If the Song Doesn't Work, Change the Dress: The Illustrated Memoirs of Broadway Costume Designer Pat

Regular price
£25.00
Sale price
£25.00
Regular price
£25.00
Sold out
Unit price
per 

Author: Zipprodt, Patricia; Wengrow, Arnold

Format: Hardback

Pages: 216

Publication date:

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

For books the EU representative is usually the publisher or authorised agent. Contact details for EU representatives are provided within the book or its packaging. For most titles, this information is provided on the imprint page of the book.

If you have any questions regarding product safety or you need assistance in contacting the authorised EU representative for a book or play you have purchased, please contact us.

Details

Iconic Broadway costume designer Patricia Zipprodt (1925-99) tells her own colorful story from a tumultuous childhood in Depression-era Chicago to Bohemian New York in the 1950s, becoming one of the 20th century's most celebrated designers.

Told with Zipprodt's acerbic humor and delicious wit, 
If the Song Doesn't Work, Change the Dress charts her journey to 1950s Greenwich Village, America's literary and artistic Bohemia. Tracking her career as it plunges into the developing Off-Broadway movement, and charting her personal and professional failures and successes collaborating with the biggest artists of the day - Jerome Robbins, Hal Prince, and Bob Fosse - making her one of the most recognizable, and award-winning, designers of 20th-century theatre.

Published in full color, this illustrated memoir includes pictures from Zipprodt's own archive including sketches, drawings, and photographs of her work from some of the most significant shows of the 20th century, including
 Cabaret, Fiddler on the Roof, Chicago, and Pippin, and her work with such American theatre giants as Jo Mielziner, Irene Sharaff, José Quintero, Boris Aronson, Tony Walton, and Joel Grey, who provides a personal foreword to the memoir. Zipprodt’s posthumous collaborator, theatre design historian Arnold Wengrow provides a vivid epilogue about her final battle with cancer. Drawing from her archive at the New York Public Library and Museum of the Performing Arts, he amplifies her recollections with letters, oral histories, and interviews she gave over the years to offer a portrait of an artist consistently working against the grain.

If the Song Doesn’t Work, Change the Dress will delight readers interested in Broadway, ballet, opera, and the history of costume design. Her lively anecdotes about New York theatre and working in Hollywood provide a rich insight into the life and work of a celebrated female creative giant of American theatre.