Albert Richard Johnson, the noted theatrical set designer, was born on February 1, 1910 to Albert Aaron and Anne Ellen Johnson in La Crosse, Wisconsin. When he was a child, the family moved to Long Island, New York. He was educated privately except in the year 1925-1926 when he attended Hempsted High School on Long Island.
Johnson started his professional career at age fifteen by painting scenery for the Farmingdale Opera House on Long Island. At seventeen he moved to New York City and studied stage design with Norman Bel Geddes, 1927-1928. He did his first sets at age nineteen for The Criminal Code (National, 1929). During his subsequent thirty-eight year career, he designed sets for over a hundred shows including The Skin of Our Teeth (Plymouth, 1942), George White's Scandals (Alvin, 1939), Jumbo (New York Hippodrome, 1935), Ziegfield Follies (Winter Garden, 1934), What Did I Do Wrong? (Helen Hayes, 1967), and Funny Girl (Winter Garden, 1964).
Johnson introduced modern forms of painting to stage design with his first musical Three's a Crowd (1930), and his revolutionary theories (as well as the rapidity of his work) were widely discussed in professional journals. His London-produced Waltzes from Vienna (1931) was then the most expensive musical ever produced.
In addition to his work on Broadway, Johnson designed more than thirty shows for Radio City Music Hall, and he did the sets for several Billy Rose nightclubs and productions. In 1939 Johnson was a consultant on production and design for the amusement zone of the New York World's Fair, and he designed, produced, and wrote the book for the musical spectacular American Jubilee, which opened at the fair on February 11, 1940. During the 1950s Johnson directed and designed numerous trade fairs and industrial exhibits throughout the United States, for example, the Travelers Insurance Company Exhibit at the 1964 New York World's Fair.
Johnson also did work in other media. He designed for the motion pictures, Crime Without Passion (Paramount, 1934) and The Scoundrel (Paramount, 1935) and for two ballets, Union Pacific (1934) and Coney Island Winter (1950). For television he created and designed The Buttonwood Street Television Project and he was designer for The Henry Morgan Show (NBC, 1951). In the last years of his life he spent much of his time on the development of “The American Flotilla” which was conceived as a floating extravaganza of theatrical tableaux of American life and history. This project, which was in part a stimulus for Robert Moses' concept of the 1964 World's Fair, was never produced. During this period Johnson also attempted to return to the theatre, but he was unsuccessful in his attempt to develop various theatrical properties for which he owned the rights.
In 1937 Johnson married dancer Tilda Goetz, but the marriage ended in divorce a year later. In 1957 he married Dianne Valvo, a cosmetics executive who worked at the beauty salon of Charles of the Ritz where she specialized in creating and fitting wigs; she was also a frequent public speaker on that topic.
Johnson's health was not good and, especially in the later years of his life, he was somewhat preoccupied with it. He died in New York on December 21, 1967.
