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This page contains testimonials from some
of Adrianne Lobel’s most dedicated and valued collaborators.

Adrianne emerged into the theater, opera, and dance world of the ‘80s with electrifying energy, intelligence, rigor, hilarity, and unlimited talent. Outrageously imaginative, ferociously smart, and fiercely devoted to exacting research, she was from the beginning driven by a perfectionist ethic of realization, refinement, and her own breathtaking clarity. Her quality of line exemplifies her commitment to truth-telling. An Adrianne Lobel line takes no prisoners. It is sharp, demanding, definitive, disturbing, and impeccable – ideal for high comedy, devastating wit, or for the slitting of wrists. Proportion in Adrianne’s work is both an advanced science and a religion – emotional weight, equilibrium, scrupulous fairness, and the presence of secret harmony within tension, pressure, and heartbreak, quietly signaling the abiding existence of hope. Adrianne is simply a master of color.

Her created worlds pulse and vibrate with blazing contrasts, contradictions, simultaneities, latent feelings, exposed nerves, her layering of color calling out the feelings behind the feelings. All of Adrianne’s explosive brilliance lives and breathes passionately within color fields that survive and speak inside a radiant zone of cool (supremely in her ineffable and unforgettable collaborations with lighting designer James F. Ingalls). The summit and summa of Adrianne’s very particular genius is in the art of storyboarding.Her sketches, renderings, and models are sophisticated and sublime crystallizations and distillations of story, history, transition, transformation, revelation, shock, surprise, and deeply intuited, overwhelmingly understood inevitability. So, in fact, her images, the way they move, and the way they move the viewer, achieve a shimmering distinction that appears rarely in any generation – they become, and have become, remain, and will remain, iconic. Working with Adrianne is one of the highlights of my life. The humor, the intensity, the fresh flow of insights, of freedom, of fun, of fineness, and of love that lives in her work lights up our lives. (PETER SELLERS – Theater Director)

Adrianne and I go way back. Together, we’ve been through a whole catalog of triumphs, canceled projects, re-designs, glamorous opening nights, missed flights, fun dates, relationships, Acts of God, natural and unnatural disasters.
She is a longtime friend with a great brain and a sense of nonsense. Adrianne has provided the settings for some of the most amazing productions I’ve ever witnessed. Her early collaborations with my dear friend Peter Sellars were what lead me to work with her initially and then on a number of projects. As an opera director, it is de rigeur to work with a scenic designer, but much less common for a choreographer to have the luxury of “a set”. Although I work in both dance and opera, I rarely get the chance to produce evening-length, narrative works for my company, the Mark Morris Dance Group. Modern Dance is a far less funded line of work than the world of Grand Opera. Adrianne has a fierce imagination and thinks at scale. She has a magic capacity of creating the stage illusion of just about anything: a bizarre dreamland or a completely convincing interior, in every detail.Every necessity and choice is questioned and examined and solved for the best of the production at hand. Her amazing work for many other directors and theaters is consistently imaginative and surprising. The work that we have done together, including (with Sellars) Nixon in China, L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, Acis and Galatea, Orfeo ed Euridice, Platée, Le Nozze di Figaro, King Arthur, The Hard Nut, has been so important, successful, and lasting. She studies the source materials, asks endless questions, percolates improbable, impossible, ideas and images. Some things work out and some don’t, and like all gifted artists, she re-examines, throws away, modifies, adapts, learns and progresses on each project. Adrianne’s work is always surprising and somehow inevitable. (MARK MORRIS – Director and Choreographer)

I had the pleasure of working with Adrianne Lobel extensively in the 1990s after our first experience when she designed the film I directed Life with Mikey. We followed that experience with a play I also wrote Luck, Pluck, and Virtue at the La Jolla Playhouse. Her wonderful sets were very imaginative and beautifully set the tone for a highly stylized theater piece. Adrianne is expert at designing a set that will excite an audience the minute the curtain goes up. Other works that followed were Twelve Dreams for Lincoln Center Theater, and my collaboration with Stephen Sondheim, Passion and a new adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, both for Broadway. Each of these productions required a unique take that took us from the world of “pop art” to a hyper- realist approach and everything in between. One of Adrianne’s strengths is her ability as an artist to expertly render exacting depictions of the sets from which we could work. No surprises when her designs are eventually built. (JAMES LAPINE – Theater Director)

As a director, collaborating with Adrianne Lobel on a number of productions was a true gift to me. She is one of those rare designers who is able to completely get inside of a piece and make the director’s job more fluid by giving them a palette to create the world of the story.
She, at her heart, is a storyteller and an authority of understanding character and, therefore, everything grows out of these roots, combined with her superb visual style and impeccable taste. She is a hands-on designer, very much what I would call “old school”, who is in the scene shop, and in the paint shop and in the prop shop working with craft people to exactly execute her vision. I am especially proud of everything I have done with Adrianne, whether a Broadway musical or an opera on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. (FRANCESCA ZAMBELLO – Theater Director)

Working with Adrianne Lobel is a Total Joy! Full Stop. Her work is artistically and intellectually rigorous. But it’s not only her keen insight into each piece, her seemingly innate genius at knowing what it should look like, her gorgeous sense of proportion, her ability to abstract to the absolute essentials nor her complete and detailed presentation of the designs. It’s how FUN and FUNNY she is! Filled with smarts, irony and gentle self-deprecation she enhances the process with brilliant bons mots and an ironic world view. We first met in drama school in the late 70s, but started working together in 1983, put together by Peter Sellars who hired us for his production of The Visions of Simone Machard which re-opened the long shuttered La Jolla Playhouse.

I remember a lot of terrific and engaging work, but also wild and immediate fun. Throughout the 80’s we did a lot of wonderful plays with wonderful people, even though many of them weren’t understood as wonderful by the critical establishment. After enduring enough of the blows of wrath from some of the best critics around, Adrianne declared that we should start our own production company: BOMBS R US…After struggling to find the correct word for “no” while working on Nixon In China at the Dutch National Opera (there are several words pronounced similarly – geen, Gein, geine), Adrianne gave up, announcing, “I’m just a girl who can’t say geen!”. You get the idea. It’s a fantastic collaboration: great work, great friendship and a ton of laughs. I am so pleased that several of our efforts have made it into this book. I hope you enjoy them. (JAMES F. INGALLS – Lighting Designer)