By Bobbi Owen

Foreword by Tony Walton

$35.00
index, illustrations
112 pages
ISBN: 978-1-933348-00-1

Published by
USITT
in cooperation with
Broadway Press
March 2005

THE DESIGNS OF WILLA KIM presents many signature designs by the costume designer who is widely known for her dance costumes. The illustrations include renderings and production photographs of Sophisticated Ladies, The Will Rogers Follies, and Victor/Victoria. It also highlights numerous ballets choreographed by Eliot Feld with whom she has collaborated over sixty times.

The book starts with Miss Kim’s early years assisting Raoul Pène du Bois on some of the great Broadway musicals of the 1950s including Wonderful Town, Bells Are Ringing, The Music Man, and Gypsy, and follows her career as a designer of costumes for Broadway musicals, and plays, operas, and dance. She is perhaps best known for her marvelous designs for dance (especially with two choreographers, Robert Joffrey and Eliot Feld) and dance-based musicals (including Legs Diamond and Goodtime Charlie). The book contains numerous illustrations, including many of her original designs for The Tempest (San Francisco Ballet), Medusa (Alvin Ailey), A Footstep of Air (Feld Ballet), and Dancin.

Willa Kim is one of America’s most distinguished costume designers, with six Tony Award nominations and two Tony Awards—Sophisticated Ladies in 1981 and The Will Rogers Follies in 1991. Her other awards include two Emmy Awards, an Obie Award, two Drama Desk Awards, the Irene Sharaff Lifetime Achievement Award, 1999, the Patricia Zipprodt Award for Innovative Costume Design, 2003, and the USITT Distinguished Achievement in Costume Design Award, 2005.

In addition to the gorgeous illustrations and the story about Miss Kim's life and career, the book includes a list of the exhibits of her designs and costumes, a list of her awards and nominations, and a chronology of her major designs from 1961 to the present. The foreword is by Tony Walton who worked with Miss Kim on Grease and many other Broadway productions and operas

The author is Professor of Dramatic Art at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of four other books and dozens of articles about theatrical designers.