TT: Four aces

Gordon Edelstein, the director of Satchmo at the Waldorf, has now nailed down the four key members of the show’s design team. It is, if I do say so myself, a pretty damned impressive lineup:
• Lee Savage, the set designer, is a founding member of Wingspace Theatrical Design. He’s designed shows for Asolo Rep, the Old Globe, the Roundabout Theatre Company, Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, Two River Theater Company, Westport Country Playhouse, Wilma Theater, and the Yale Repertory Theater. His arrestingly stark set for the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s revival of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (pictured above) caught my eye when I reviewed that production for The Wall Street Journal in 2009.
• Ilona Somogyi, the costume designer, is currently represented on Broadway by Clybourne Park. A lecturer in design at the Yale School of Drama, she designed the costumes for Hartford Stage’s productions of The Crucible and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both of which I reviewed enthusiastically in the Journal.
• Stephen Strawbridge, the resident lighting designer of the Yale Repertory Theatre and co-chair of the Yale School of Drama’s design department, has worked on more noteworthy shows than I can list, including Signature Theatre Company’s recent revival of Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot and the off-Broadway premieres of Bernarda Alba, Black Tie, The Glorious Ones, and A Perfect Ganesh. He has also designed nineteen works for Pilobolus Dance Theatre.
• John Gromada, the all-important sound designer and composer of incidental music for Satchmo at the Waldorf, did the honors for six shows that opened on Broadway this past season: The Best Man, Clybourne Park, The Columnist, Man and Boy, The Road to Mecca, and Seminar. He also scored Michael Wilson’s landmark production of Horton Foote’s Orphans’ Home Cycle, which opened at Hartford Stage, then transferred to New York’s Signature Theatre Company.
I am immensely proud to be working with them all.
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Ilona Somogyi talks about her costumes for Hartford Stage’s 2008 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Part of a recording session for John Gromada’s Orphans’ Home Cycle score: