Sets, Lights, & Lunacy: A Stage Designer’s Adventures on Broadway and in Opera

Lloyd Burlingame has done stage design for dozens of Broadway and theater shows, adding his singular touch and sense of presentation to all sorts of productions throughout the years. But theater is a collaborative art, and any book about his experiences in theater wouldn’t be complete without anecdotes galore detailing his many run-ins with theater luminaries both famous and infamous.

But Sets, Lights, & Lunacy isn’t simply a collection of Burlingame’s remembrances or an opportunity to namedrop celebrated names and colleagues. It’s also a wonderful handbook for aspiring stage designers, offering hard-earned lessons about the creative process, interacting with crew and talent, finding solutions for unexpected problems or last-minute changes, and dealing with temperaments of all kinds. The author takes us through production on masterpieces and flops alike, presenting textbook examples of overindulgence alongside cases of masterful economy and cleverness.

As you’d expect from a man who once risked a military court-martial to see a Mozart work, Burlingame’s writing is all personality, adding dashes of charm to occasionally dry storytelling. I didn’t laugh out loud, but there were a few choice chuckles to be had.