two-dimensional set pieces (such as designs for stage flats or prosceniums) have been stored in folders where foldering would not disrupt the donated ordering.

Arrangement:

This collection is arranged into six series and three subseries. Series I documents Heeley's design process through sketches, notes, scrapbooks, and fabric samples relating to a range of theater, opera, and ballet productions. Series II comprises administrative documents and professional correspondence relating to Heeley's design activities. Series III contains memorabilia relating to theater, opera, and ballet productions that Heeley worked on, consisting mainly of review clippings and souvenir programs. Series IV contains personal memorabilia: Subseries IV.1 and IV.2 contain memorabilia relating to Heeley's relationships with Tanya Moiseiwitsch and Lance Mulcahy respectively; Subseries IV.3 primarily comprises his personal correspondence. Series V contains Heeley's photographs, which document the full breadth of his personal and professional activities.

Although this collection was originally compiled by Heeley himself, it had to be reassembled in the wake of his passing, collated for donation amid the dismantling of the designer's estate. The immediate preservation of these materials was a complex and exigent process and required significant intervention on the part of the donor. As such, portions of this collection were reorganized by the donor prior to accessioning. Thus, the original order of the collection creator has not necessarily been preserved. There are some items in the collection that date from after Heeley's passing, usually mixed in with items collected during his lifetime. There are also some notes and inventories that were produced by the donor - generally regarding their sorting of the collection. These have been preserved in the collection wherever practical.

The boxes donated to the RBML were largely organized by format, with the exception of two boxes: one relating to Heeley's relationship with Tanya Moiseiwitsch and the other relating to his relationship with Lance Mulcahy. These groupings were largely maintained in processing, with minimal reorganization undertaken by the archivist in order to minimize further intervention in the collection's ordering. Thus, the collection's six series reflect the order of materials as they were donated: although the original ordering is lost, the minimization of further intervention may be useful to researchers seeking to make inferences about the original order. The audio recordings (which were donated in a separate box) have been housed in Subseries IV.2, as these appear to largely contain recordings of music by Lance Mulcahy and were labeled as such by the donor. Researchers looking for material on a specific production or company would be best served by running a word search on the container list. Heeley did not always record the full titles of works or companies in his labeling of the collection. And because Heeley's own folder or item labels have been preserved in the finding aid, it is often best to search for individual words in a play's name, rather than the full title (i.e., "Julius" or "Caesar" rather than "Julius Caesar," "Stratford," "Shakespeare," or "Festival" rather than "Stratford Shakespeare Festival," etc.).

Series I is generally arranged by production; however, there are some folders that contain sketches from multiple productions, often interspersed with assorted unlabeled and unidentified sketches. In Series II, Heeley's appointment books and planners are arranged chronologically, while other documents are arranged by subject or by format. Series III is arranged according to genre, with opera, ballet, and theater materials foldered separately; in some cases, materials relating to specific venues (i.e., the Guthrie Theater, the Stratford Festival) or productions (i.e., The Merry Widow, The Importance of Being Earnest) have also been separated. Series VI and its subseries are largely arranged according to format. The correspondence in Series VI originally took a variety of organizational patterns, which have been maintained in the current arrangement: some boxes of correspondence were arranged by correspondent, some were arranged by subject, some were arranged by format (with greeting cards, postcards, and letters stored separately), and some contained an assortment of correspondents, dates, subjects, and formats. Series V is arranged by format and then by activity, with photographs of similar subjects generally grouped together unless doing so would greatly compromise the original order; thus, many folders contain a range of photographs on a variety of themes. Series VI reflects the original ordering wherever possible; however, some materials have had to be separated to aid preservation and storage. Although most model pieces are unlabeled, some have been arranged according to production.

All of the audio-visual material in this collection has been grouped into Subseries IV.2: the box of audio recordings was surveyed prior to donation as the "Desmond Heeley and Lance Mulcahy Audio Recordings," and most recordings appear to document Mulcahy's musical career. However, there may be some audio recordings in this series that do not directly relate to Lance Mulcahy or his compositions.

Accruals:

Additions are expected from the donor.

Rules or conventions:

Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Separated material:

Audiovisual materials (Subseries IV.2, box 51) have been set aside for digitization.

Access and use

Restrictions:

This collection has no restrictions.

All original copies of audio / moving image media are closed until reformatting. Please email rbml@columbia.edu for more information.

This collection is located on-site.

Terms of access:

Single reproductions may be made for research purposes. It is the responsibility of the user to secure permission for publication or use from the appropriate copyright holder.

Preferred citation:: Identification of specific item; Date (if known); Desmond Heeley Collection; Box and Folder; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

Location of this collection:: Rare Book & Manuscript Library

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