Broadway: A Man for All Scenes

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Along Broadway he seems to be everywhere. The newlyweds are using his skylit walkup in Barefoot in the Park, and The Odd Couple (see THEATER) has just moved into his drab, cluttered flat. In Luv they are leaping off his bridge; gypsies are dancing in his fortunetelling parlor in Bajour. Sherlock Holmes is struggling with Moriarty on his cliffs of Dover in Baker Street; Ben Franklin is still joyously ascending in his balloon; and Dolly is giving her big hello from his Yonkers streetcar. In all, the seven sets account for more than one-third of the shows on Broadway, and all seven are the work of kinetic, white-haired Oliver Smith, 47.

He is a man for all scenes and the delight of all producers. "Most designers are masters of a single color," notes Producer David Merrick. "So if the basic color of your show is red, you get so-and-so; if it's green, you get somebody else. You can get Smith for anything." He also proves himself happily at home in all genres and periods—from the romantic realism of his squalid bed-sitter in A Taste of Honey to the sculptural expressionism of his revolving turntable for Dylan. He is also uniquely fast (he splashed out 250 watercolor sketches for Hollywood's Oklahoma! in a fortnight), prodigiously productive (eight Broadway openings this season and a lifetime score of some 250 shows), and justly celebrated, with more Tony awards—six—than any other Broadway designer.

Three Fairs in One. Smith confesses to have been stage-struck ever since he saw Carmen at age ten in Buffalo, but he took a roundabout route to Broadway. He studied architecture at Penn State, did a stint as a Roxy usher ("The stage design was hideous"), tried selling mackinaws in Gimbels' basement. He was also a member of the ménage in the Brooklyn Heights town house shared by W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers and Richard Wright. Smith was the dishwasher and furnace man. He also thought he was a painter. His first show, if little else, attracted William Saroyan, who instantly commissioned Smith, then 23, to design his Beautiful People for Broadway.

Smith established himself within a year, mostly doing ballet backdrops, soon added a staff of up to four in the busy season. But they were only mockup builders and draftsmen to turn the Smith brainstorms into blueprints, for Smith has always been his own idea man. His most lasting innovation was the development of mobile scenery: his choreographed ballroom stopped the show in the midst of My Fair Lady. But Smith has never been criticized for scene stealing. He just takes them when they are there for the taking. In a viable writer's show like The Odd Couple, Smith abstemiously designs "a set no one will ever notice." It is primarily in musicals with undernourished books that he lets fly. Prime examples: Camelot, which glittered as if it had been ripped from a medieval Book of Hours, and was called by Critic John McClain "the most beautiful show in the world." Or in Baker Street, whose eyeball-melting panoply was likened by Walter Kerr to "three world's fairs rolled into one."