‘Lives Lived and Lost’

Your tribute to Hugh Hardy ’54 *56 (“Lives Lived and Lost,” Feb. 7), including the whimsical cover photo, left, captured Hugh’s brilliance but overlooked his work on the stages of Murray and McCarter, where he designed productions of Theatre Intime and Triangle, as well as the summer University Players of 1953, led by his comparably brilliant stagemate, Chiz Schultz ’54. I was privileged to help build many of Hugh’s stage sets and remember those long hours, stretching sometimes to dawn, as some of the best times I spent at Princeton, occasionally when Hugh, after a Triangle rehearsal, would sit at the piano and give a plausible rendition of Noel Coward.

Touring with Triangle’s 1952 show, Ham ’n Legs, one of the four union stagehands who traveled on the train with us remarked that he had toured with the Metropolitan Opera and Broadway shows and that we had more stage settings and equipment than the touring company of Oklahoma!. It was all designed by Hugh to be carried in a balloon-top boxcar in one-night stands from Princeton to Chicago and cities in between.

Back in Murray and McCarter, Hugh nurtured the theatrical gift that later suffused his architecture.