Humming the Sets

By RICHARD CORLISS

Aladdin couldn't have found a more magical carpet than the one painted on the stage of the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Manhattan's Lincoln Center. Rich, rosy and speckled with peacocks, it stretches back for what seems like miles--into the past, into the fantastic topography of Shakespeare's Illyria, into a delicious dreamworld. A last perfect touch: the carpet is flanked by two small pools, suitable for bathing and wallowing, where villains can be dunked and lovers share a kiss. The set is the playgoer's first cue to enchantment; before a word is spoken in this rapturous revival of Twelfth Night, designer Bob Crowley has alerted you to expect wonders. He has already provided one of his own.

Helen Hunt, garlanded with Oscars and Emmys, plays Viola in Nicholas Hytner's production; but the show's real star is Crowley. He has joined the short list of masters in a fertile era for stage designers. Such wizards of pencil and paint as Tony Walton (Guys and Dolls), Robin Wagner (Crazy for You), John Napier (Cats) and Heidi Ettinger (The Secret Garden) create unique worlds from a playwright's words and a director's hopes. When you leave a show "humming the sets," these are the folks to thank for those sumptuous visual melodies.

Just now Crowley, 45, is the Gershwin of designers. With his 1987 Broadway debut, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (all those elegant, suffocating drapes!), and 1994's Tony-winning Carousel (a small town in idyllic greens and blues), the kid from Cork, Ireland, showed the breadth and iridescence of his gifts. This year he had three new Broadway shows: Twelfth Night, the Oscar Wilde bio-play The Judas Kiss and Paul Simon's The Capeman. Amid the rubble of Capeman's reviews, Crowley earned praise for his expressionistic perspectives of uptown tenements and upstate jails. He is now at work on four projects, including Hytner's film of the show Chicago (with Madonna and Goldie Hawn); a London revival of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, directed by Crowley's younger brother John; and a Disney stage musical loosely based on The Invisible Man. There's a Bob boom on: he is the guy everyone has to have.

Hytner, the first of this generation of Brit boy-wonder directors, says he wouldn't have done Carousel or Twelfth Night without Crowley. "Bob's aesthetic is mine as well: that a theater world should be poetic, a world of the imagination; that it should be hospitable to actors; that it should be bold in the use of colors." That would account for the glorious pools, and the pathways that slide together at the end to bring the lovers together. As Hytner says, "We are also both totally shameless about feeling that now and then you have to give the audience a visual lift, a visual thrill."

Crowley the thrillmaker is modest in describing his calling: "I don't think I have a process," he says. "It's thinking on your feet differently for each show, moving forward rather than looking backwards. What I try not to do is repeat myself, because I get bored very quickly."

For Twelfth Night, Crowley and Hytner visited the Asian galleries at museums in New York City and London; they studied Japanese watercolors. Since the production was to run for only 10 warm-weather weeks, they decided to give New York a lovely present: a midsummer, Mideastern night's dream. "We said, 'Let's make a great place to go on a hot evening,'" he recalls, "a space with seductive sights and sounds and smells, where you could suspend your disbelief and go with this fantastical tale. It'd be there for just a couple of months--and then evaporate!"

The flashing, frustrating magic of theater is that it does evaporate on closing night. Fortunately, PBS will air the show's final performance live on Aug. 30. On that Twelfth Night, viewers everywhere will be able to take one of Bob Crowley's magic carpet rides.

--Reported by William Tynan/New York

With reporting by William Tynan/New York