Onstage! Costume Design and the Theatre
The stage manager calls performers to their places. The house lights dim and the audience hushes. Nothing matches the excitement of live theatre. Onstage! Costume Design and the Theatre explores what is unique about designing for the stage through drawings from the McNay’s collection paired with the realized costumes they inspired. Focusing on five of North America’s most celebrated theatre designers, the exhibition showcases costumes that command the stage like the actors who wore them. Bejeweled robes, appliquéd capes, hand-painted armor, and papier-mâché masks are featured. All from different generations, designers Eugene Berman, Peter J. Hall, Desmond Heeley, Tanya Moiseiwitsch, and Martin Pakledinaz produced work in a variety of distinct styles. Berman created vast stage pictures, composing bold shapes and colors of many costumes on the Metropolitan Opera’s proscenium stage. Inspired by painter Gustav Klimt, Hall’s symbol-laden costumes echo the psychological tensions of Richard Strauss’s Salome for the Dallas Opera. Heeley and Moiseiwitsch focused attention on individual actors, enveloping them in richly textured costumes on the bare thrust stage of the Stratford Festival. In over-the-top exuberance,Pakledinaz’s costumes for Cole Porter’s musical Kiss Me, Kate on Broadway rival the original Shakespearean designs. Onstage! recreates a designer’s studio and a costume shop, revealing how theatre costumes are created, from the drawing board, to the cutting table, and finally the stage.
