Carrie Robbins, whose more than 30 years as a Broadway costume designer saw her involvement in 1972’s Grease, for which she contributed the production’s signature poodle skirts, and the nuns’ habits of 1983’s Agnes of God, died following a brief illness with Covid on Friday, April 12, at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. She was 81.
Her death was announced by her friend Daniel Neiden.
Robbin’s Broadway career began somewhat inauspiciously with Leda and the Little Swan, a play that closed on Broadway before its scheduled opening at the Cort Theatre in 1968. Written by Amber Gascoigne and dealing with sex between generations of one family, Leda was called by William Goldman in his classic theater book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway “the hardest show of the season to sit through.”
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Robbins rebounded quickly on Broadway with a revival of You Can’t Take It With You the following year, and, in 1970, The Good Woman of Setzuan.
Her major break came in ’72 with Grease, which ran for eight years. A long stream of Broadway productions would follow: The Plough and the Stars, The Iceman Cometh, The Beggar’s Opera, The Crucible, Macbeth, An Enemy of the People, The Time of Your Life, Yentl, The Boys of Winter and The Shadow Box, among others. She designed costumes for the production of Brecht’s Happy End that introduced a young, singing Meryl Streep,
On London’s West End, she designed costumes for Sweet Bird of Youth starring Lauren Bacall, and Off-Broadway for Cyrano with Frank Langella.
Robbins was twice nominated for the Tony Award (Grease and 1974’s Over Here!), and received four Drama Desk Awards. She received the Irene Sharaf Award for Sustained Excellence in 2012, an honor bestowed by the Theatre Development Fund. She was a member of the League of Professional Theatre Women and received its Ruth Morley Award “because of her brilliant costume designs, and we loved her as a sister for her warmth and her support of women in theatre,” said past president Shellen Lubin.
Born in Baltimore on February 7, 1943, Carrie Fishbein Robbins was a graduate of Yale School of Drama, a Master Teacher of Costume Design at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and author of The Designs of Carrie Robbins, published by Samuel French. At the time of her death, she was writing a new play about her perspective as a costume designer, to be titled Fly on the Wall.
Robbins also designed the costumes for the 1985-86 season of NBC’s Saturday Night Live.
Among her other endeavors, Robbins turned to puppet-making in recent years, using life-size child puppets to depict the story For the List Children of Paris about French-Jewish children who were captured and taken to Auschwitz. Her designs for opera include Death in Venice for Glimmerglass and Samson Et Dalila for San Francisco and Houston Grand Opera. She designed, as well, for Lincoln Center, Acting Company and New York Shakespeare Festival. She co-curated an exhibit of designs by women for the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center in 2008-09.
A service will be held at 10:30 a.m. May 13 at Brotherhood Synagogue in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park.
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