(Kinky) Boots and all – costumes maketh the show

Kinky thigh-high faux leather boots, crystal encrusted capes, wigs and a hell of a lot of Lycra – costumes maketh the show, Bess Manson discovers.

Stephen Robertson was a keen dresser-upper as a young kid.

In all his childhood photos, there he was, clad in costume, looking like someone else.

“I remember my aunty had a room at the back of her garage with a big chest of costumes, and I was forever in there playing with them.”

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A career as a costume designer was perhaps a foregone conclusion.

These days he’s dressing everyone else up in the musical Kinky Boots, a story mostly inspired by true events about a reluctant shoe factory owner who teams up with a drag queen to produce a line of high heels to save the family business from bankruptcy.

As the designer for the show – where more is more, where gilding the lily is not just a bonus but a necessity – Robertson must be in his element.

At last count there were 2000 costume pieces, he says ahead of its Auckland opening later this month.

But the boots, well, they are the stars of the show. In all there are 60 pairs.

Boots glittered from top to bottom, long red traditional kinky boots made from faux leather, Lycra velvet, satin boots, silver-glittered, gold glittered, studded; solid platforms with 13cm heels.

“It’s quite amazing how easily [the cast] put on their boots and start walking around the room, whereas I look at them, and I’m terrified,” Robertson says.

With an eye on the budget, he sourced a load of garments for the factory worker characters in the story from thrift shops.

He’d drive around and come home six hours later with a boot full of clothing. “I’m still out every day spending hours and hours and hours in the op shops because you have to go through every item on the rack. Yeah, they know me well. They see me coming.”

Sometimes we think of costumes as fancy dress, something mum has whipped us up for us to wear, he says.

“These costumes are more than that… It’s all about transporting the audience to another place and another time and making it believable. Costume is everything for an actor – there’s the practicality and comfort – but when they put on a garment they have to believe it’s going to help in the story telling.”

Kinky Boots is one of three elaborate shows coming to stages around Aotearoa in the coming weeks. RNZ Ballet’s Romeo & Juliet is currently on tour and NZ Opera’s Cosi Fan Tutte opens at the end of May.

The costume element to each show is a production in itself.

Costumes help the audience identify characters in quite a complicated story, says Jim Acheson, the Oscar-winning costume designer behind Romeo & Juliet.

Capulets in red, Montagues in blue, joker in purple, that kind of thing.

The costumes got their first airing at the company’s 2017 season of the production and Acheson is back tweaking and adding to the collection.

This show has 77 costumes, but all the components add up to more than 320. Some weigh more than 10kg. That’s a lot for a dancer to hike around and make look light.

Up close the detail is extraordinary; cotton, velvet, silk, ribbon, braid, sequins, crystals.

Garments made with leather, lace, linen and the ubiquitous Lycra. Those legs have gotta move. There are pompoms and funny sounding things called aiglets – the bits you find at the end of your shoelaces, only fancy.

Ballet shoes might be worn through in one night. Some like to wear them till they’re dead. Other dancers bash them up to soften them.

Fun fact: Some dancers use shellac, an old-fashioned varnish made from the secretions of the lac insect, to keep their pointe shoes firm.

Acheson, a three-time Academy Award winner for costume design, says he and senior costumier Hank Cubitt have an ongoing gag about detail.

“I think detail is something that you sense, it’s not just something you see… The first job of the costume designer is to help support the performance and the character. The second job is to communicate that to the audience. But there’s also something in between.

“When people look on the stage they can’t see a lot of detail, but it’s there, and somehow it’s giving off a sense of lavishness.”

The ballet costumes have to be built to last and to cope with being danced in night after night and the fact they have to be constantly laundered and dry-cleaned, says British-born Acheson, who moved to Aotearoa in 2002.

Even with the layers worn underneath costumes, the fabric is vulnerable to rotting because of sweat.

Nasty.

One of the tricks of the cleaning process is to spray them between laundering with a little tipple called a vodka spray.

Apart from being built “like s…house doors,” says Acheson, you can take illusionary risks with stage costumes.

“You can make a bit of cheap velvet look like a million dollars in the right light.”

You can even do some theatrical cheating on film, he says, recalling a trick he used on the Oscar-winning film The Last Emperor where the embroidery was made using a glue gun then painted gold.

Acheson has designed costumes for scores of films, including Dangerous Liaisons, Spider-Man and classics like Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. TV too – he designed the famous long scarf worn by Tom Baker’s Doctor Who, though he’s a bit sick of people bringing that one up.

He loves working with dancers. Romeo & Juliet was his first ballet.

“Trying to make a finite number of costumes fit 40 different people is a real job, but the most wonderful thing about my job is working with the dancers. These are beautiful young athletes who are disciplined.

“They work with anything they are given to wear – huge heavy cloaks, layers and layers of petticoats, a load of bling – and they’ll make it work,” he says. “They do it without moaning and with huge discipline and modesty and I take my hat off to them.”

He credits the wardrobe staff who do the hard yards. The backroomers that don’t usually get acknowledged.

Dinner suits and sequinned frocks

There are close to 100 costumes for New Zealand Opera’s production of Cosi Fan Tutte, which starts touring at the end of the month.

The 18th century story about fidelity, trickery, deception and rather a lot of manipulation, is set in the here and now but later slides into the surreal.

Good news for designer Tracy Grant Lord, who gets to play around with her costume ideas.

They start out contemporary – think men in dinner suits, women in sequinned cocktail frocks – but as the story goes on the costumes go down the romantic Bohemian, rock route.

By Act 4 it’s full-bore exotic.

It’s exciting to see an actor become their character once they are in costume, says Grant Lord, who is a scenographer designing sets and costumes.

“That’s freeing for them. It’s about looking at something in a new way, not just for themselves in their own character, but with other people who are all bringing new characters to a work. It’s a great exploration.”

Grant Lord has designed sets and costumes for ballet, musicals and opera, most recently, The Unruly Tourists.

Designing for opera she starts with the music and the libretto – the written story inside the music.

The beauty of being able to work with opera and ballet are the scores, she says.

“They are incredible. They describe a lot about the place and the people and the kind of intention of each of the scenes. You can hear it in the music. If it’s joyous it needs to look joyous. If it’s a dark and enveloping piece of music we will think about that in what we design to put on stage.”

Clothing with a job to do

Costumes are clothing with a job to do, a performance tool for the performer, explains Kaarin Slevin​, head of the two-year diploma in costume construction at Toi Whakaari, New Zealand Drama School.

Her students are learning the art of realising the vision of the designers by creating the physical garments and accessories.

“We are like engineers, and a costume designer is like an architect,” she says.

“As the engineer, costumiers work with the topography of the human body, and the qualities and characteristics of all the many materials that are used to create an article of clothing. We want to realise the vision of our other collaborators, but we are all in service of the story.”

The costume construction course includes sewing, pattern drafting, millinery, making costume props – from fans and parasols to accessories and armour.

They learn how to create a beautiful garment then how to distress it to make it fit a storyline – think Les Miserables.

Different productions call for different approach to costume making.

Take a ballet – there’s no room for runs in tights or broken straps. “You know the strain that the costumes will be under, the extreme movement that the dancers demand. Those costumes are high performance garments. They have to be so light, so flexible.”

With musicals and other stage productions they have to be particularly durable and in some cases, fireproof for shows that have pyrotechnics.

In musicals like the upcoming Kinky Boots and Wicked there are multiple costumes, often five per performer, she says.

“They have to look beautiful and be machine washable. They have to be quick change. They have to last eight shows a week for however long your season is. They have to be refitted on a new performer when contracts are up.”

Costumes come with a whole entourage. There’s a wardrobe crew on hand during performances – sewers, dressers, people working on the maintenance and care of the garments.

“Dressers help performers get in and out of costumes quickly and in a way that isn’t messing with the mojo of the performer who has to get back out on stage like nothing’s happened. It’s an essential backstage role.”

In some companies there are manufacturing wardrobe and performance wardrobe departments.

Performance people are at the coalface, she says.

They are dealing with understudies going on unexpectedly, things breaking, things shrinking in the wash, ironing, keeping things clean, applying and taking off wigs.

“These are work uniforms for the performers. They have to be maintained. It’s a whole machine.”

Dressing up, it’s a serious business.

Kinky Boots plays at Auckland’s Civic Theatre from May 25 and at the St James Theatre in Wellington from June 28. Romeo & Juliet tours NZ till June 10; Cosi Fan Tutte by Mozart, will play Auckland’s Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre May 31-June 4, Wellington’s St James June 14-18, and Christchurch’s Isaac Theatre Royal June 28-July 2.