Category — Costume Design

Designer Anita Yavich gets metaphysical for Broadway’s “Venus in Fur”

Bags of tricks don’t get much deeper or kinkier than the one Vanda carries into her audition/ambush/apotheosis in Venus in Fur.

Though she seems like a desperate actress with a thick outer-borough accent, Vanda (Nina Arianda) quickly commandeers her would-be director, Thomas (Hugh Dancy), with the help of her roomy satchel. She’s carrying thigh-high boots, frock coats, froufrou dresses and everything else a girl would need to enact David Ives’s sprightly riff on the 1870 novella “Venus in Furs.” Clothes make the man and woman here, then remake and re-remake them, upending any number of power dynamics along the way.

That’s where Anita Yavich comes in. An Obie Award-winning costume designer, she earned a Henry Hewes Design Award nomination for her work on Venus in Fur’s Off-Broadway run with Classic Stage Company last year. She’s back on board for the Broadway transfer, which is currently in previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

To suit the ambitions of the play, her costumes have to strike a balance between literal and metaphysical worlds. How much is happening in the dingy rehearsal room where Vanda and Thomas initially meet, and how much is happening in a more abstract realm of desire and debasement?

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Steampunk Haunted House blends horror and dance

Plenty of haunted houses have blood and guts and monsters, but only one lets nightmares mingle with dance.

Presented by the dance troupe Third Rail Projects, Steampunk Haunted House first appeared in 2009, and this year, it plunges audiences into a dark world inspired by Lewis Carroll and his Alice stories.

That’s a natural motif for choreographer Zach Morris, one of Third Rail’s co-artistic directors. He’s always been drawn to the Victorian era, and Carroll inspires much of the company’s work.

Steampunk, meanwhile, is a science fiction genre that imagines a modern world dominated by Victorian-era technology and style. Its elegant creepiness—think of the shadows and gadgets in Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes—is a natural fit for a haunted house.

And a haunted house, of course, widens the possibilities for a dance performance. Morris says Third Rail “wanted to create a fully immersive world where audience members were experiencing different things at different times.” (He co-choreographed the piece with his fellow artistic directors Tom Pearson and Jennine Willett.) The troupe fills the Abrons Art Center, and as audience members roam the building, they encounter art installations, theatre, sound design, costuming, and site-specific work.

Steampunk Haunted House: Through the Looking Glass from Third Rail Projects on Vimeo.

The suits the house’s Alice in Wonderland scenario: “Alice is an iconic text that can be a jumping off point,” Morris says. “If you wander into a room with a character, you already have a frame of reference.”

But the company isn’t just retelling famous stories. They are digging deeper to find Carroll himself within the texts. Morris explains, “There is much biographical information about Alice Liddle and Lewis Carroll that proved to be the richest source of inspiration. We are dealing with duality: Order versus chaos, regimentation versus freedom, desires of adults versus those of children.”

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Brian Thomson designs the Broadway musical’s fabulous title bus

How’s this for pressure? Brian Thomson isn’t just designing the set for a new Broadway musical: He’s designing the title role.

Or rather, the title vehicle. In Priscilla Queen of the Desert: The Musical, “Priscilla” is the bus that three performers—two drag queens and a transsexual woman—drive across the Australian Outback as they head for new jobs and new lives. Along the way, they have campy adventures, make heartfelt revelations, and belt out classic pop songs like “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” “Like a Prayer,” and “MacArthur Park.” But as fabulous as they are, the divas would be nothing without their mobile home, which serves as a set, a symbol, and a source of sassy jokes

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Jess Goldstein designs costumes for A.R. Gurney’s new play

When you think of costume designing, you might think of someone sketching clothes or sitting at a sewing machine, not shopping at Brooks Brothers. But that’s just where designer Jess Goldstein stopped when he was gathering pieces for A.R. Gurney’s Black Tie.

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Designing costumes for Broadway’s The Pee-wee Herman Show

One night back in 1977, Paul Reubens, a wiry sketch comic at the Los Angeles improv company the Groundlings, came up with the character of a hapless, unfunny standup comic called Pee-wee Herman. To complete Pee-wee’s awkward look, he borrowed an ill-fitting glen plaid suit from Groundlings founder Gary Austin.

Thirty-three years later, a row of identical glen plaid suits hangs backstage at the Stephen Sondheim Theater, where Reubens’ now-iconic creation is having a triumphant Broadway moment in The Pee-wee Herman Show.

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