Among the nine Syracuse University alumni who were nominated for Tony Awards on June 12, alumnus David Rockwell was one of three who came home with an award in hand.

Rockwell, who graduated from SU’s School of Architecture in 1979, received his first Tony Award for Best Scenic Design of a Musical for his work on the Broadway revival of “She Loves Me.” He runs his own architecture and design firm, The Rockwell Group, which he opened in 1984, just five years after graduating college. The firm works on design projects such as hotels, exhibits, restaurants and stage sets.

The Daily Orange spoke with Rockwell about his overlapping interest between architecture and theater, and his work on “She Loves Me.”

The Daily Orange: You majored in architecture, but what led to your involvement in theater and stage design?

David Rockwell: I’d always been interested in theater as well as architecture. Probably my earliest interest is based on my mom’s participation in community theater in New Jersey. It was a total community engagement every summer, as well as growing up. We moved to Mexico when I was 12 and in many ways my interest in theater transformed into an interest in urban space and public theater and plazas — that kind of theater of everyday life in Mexico was just fantastic. So that became kind of like my primary interest. I then started to understand how there might be some kind of intersection between the two.

The D.O.: It sounds like your interest in theater is really rooted in your family.

D.R.: Yeah, my first day in New York when I was 12 with my family — we walked around the city and I was blown away by the kind of excitement on the streets and in Times Square. We went to lunch at a restaurant called Schrafft’s, and then I went to my first Broadway show (“Fiddler on the Roof”), and in many ways those multiple experiences were seared into my memory as places that a community around design: public spaces, theater, restaurants. It’s only in the rearview mirror that you can start to see how things make sense. … I started to see that the tunnel of what I was most interested in was how design creates opportunities for people to connect as a community around storytelling.

Courtesy of Rockwell Group

The D.O.: How did your theater career grow from your architecture experience at Syracuse?

D.R.: Well I went to Syracuse, and the architecture school was very willing to let me indulge in research in all of the pieces that I thought overlapped between theater and architecture. In fact, it was there while I was doing research on a project that I started reaching out to people in the theater community in New York. I actually took off a semester and worked for a Broadway lighting designer as an assistant to get some experience as to what that was like, and then started a career in New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s, working for other people.

In 1984 I launched my own studio, and for the first 10 or 15 years of the practice, which is now 32 years old, I looked at how theater infuses architecture. … Now unbelievably it’s my 20th Broadway show and that 20th Broadway show is the one that got the Tony.

Courtesy of Rockwell Group

The D.O.: What was it like to create a set inspired by 1930’s Budapest as well as to make sure it fit together with the show’s musical composition?

D.R.: The director, Scott Ellis, who I’ve worked with many times before, is a fantastic collaborator. I started out, as we do on every project, with lots of research around art nouveau as a style, which bridged the more academic, 19th-century historical style, with a more 20th-century modernism. So we looked at art nouveau and fluid dynamic, undulating flowing lines, bursts of color. We looked at Budapest, which I had been to, and then we talked about story, which is about the human need to love and be loved. … The set actually becomes a character in the show, and dances and moves with people moving around.

The D.O.: Did you run into any challenges or difficulties while designing the set?

D.R.: Challenges, I think, lead to great opportunities. There’s no wing space in the theater at Studio 54 — there’s not really any offstage areas left and right — and we solved that by having all the pieces move in circular motions from the sides in. We also wanted all the transitions to be musical. We looked early use of elaborate stagecraft, and then developed mechanisms where it could open up in 17 seconds.

Published on June 29, 2016 at 10:31 am

Contact Clare: clramire@syr.edu