The Phantom of the Opera, ACT 2, SCENE 1: THE GUILDED SWEEPING STAIRCASE OF THE PARIS OPERA HOUSE. The date: New Year's Eve 1881. A heavily draped curtain swings back and the bal masque - a glittering masquerade - swirls into action as 33 actors and actresses flow down the stairs, flirting in a mass of color and motion. The effect is spectacular, a stunning moment in a musical widely celebrated as a feast for the eyes. With this scene, costume designer Maria Bjornson, who also created the elegant sets, has outdone herself: True to the wondrous excesses of la belle epoque, no two costumes are even remotely alike, not even those that adorn the 11 mannequins thrown in for good measure.
Onstage, the masquerade guests mingle in a sea of silks, velvets, sequins, feathers, and bows. Among the costumes, there is a gauzy, pastel butterfly; a striking half-man/half-woman outfit; a ribbon-candy dress, with striped shirt and hat tightly looped like Elizabethan ruffles; a male cannibal with a gold metallic leather leaf skirt; and a menacing executioner wearing multicolored velvet pants, a black hood, and wielding a big ax. A masked, black-caped man suddenly sweeps across the stage, setting in motion a chain of events that includes dramatic appearances and disappearances by the red-clad Phantom, who terrifies the revelers. The masquerade abruptly ends in disarray as screaming guests run from the stairs and the stage fades to black.
On a recent Saturday afternoon at Boston's Wang Center, where Phantom is ensconced through November 14, the scene comes off without a hitch. That hasn't always been the case, according to wardrobe supervisor Michael Hannah. Early in the New York production of the show, the actors kept getting entangled with one another as the beaded fringe of one costume snagged in the open-weave fabric of another. Even more frustrating was the fact that the black cape - which is donned in a split second offstage and used to be secured only by little snaps - kept flying off, until Hannah went to a hardware store, bought a couple of dog leashes, took of their hooks, sewed them firmly onto the cape, and solved the problem. But in a show with 230 costumes (copies for understudies bring the total to around 400), spanning five historical periods - and accessorized with 150 pairs of shoes, 150 hats, and hundreds of earrings, necklaces, gloves, and scarves - those mishaps are just some of the little things that come with the territory. "Avoiding catastrophies," explains Hannah, "is all in a day's work.
ACT 1, SCENE 1: THE DRESS REHEARSAL OF HANNIBAL. To the casual observer, this exuberant scene, complete with fake elephant and dancing slave girls, simply marks the opening of Andrew Lloyd Webber's award-winning musical. It is also the first of three operas "staged" at the Paris Opera House, as a sort of musical within a musical, during the course of the show.
From a costumer's point of view, however, Act 1 Scene 1 marks the entrance of The Dress. Worn by actress Patricia Hurd in the role of Carlotta, diva of the opera house, The Dress is a marvelously jumbled Victorian view of garments worn by an Egyptian-Byzantine queen. It is a massive concoction, 70 pounds' worth of a dozen different silks in reds, greens, blacks, and purples, highlighted throughout with gold thread and ornamentation. Crisscrossed ribbons, metal studs, layers of pleats, hand-painted panels, dozens of sequins, plastic gems, green tassels, and countless colored beads adorn every available inch of fabric.
By Hannah's estimate, it would take one person working eight hours a day for a month to recreate The Dress, which cost so much that Hannah won't even discuss the price tag, other than to say, "You could own a very nice car for what that dress cost.
"The Dress just makes such a statement," says Hannah, who calls Bjornson, the designer, his hero. "It's the first opera costume that you see in the show. Carlotta walks out there in this huge dress, holding a severed head. That, to me, is anybody's dream-come-true entrance. I tell everyone who plays Carlotta, 'You're never going to top that.'"
The Dress is the single most expensive item in a production with a costume budget of $1.35 million (not counting upkeep), which works out to $9,000 per minute for this 2 1/2-hour-long show. Every penny spent seems to glimmer through scene after scene, as the actors appear not only in the daywear of the 1880s (and, during the brief prologue, of 1911) but also perform in three period operas set within the play: Hannibal; Il Muto, an 18th-century piece of French foolery; and Don Juan, which is set in conquistadorean Spain. Unlike many other Broadway musicals, Bjornson's painstakingly detailed costumes are individually designed; with the exception of some outfits worn by the women in the corps de ballet, every costume is elaborately different, right down to such accessories as gloves and earrings.
"I sort of viewed all the costumes very affectionately," says Bjornson, a London-based artist whose background in opera design prepared her for Phantom of the Opera's grand scale. "I have to say, the costumes I enjoyed doing most were for Hannibal and Don Juan," adds Bjornson, who won several awards for Phantom's set and costume design, including a 1988 Tony. "They were real send-ups of the period, but done affectionately. Because they're glorious and funny. You can't say that the Carlotta costume isn't beautiful, but you can say it's funny."
Bjornson drew on her extensive collection of research materials - including a turn-of-the-century book on opera productions at New York's Metropolitan - for inspiration and ultimately dashed off more than 200 costume sketches in one hectic two- to three-week period. (Bjornson forgets exactly how long that part of her work lasted but does remember turning out as many as 20 fully executed drawings in one day.)
The complete set of costumes took 50 people in three New York costume houses three months to make. (Currently, there are three full productions of Phantom in the United States - in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston, where the national touring company is now playing. A fourth production for a second touring company is now being built.) Bjornson and Hannah say they don't know how much fabric and trim were used on the clothes. But, judging by partial estimates - 12 yards of silk in a recently replaced ruffle at the hem of one of Carlotta's dresses; three or four pounds of beads used each week to replace those that fall off because of daily wear and tear - the numbers would probably boggle even Ripley's Believe It or Not.
Each costume is in itself a testament to the glories of excess that ultimately backrupted the Paris Opera House during the period in which Phantom is set. One dress, a purple concoction of silks, antique trims,and handmade flowers, costs thousands of dollars yet is worn for just five minutes by a minor character who utters only one word on stage. "If you didn't see the tons and tons of over-detail, it wouldn't look so opulent," explains Hannah, as he pulls one dress after another from a rack.
Almost every costume features a variety of fine detailing that the audience will never see, from tiny velvet piping tucked behind satin trim on a sleeve to a black silk inset with a medallion design centered perfectly inside the folds of a man's jacket. "What I wanted to do was just really enjoy the period, and just glory in it," says Bjornson. "That's what I hope the audience does as well."
ACT 1, SCENE 5: BEYOND THE LAKE. After a whirlwind journey into the depths of the Paris Opera House - including a breathtaking gondola trip across a "lake" of fog and candles - the Phantom and his protege, Christine, engage in a bizarre courtship ritual, perhaps one of the musical's most seductive moments.
From a vantage point off to the side of the sold-out house, Michael Hannah watches the stage, oblivious to the unfolding melodrama. He is absorbed, instead, in watching the Phantom's white dress-shirt cuffs (Are they sticking to his wrists when he lifts his arms?) and in carefully checking the hem of Christine's negligee (Does it hang evenly?).
"In the beginning, I'd be so overwhelmed by the show that I'd go out to check things, and someone would ask me what I'd seen [that was wrong], and I'd just go, 'Oh, wow, I forgot to write anything down,'" says Hannah, who has been on the road with this production and these costumes for 21/2 years.
These days, however, scrutinizing feathers (Do they need steaming?) and checking colors (Have the flesh-colored tights faded too much?) are second nature for Hannah. He is responsible for overseeing the wardrobe staff, which includes 13 people hired locally in each city for the duration of the show's run, and the truckloads of costumes. (The wardrobe section of Phantom fills three 44-foot trucks.)
Each show day, local workers, all members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, come to work five hours before curtain time. In a warren of rooms in the basement of the Wang Center, they polish shoes (by hand and with paste, not liquid), wash and dry endless loads of laundry (a full five hours of work), set out clean shirts, and steam rumpled costumes. Delicate bodies for the women's costumes are washed by hand in cold water, while heavy skirts and men's formal wear are dry-cleaned at a cost of about $500 to $700 a week.
"I do know of dry cleaners I'd be terrified to send anything to," says Hannah. "We have had dry cleaners press very heavy creases into the Phantom's silk suits, and there were no creases in men's pants during this period. Creases didn't start until the 1920s." How did the creases come out? Hannah sighs. "We had to steam them and repress the pants. It took a long, long time."
Daily maintenance of the costumes also required an eight-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week seamstress who usually is handed five to 10 major repair jobs after each show, including tears, rips, broken strands of beads, and frayed hems. The delicate work is made even more difficult by the sheer weight of the costumes, which can tip the scales at 40 pounds for a ladies' evening dress. "The costumes are so heavy," says seamstress Cassy McEvoy, "that sometimes we have to move the sewing machine over to the costume. We lay the costume on the table, pick up the machine, and work it around. It's easier than trying to twist the costume through the machine."
Care and maintenance are also complicated by the fact that many of the trims and fabrics used in the costumes are one-of-a-kind antiques found by Bjornson's assistants. When the materials wear out, Hannah either asks for a new antique piece or sets about trying to find a facsimile. "It's not like I can just go to Woolworth's and replace things in the show," says Hannah, "although I bought adjustable curtain rods at K mart once, to reinforce the bustles until we got near New York. They worked great."
The costumes also present a challenge to the actors who wear them. When Patricia Hurd first tried on The Dress - a garment so heavy it takes two people just to get it off the rack - for the Hannibal scene, she practiced walking a big circle onstage. Instead of following her around, the weighty dress pulled her around. "She was very good about that dress," says Hannah. "Historically, women who wore this kind of finery went to finishing school to learn how to walk, maneuver, kick their skirts, and back up. It's not something that the dress will just do for you. The actor has to have the patience to learn how to walk and how to behave in these kinds of costumes," he says. "Sometimes you have people who feel the costume should just kind of follow them around. And that's not the case."
ACT 2, SCENE 9: BEYOND THE LAKE. In the musical's final scene, Christine breaks off her romance with the Phantom, who then mysteriously disappears. The play ends, the curtain calls begin, and members of the cast emerge to take their bows in what is also a visual recap of the show's costume highlights.
"At the end of the show, most of the cast end up in peasant wear, and that would have been a boring curtain call," explains Hannah, who says that Bjornson decided to dress each of the actors in costumes from various scenes for the final curtain. "It's a visual farewell."
As the stage clears and the applause dies away, the audience leaves the theater. Backstage, the performers undress, and their costumes agree carefully hung by dressers, who are the last to leave the hall and who will be the first to enter the following day, when the washing and stitching and pressing and steaming begin all over again.
|