Lloyd Burlingame Among 2012 TDF/Irene Sharaff Award Winners

Two-time Tony Award nominated costume designer Carrie Robbins, and scenic, lighting, costume designer, and educator Lloyd Burlingame are among the 2012 TDF/Irene Sharaff Awards recipients. The awards will be presented at a ceremony on Friday, May 4, at 6:30pm, at the Hudson Theatre (145 West 44th Street). Robbins was selected to receive the 2012 TDF/Irene Sharaff Lifetime Achievement Award for costume design, and Burlingame will receive the Robert L.B. Tobin Award for Sustained Excellence in Theatrical Design.

Additionally, costume designer Mathew LeFebvre will receive the TDF/Irene Sharaff Young Master Award, and famed author and designer Lynn Pecktal, will receive the TDF/Irene Sharaff Artisan Award.

During the ceremony, as a special memorial tribute to legendary designers, the husband and wife team of William and Jean Eckart, there will be a screening of an original 15-minute film on their lives, created by designer, Suzy Benzinger.

TDF/Irene Sharaff Awards were selected by the TDF Costume Collection's advisory committee and are presented through Theatre Development Fund's Costume Collection.

Throughout her long and distinguished career, elegance and an attention to detail were the trademarks of costume designer, Irene Scharaff. She was revered as a designer of enormous depth and intelligence, equally secure with both contemporary and period costumes. Scharaff's work exemplified the best of costume design. Such excellence is demonstrated by the winners of the 2012 TDF/Irene Sharaff awardees.

About the awardees:

Carrie Robbins (TDF/Irene Sharaff Lifetime Achievement Award). In a career spanning over 40 years as a costume designer, Robbins has designed the costumes for over 30 Broadway productions and received Tony Award nominations for her work on Grease and Over Here! Her other Broadway productions include Irving Berlin's White Christmas, A Class Act, The Shadow Box (revival 1994), Agnes of God, Yentl, Octette Bridgeclub, Sweet Bird of Youth, The First, Frankenstein, Happy End, Boys of Winter, Cyrano and Secret Affairs of Mildred Wilde, among others. She has designed many shows for Lincoln Center Rep, Chelsea Theatre Center, Acting Co., and New York Shakespeare Festival. Regional credits include: M. Butterfly (Arena Stage), Tempest (FIT Surface Design Award), and A Flea in Her Ear (LA Dramalogue Award) for the Mark Taper Forum; The Guthrie; Williamstown; Berkshire Theatre; Paper Mill; Seattle Rep; and others. Her opera credits include Death in Venice for Glimmerglass ('08 Prague International Design Exhibit), Samson et Dalila (SF Opera), Houston Grand Opera, Sarah Caldwell's Opera Co. of Boston, and Hamburg Staatsoper. Film and television credits include In the Spirit, Saturday Night Live and PBS' Arts-in-America.

Known for her drawing ability, Robbins' work is featured in the Time-Life Series Collectibles (between Telephones and Trivets). She has been profiled in: Costume Design, Techniques of Modern Masters (Pecktal, Watson-Guptil), Contemporary Designers (Editor: Colin Naylor, St. James Press, London) and LPTW/CUNY-TV's Women in Theatre Series.

In addition to her two Tony Award nominations she has received five Drama Desk Awards, a Maharam Award, and two juried international awards. Other design work includes illustrations for children's books on Mozart and uniforms for The Rainbow Room and Windows on the World.

Lloyd Burlingame (Robert L. B. Tobin Award for Sustained Excellence in Theatrical Design). A scenery, lighting, and costume designer and educator, Mr. Burlingame designed his first summer stock set at age 12 and at age 25 designed first Broadway musical (scenic and lighting design), an out of town flop, Lionel Bart's Lock Up Your Daughters. His first show Off-Broadway, Leave it to Jane, a Jerome Kern musical (scenic design), was a hit and ran two plus years. His favorite Off-Broadway production, Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (scenic design), was designed simultaneously with a season of plays for APA (Association of Producing Artists), the brain child of director/actor Ellis Rabb. Burlingame designed scenery, lighting, and costumes for five productions for them. He then provided all three design functions on Broadway for Philadelphia, Here I Come! For producer David Merrick, he designed a total of 13 plays on Broadway, not to mention serving as chief scenic and lighting assistant on three major musicals for that same producer.

Mozart operas were the true love of his life, and he designed eight productions of that genius's works, the bulk of them for Maestro George Schick at the Manhattan School of Music's John Brownlee Opera Theatre. He also had the privilege of designing a combination of scenery, lights, and/or costumes for major opera companies: new productions for divas Joan Sutherland in Boston; Leontyne Price in San Francisco; Beverly Sills, also in Boston; and Martina Arroyo in Cincinnati.

Ten years into his New York career, opportunity knocked, offering the chance to redesign the NYU School of the Arts fledgling design department. With colleagues Oliver Smith and Fred Voelpel he created a school to nourish the individual talents of young designers by exposing them to a wide variety of design teachers -- all working professionals.

After more than twenty years of busily designing on Broadway, Off-Broadway, regionally, and in opera, he turned all the design skills he had learned into coping with the gradual loss of almost all of his vision. As his sight went "down on dimmer," he turned to painting very large canvases and designing huge fabric collages, and he had a major one man show at the Wadsworth Athaeneum in Hartford. It was touchable art and the show was called "Once More with Feeling." He has written two books, a theatre memoir: Sets, Lights, and Lunacy: A Stage Designer's Adventures on Broadway and in Opera and Two Seeing Eye Dogs Take Manhattan: A Love Story. He has been the recipient of two Fulbright research grants for study abroad and has been awarded emeritus status as well as the "Distinguished Teaching Medal" by New York University.

Michael LeFebvre (TDF/Irene Sharaff Young Master Award) has been designing costumes for theatrical productions since 1987. He was born and raised in Minnesota. Although performing was his first love, he made a transition to design while in college. He studied costume design for a year at UC Irvine, but eventually received his MFA from The University of Minnesota.

New York credits include Two Trains Running for Signature Theatre, Bach at Leipzig for New York Theatre Workshop, and The Spy and Romeo and Juliet for the Acting Company. A member of United Scenic Artists Local 829, LeFebvre is a Professor of Costume Design and the current Director of Theatre at the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Lynn Pecktal (TDF/Irene Sharaff Artisan Award) is the author of three acclaimed books: Designing and Painting for the Theatre, Designing and Drawing for the Theatre, and Costume Design: Techniques of Modern Masters. He began designing scenery professionally at Robert Virginia's Porterfield's Barter Theatre while still an undergraduate at Emory & Henry College. He did graduate work in stage design at the Yale School of Drama. He taught stage design at Carnegie Mellon University, and the North Carolina School of the Arts, and he has lectured at a number of universities. Shows for which Pecktal has designed the settings include the Sound and Light Show at the Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.; Lucia di Lammermoor in Santiago, Chile; Don Pasquale and Naughty Marietta for the Cleveland Opera Company; and The Music Man for the Jones Beach Theatre on Long Island. Pecktal's costumes were featured in the world premiere of Tennessee Williams's Tiger Tail at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta.

Pecktal won a Maharam Award for supervising Edward Gorey's scen¬ery for Dracula on Broadway, an assignment he repeated in London's West End, Australia, Mexico and elsewhere. Other Broadway supervising credits include Home, Bosoms and Neglect, The Crucifer of Blood (also London and LA), Harold and Maude and Gorey Stories. He was awarded a place on Barter Theatre's "Walk of Fame" for being the scenic designer for over 100 shows there. Currently, Pecktal is writing other books: Fashions for the Feet, Costumes Two, and Scenic Designers.

William and Jean Eckart (Memorial Tribute) were a husband-and-wife team of theatre designers in the 1950s and '60s. They designed sets, costumes, and lighting for dozens of productions. The Eckarts' Broadway career was relatively brief but prolific. Between 1951 and 1970, they designed the sets and/or lighting and costumes for 34 Broadway shows, three of which started Off-Broadway, as well as seven other Off-Broadway shows and five shows that started rehearsals for Broadway but never opened there (including two legendary titles, Reuben Reuben and A Mother's Kisses). For 16 of their Broadway shows, they also designed the lighting; for four, they also designed the costumes.

In addition, they designed several major regional productions and tours, three films (The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, and The Night They Raided Minsky's) and several television productions, including the sets and costumes for Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella. They produced Once Upon a Mattress, as well as designing its sets and costumes. Some of the other famous Broadway shows they designed: The Golden Apple; Damn Yankees; Flora, The Red Menace; Mame; Fade Out-Fade In; Hallelujah, Baby!; Anyone Can Whistle; Li'l Abner; Never Too Late; She Loves Me; and Oh, Dad, Poor Dad.

They later taught at Southern Methodist University when they ended their design careers. William Eckart was born October 21, 1920 and died on January 24, 2000, aged 79. Jean Eckart was born on August 18, 1921, and died on September 6, 1993, aged 72.

The awardees were selected by the TDF/Costume Collection's advisory committee, which is comprised of leading members of the theatrical costume design community. They are: Kitty Leech, chair; Gregg Barnes, Suzy Benzinger, Dean Brown, Stephen Cabral, Linda Fisher, Lana Fritz, Rodney Gordon, Desmond Heeley, Allen Lee Hughes, Holly Hynes, Carolyn Kostopoulos, Anna Louizos, Mimi Maxmen, David Murin, Sally Ann Parsons, Robert Perdziola, Gregory Poplyk, Carrie Robbins, Tony Walton, Patrick Wiley, and David Zinn.

Theatre Development Fund (TDF), which recently received a 2011 Mayor's Award for Arts and Culture, is the largest nonprofit performing arts service organization in the United States, returning over $130 million to hundreds of productions annually through a variety of programs. It is dedicated to developing diverse audiences for live theatre and dance and strengthening the performing arts community in New York City. Created in 1968, TDF's programs have provided over 80 million people with access to performances at affordable prices. Best known for its TKTS Discount Booths, TDF's membership, outreach, access, and education programs -- as well as its costume collection -- help to make the unique experience of theatre available to everyone.