Pam Panchak, Post-Gazette
	When designing the set for "Forbidden Broadway" at the Cabaret in Theater Square, Cletus Anderson threw in touches from Broadway's old Amsterdam Theatre and "a little mystery," too.
	MORE COVERAGE Hit parody 'Forbidden Broadway' takes to the Pittsburgh stage 'Forbidden Broadway' Where: CLO Cabaret at Theater Square, 655 Penn Ave., Cultural District When: Open run, Thurs.-Fri. 7:30 p.m.; Sat. 3 and 7:30 p.m.; Sun. 3 p.m.; 1 p.m. matinees last Thurs. of each month. Tickets: $35-$37, discounts available; 412-456-6666.
	Details from Cletus Anderson's drawings for the set of "Forbidden Broadway."

Adaptable -- that's the name for the CLO Cabaret space at the Cultural Trust's multipurpose Theater Square. So when its long-running revue, "Forever Plaid," was giving way to the parodic "Forbidden Broadway," the CLO sought a complete transformation of the space.

And Jason Coll, Cabaret general manager, knew just where to go, to Cletus Anderson, dean of Pittsburgh designers.

"Cletus is a renaissance man," Coll says. "He's really an artist. He's retired, so I thought he might have the time. And we wanted someone we knew we could trust."

That means someone who could get it done on time, within budget, with style, polish and practicality. Who better than the long-time head of design and production at Carnegie Mellon Drama, mentor to generations of younger designers, author (with his wife, Barbara Anderson) of "Costume Design," the standard text, but also set and/or costume designer for hundreds of plays and operas, professional and college, here and across the northeast, as well as production designer or art director for several dozen TV shows and more than a dozen films?

And Cletus' professional resume tells only part of the story. He's also an accomplished painter, a singer, an enticing cook and an inveterate host.

Above all, this erudite, charming man is an artist. So it's no surprise to encounter the subtle detail and wit of his set for "Forbidden Broadway," which opens tonight after two weeks of shake-down previews.

Within the sophisticated designer lurks a resourceful scavenger. "Find what you can locally and make it work," he says, and the details of his set, which pays homage to old theaters and vaudeville houses, turn out to come from Lowe's -- not the theater chain, but the home improvement store.

A few elements were ordained in advance by the "Forbidden Broadway" franchise (see related story): its logo in lights, a rear glitter curtain and the position of the grand piano. Beyond that, Cletus first designed a nightclub set, but it was too like that for "Forever Plaid," and the CLO wanted to offer something new, which is to say something old, with, Cletus says, "a little mystery."

So he researched Broadway's old (pre-Disney) Amsterdam Theatre, and the result is archways embossed with architectural details and touches of whimsy, such as bas-relief medallions that the knowing will see as caricatures of Broadway divas Carol Channing and Ethel Merman. Other design elements are cobbled together out of wallpaper borders, urns and architectural details from Lowe's, dry-brushed and touched with glitter dust to give them more presence, framed by chaser lights and backed with that three-layer glitter curtain (black, white and hologram), all of it designed to multiply the effects of lighting designer Andy Ostrowski.

Facing the stage, on the back wall, is a large marquee from the Ziegfeld Follies, extending the vaudeville motif but also masking the sound and light operators. Design serves practicality.

Among hundreds of Cletus' designs, this is not one of the heavyweights. But its professional sheen, research and detail all speak to the man behind it.

Now 68, Cletus was born in Cleveland and raised largely by his grandparents, Italian immigrants from Florence and Naples who ran away to America because their families frowned on their union.

His grandfather was a craftsman who carved religious statues for cathedrals. "He was adamant that children be exposed to the arts -- museums, music, drawing lessons. He taught art and craftsmanship, working with your hands and making sure you do the very best you can. My grandmother taught me about humanity, toleration and respect."

Four uncles were like brothers. It was a large, convoluted extended family, and Cletus never knew his biological father -- his surname, Anderson, comes from his stepfather, and his first name from the supposed second successor to Peter as bishop of Rome. (Over the years, he's received many photos from amused students of churches named St. Cletus.)

In the fifth and sixth grades, he was sent to an experimental public school with an arts curriculum. In junior high, there was "an assistant principal who'd been a vaudevillian, a great little roly-poly guy who wrote lyrics to pop songs" and had students perform at assemblies. And at 13, Cletus was apprenticed to a sculptor for two years.

His immersion in the arts brought with it people from different backgrounds, making it more shocking when he encountered ethnic prejudice on Cleveland's East Side, "a pretty tough neighborhood with lots of challenges ... where you could get beat up because you didn't look like your neighbor."

In high school, he remembers this "strange, mystical thing: I decided I'd go to Yale Drama School." He's not sure how he got the idea. But when the time came, he went to Ohio University in Athens, where he worked his way through in the kitchens, starting out cleaning pots and pans, then as salad cook and eventually head pastry chef, getting up early to bake 500 cherry pies.

Along the way he was hired to move the theater department's costume stock into new quarters, since, with his art background, he could sort it. Then the faculty designer vanished, and since he knew where the costumes were, he was asked to pull costumes for "some Greek tragedy. So I organized it and it turned out to be a success." Next came an 18th-century comedy, "The Rivals," for which there was nothing in stock, "so I sketched up some stuff, and they had seamstresses."

Presto, he was a designer.

Eventually he took a few theater courses, including fencing because it was fun. A faculty director invited him to come along to the Monomoy Theatre on Cape Cod, where he designed eight shows and acted in six, sometimes as a last-minute stopgap, sometimes because he fit a costume. Needless to say, he never slept. And he says he wasn't much of an actor: "I could barely walk or remember my lines." Several experiences, such as dancing across the stage in "The Time of Your Life" and discovering his fly was open, or tying up an actor so securely he couldn't make his next entrance, "were clues that I shouldn't be an actor."

On graduation from OU, he was hired at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park as resident costume designer. There he met Mel Shapiro (a future drama head at CMU) and other Carnegie Tech grads. "I designed Mel's first original play, 'Here Today and Gone Tomorrow' -- and it was."

Cletus recalls doing "The Lark" by finding bedspreads and sheets at Goodwill and taking them to a laundromat late at night to dye them blue -- "the terrible things you do for the sake of theater!" But not having money is good training for a young designer.

But that company really didn't have any money and went belly up, so Cletus returned to OU as head of resident services (catering). At the Ohio Valley Theater he was cast in Noel Coward's "Nude with Violin" and had two weeks to learn a giant part complete with several languages. "Opening night, I couldn't remember a syllable, but when I walked on stage, it all just rolled out of me, like vomit. The next night, it happened again, and I was ready to die, so I thought, 'If you just get me through this, God, I'll never walk on the stage again.' And I've almost lived up to it."

But his girlfriend, Sally, told him he was wasting his life working at OU, so, remembering his mystical conviction, he wrote Yale a letter saying he was coming for an interview. They took him.

A Yale MFA in design provided his professional cornerstone, but it shares importance with meeting his future wife, Barbara Jo Benz, who had already graduated and was head of the Yale costume shop. He was introduced to her, oddly enough, by her fiance, a shadowy figure who features in several family anecdotes but is never named.

Cletus needed an apartment and there was one on the ground floor of the house where Barbara lived upstairs. He was poor, but he knew how to cook -- except, he says, he "could only bake 12 loaves of bread at a time, since that was my recipe." The aroma wafted upward and Barbara would be enticed downward.

Her fiance worked long hours, so Cletus and Barbara went to movies and parties together "and got to know each other well." It was an uncomfortable situation, so eventually Cletus declared he was going to be pursuing his career in New York, and Barbara took a job in charge of costumes at Carnegie Tech.

But they stayed in touch. "Her fiance waited for her to make the first move, and I didn't." He visited her in Pittsburgh, and they decided it was serious, which meant they finally had to tell the fiance -- another story, too long for here.

They were engaged at Thanksgiving and married in 1964, making this year's anniversary their 42nd. Cletus finished his final year at Yale, Barbara finished her year at Tech, and they both took jobs at Brandeis University, she as a teacher of costume design, he as resident designer for the professional Spingold Theater.

They were in legendary company, with the great Morris Carnovsky as the theater's artistic director and famed designer Howard Bay as head of the drama school, with a core of pro actors who'd been black-listed in the '50s. But several new plays that were planned to go to New York failed. And then Tech -- now CMU -- called, this time for both of them.

They decided to try it. "So we sold our house in Newton, Mass., which would now be worth quite a bit and perfect for our children who are living in Boston," and arrived at CMU in 1968 as professors of drama.

They never looked back, deciding they loved CMU, with its small, committed faculty and "dedicated, precocious, energetic students." Many of those students have become life-long friends.

While teaching, designing and raising two children, the Andersons made their home a social center. Originally, they had a huge house in Point Breeze with a 12-by-40-foot central hall where there were some notorious parties, especially at Halloween, when the theater people came "in the most outrageous things. ... We'd find sequins and glitter and remnants of costumes for months afterward."

Teaching, Cletus concentrated more on design and Barbara on history and construction. "She's a lot more organized and less scattered than I," he says.

He wasn't so scattered that he didn't have time for prodigious amounts of design work, both sets and costumes. At CMU, for student and professional companies, he's done everything from "Merton of the Movies" and "Absurd Person Singular" to "Candide," "Nicholas Nickleby" and "Kiss Me Kate." At the Public Theater, he's done "Hay Fever," "The Importance of Being Earnest" (the first time) and "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," among others. At City Theatre, there's been "Temptation," "Master Class" and "Sorrows and Rejoicings."

But it's movies and TV that have provided some of his highest profile work, including four George Romero films. There's also a long list of specials and series that came out of WQED-TV during its golden years as a major national production center, including "Leatherstocking Tales," "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," "Harry Truman: Plain Speaking" and the 12-part "Decades of Decision."

Now the Andersons live in Squirrel Hill, where the parties are still warm if rather more restrained, partly, Cletus says, because faculty and students don't fraternize as they used to, and partly because there really isn't enough space to make a grand entrance.

Key to their parties is cooking artistry, much of it his. "I think it's a social art," he says, "because you want others to enjoy it with you. Maybe it's a social bribe."

A series of illnesses and operations led to his retirement in 2003, but he continued to mentor design students. Now, he can devote himself more to his life-long passion for painting, the results of which hang in many collections and museums.

Though Cletus once swore off the stage, he has had a late blooming as a performer for 10 years with the Mendelssohn Choir. "I'm one of the few white guys to sing 'Old Man River' in concert, solo," as he did at Carnegie Music Hall.

And he even has time to respond when a former student like Jason Coll calls with an offer to design a set for the CLO. Skills of such depth and duration do not fade.