Stage designer, born in Kiev, Russia. Winner of the New York Drama Critics Award in 1964 for Fiddler on the Roof, he began his New York career in 1924 working for the Unser Theatre and the Yiddish Art Theatre. His sets included those for Three Men on a Horse (1935), Detective Story (1949), and JB (1958). An admirer of Marc Chagall, he excelled in stylized settings, but he was also capable of straightforward realism.
Boris Aronson (1898 – November 16, 1980) was an influential American scenic designer for Broadway and Yiddish theatre. He moved to the Lower East Side in New York City and soon began designing sets and costumes for the more experimental of the city's Yiddish theatres, including most notably Maurice Schwartz's famous Yiddish Art Theatre. However, he soon after left the Yiddish Theatre to prevent his work's "ghettoization", and debuted on Broadway, in 1932, with a revival of Vernon Duke and Yip Harburg's Walk a Little Faster. During the 1930s, he also worked on several productions by the Group Theatre, including works by Clifford Odets and Irwin Shaw.
From 1934 to 1952, Aronson designed scenes, costumes, and lighting for thirty-four plays and three musicals on Broadway that achieved varying degrees of recognition (including his design for what is considered to be the first "concept musical",Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner's Love Life), but those successes were overshadowed by his work for the original 1953 production of The Crucible and the 1955 stage adaptation of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl (retitled The Diary of Anne Frank). He continued his work on Broadway into the 1970s with notable and famous musicals such as Do Re Mi, Fiddler on the Roof (for which Aronson returned to his earlier experience with Jewish theatre, and was a turning point in his career), Cabaret, Zorba, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, and Pacific Overtures.
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