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| Review excerpts from Talley's Folly: " Draped with moss and honeysuckle and dappled with Steven B. Mannshardt's skillful lighting, Andrea Bechert's set is gorgeous--so painstakingly detailed you can practically feel the humidity. The set integrates well into the space of the cozy, black-box SecondStage theater, making this already intimate play even more invitingly so." |
| Review excerpts from Night of the Iguana: "The Night of the Iguana," is a beautifully staged piece of work. Andrea Bechert's set is a realistic portrayal of an isolated, run-down hotel nestled among dying palm trees on the west coast of Mexico in 1940. |
| Review excerpts from The Legacy Codes: " Scenic designer Andrea Bechert has created a strong, dramatic set, dominated by a huge model of the double helix, endless computer code crawling across a screen at the back, and some striking red chairs." |
| Review excerpts from Bat Boy: "When we first meet our hero, the Bat Boy, he's twitching and screeching and climbing all around Andrea Bechert's creepy set, a cavernous emptiness of rock and darkness." |
| ..."Bat Boy remains a smart and assured ride, shrouded in scenic designer Andrea Bechert's impressive subfusc set – which weds versatility with a playful appeal reminiscent of Sesame Street, or maybe Iron Maiden..." |
| Review excerpt from Sweeney Todd: " Production standards are impeccable. Andrea Bechert's soaring London set has all the bells and whistles required for this Fleet Street thriller, from the barber chair that disposes of its victims down a trap-door chute to a creative variety of flown-in bridges that give the impression of the Byzantine city by the Thames." |
| Review excerpt from West Side Story at Cabrillo Stage: "Scenic design by Andrea Bechert complements the action perfectly. The basic set is a dark and unappealing tenement neighborhood that is strangely mesmerizing; the sub-sets are structurally simple but complex enough to be satisfying and are moved in and out with little delay." |
| Review excerpt from On the Verge: "Designed by Andrea Bechert, the set is ingenious in its simplicity, evocative at once of mountain ranges and the unsettling vertigo that might accompany time travel. Bechert, who received the 1999 Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle award and the Dean Goodman Choice award for her design of TheatreWorks' Night of the Iguana, furnished the set with little more than the three travelers' rudimentary backpacks and their imaginations." |
| Review excerpt from Book of Days: "...sweltering summer days – palpably summoned by Andrea Bechert's vibrant-looking trees, which ring a courtyard drenched in vernal blues, against a vista cut by an orange vein of distant mountains..." |
| Review excerpts from Fences: "Andrea Bechert's set design provides detailed realism with a rendering of the front porch and yard of Troy's and Rose's house, convincing down to each weathered board and fallen leaf." |
| Review excerpt from Voir Dire: "The first thing you'll notice as you enter the theater for TheatreWorks' production of "Voir Dire" is Andrea Bechert's set, a stark gray jury room against staggered backdrops of red brick. It feels like something out of the 1950s, restrictive and familiar; not coincidentally, the play itself has a similar atmosphere." |
| "The set, a simple old house sitting on a dirt-filled back yard, was realistically designed by Andrea Bechert and gave us a subtle idea of the family's struggles within their yard." |
| "A large, evocative double-helix sculpture dominates Andrea Bechert's eloquently spartan, geometric set..." |
| "Set design, Eccles, Jackson and Wilson's dialogue, make TheatreWorks' season opener worthwhile" |
| "...Andrea Bechert's set design is extraordinary" |
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| Review excerpts from West Side Story at American Musical Theatre: "Andrea Bechert's set, a grimy landscape of dingy alleys, graffiti-tagged walls and sooty fire escapes, nails the atmosphere of Manhattan's West Side in the late '50s, the harsh patches of concrete where this ``Romeo and Juliet'' in the age of rumbling street gangs and Daddy-O takes its course." |
| "Andrea Bechert's scenic design rules. The three-story brick buildings, their lattice work of iron fire escapes, the shade-drawn, back-lit windows, the clothes-strewn lines far aloft—this set demands exciting and far-flung action." |
| Review excerpts from Dolly West's Kitchen: "In its usual grand scale, TheatreWorks, with scenic designer Andrea Bechert, has created a beautiful set design for the American debut of Dolly West's Kitchen, a play by Frank McGuinness. Set in Ireland during World War II, the elaborate rock-walled garden framing a huge cutaway house projects the relative comfort of the West family's lifestyle, the mystique of Ireland and the "simpler times" we tend to envision as the 1940s." |
| "One look at Andrea Bechert's richly manicured kitchen set automatically tells us we're not in the south of Ireland." |
| 'Andrea Bechert, set designer of the TheatreWorks production, filled the stage of the Mountain View Center for the Performance with a run-down hotel surrounded by trees, exotic plants, an expansive two-level platform and the most important prop: a large hammock." |
| Review excerpt from All My Sons: "The yellow clapboard Keller family home looks like a fairly ordinary version of the American dream, Midwest style, in the TheatreWorks production of "All My Sons" -- except for the boards missing in the upper story where the blue sky shows through. Terrible secrets will come bursting through the holes in a house too small to contain the family's ambitions or its lies. It's a well-designed and impressively performed production. The skewed, heightened realism of Andrea Bechert's set -- its rolling lawn, yellow walls and profuse poplars gleaming in the golden sunshine..." |
| Review excerpts for Annie Get Your Gun: "Set design (Andrea Bechert) is phenomenal. Raising the big top at the start of the show is breathtaking and sets the tone for the entire evening." "The spectacular and versatile set by Andrea Bechert provides a good selection of backgrounds for the action with little wasted time for scene changes." |
| "The set is brilliantly conceived by Andrea Bechert; it is at once minimal, and rich in detail. Its economy of design leads to seamless transitions from one scene to another." |
| Excerpt from the FEATURE ARTICLE in the Arts section of The Wave Magazine (Volume 6, Issue 20) "If you’ve seen much theatre around the Bay Area, chances are you’ve seen the work of Andrea Bechert. She has designed more than 105 sets for local companies, including American Musical Theater of San Jose, Opera San Jose, 17 shows for TheatreWorks, and a whopping 26 for Peninsula Youth Theater.... ...Asked if set designer is a neglected position, Bechert cites the “30 to 50 craftsmen who actually create what I design. Talk about people who don’t get credit!”... |
| "Andrea Bechert’s set design is almost overwhelming; the whole stage is filled with not only the kitchen but the garden and walkways on both sides of the stage. There are rounded stone walls and fertile earth about the outside of the cutaway kitchen which is a masterpiece of detail." |
| Review excerpt from MACBETH in the Denver Post: "The storytelling starts before the play even begins. Andrea Bechert's gray stone set shows Macbeth's domicile as a house of horror amid the ruins of order. It's dominated by severed stone body parts: a wrist, possibly a middle finger and, most prominently, an enlarged head. It's the felled king of kings Ozymandias (from the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem that condenses the fall of a civilization into just 14 lines). But it might as well be Caesar — the Roman leader who's mentioned in "Macbeth" and whom, like King Duncan, was slaughtered in a morally ambiguous power grab. These scattered body parts are simply part of the present-day foundation and culture here. Faces of the dead are encrusted in the walls, remnants of violence past. Those stone eyes even bleed, for blood is actually everywhere. And why not? It runs down the winding stairs from Duncan's guest room even before he's massacred, as if it's a stylish home-decorating choice.” |
| Review excerpts from TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD with TheatreWorks: "Andrea Bechert's set depicting a street in a small, southern town is flawless" read the full review "Andrea Bechert’s brilliant set design puts forth four home-fronts, each detailed to delineate varying economic and social standings." read the full review "The set...is a feast for the eyes. Detail is astonishing." read the full review "A lavish stagebound treatment...lush, epic sets...a stunning vision of Lee's work, gorgeous but always with a hint of menace to cut the nostalgia." read the full review "Andrea Bechert’s fantastic set of cut out house fronts and gnarled trees..." read the full review |