CREATIVE TEAM INTERVIEWS
COSTUME ASSOCIATE
JACK GALLOWAY
Jack’s work includes high profile West End shows such as The Lion King, Aladdin, Dirty Dancing, Beauty and the Beast, and Hairspray. Jack has also worked on productions with the Royal Ballet, Royal Opera, Scottish Opera and Donmar Warehouse.
My job as Costume Associate involves working as a go between various different departments within a production. I liaise very closely with a lot of different people, taking costume designs from the drawing stage to bringing them to life in 3D to be used on stage. I deal with the granular detail of this process, including budgets, sourcing materials, supervising fittings etc: my role is to bring all of the elements and people together to execute the designs as successfully as I can.
I might be biased but costume is incredibly important in a show. Remember that the audience spends much of their time looking at the actors on stage, and therefore at the clothes that that character is wearing. In Tina, costume also plays a crucial role in helping to anchor the audience in each of the time periods and locations in which we see Tina. The scenery might not appear to change a great deal, but the costume does. We go from Nutbush, to Club Manhattan, TV appearances to Tina’s concert in Rio in 1988. We see Tina across several decades: she travels through time and so the audience needs to be able to join her and costume allows them to follow her clearly.
Within each of those decades, the world changed a huge amount too. For example, the early 1960s were very different to the mid or late 1960s. Again, a costume designer’s job is to ensure that the audience can see this. The colour, texture and fabrics were so different in clothes of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. In Tina we’re not just creating ‘theatrical’ or spectacular costumes – often it’s the clothes that characters are wearing so there needs to be a visual fit, or sense, to what we choose for them.
In finding dresses for the show, we spent a great deal of time trawling for vintage dresses. 1950s dresses in particular are now quite thin on the ground. Sometimes a piece of clothing that we found didn’t fit a performer, but they were highly instructional in how we might be able to copy the design or use it to inform our own designs. By using original or vintage pieces in this way, we could lend a sense of authenticity and naturalism to the costumes that you’ll see on stage.
The most satisfying costume to work on was Tina’s dress at the end of the show – for the concert element that closes the performance. It’s a recreation of a dress that Tina wore for a performance but there are very few photographs or details about it, so we had to take a leap of faith that it would work on stage. It’s basically a mesh minidress, with large Swarovski crystals sewn on to it. It’s often the case that you don’t if a costume will deliver until you see it on stage, under the lights but in this case the dress, with all of the crystals, just explodes in colour like a disco ball!
Costume design and research has really changed with the advent of the internet! It used to be the case that mood boards, trying to track down expensive books for one photo or visual reference and time spent in libraries was time consuming and intense. Now with sites like Pinterest, and the breadth of information that’s now available online, it’s a much easier process in a lot of ways. One resource that I’m lucky to have is a big back catalogue of Vogue magazines. Not only do you see all of the fashion plates, the advertisements and the editorial give an additional flavour of that particular moment in time. In much of what’s available – photos in isolation with no context found on the internet, for example – you don’t get a sense of regular, working people but with historical items such as Vogue it’s made a bit easier. When you’re portraying those normal people on stage, it’s important to imbue the flavour of the people, the place and the period.
I think one of the most interesting and effective pieces of costume in terms of storytelling is the dark trench coat worn by Ike when the Revue are out on the road. It’s elegant, but it’s also slightly menacing. There’s a seductive quality to it, but there’s also a darker undercurrent and that was an effective way to communicate the character of Ike himself. Ike was a snappy dresser, there was a strong elegance to him, but much of the costume that he wears in the show helps to portray his more menacing side. There is a strong emotional thread to his journey throughout the show.
Because a lot of the footage that we used in research is in black and white, we weren’t slavish to any particular colour matching of the original items. We allowed ourselves some creative license. When we choose fabrics, we also have to consider durability. Each costume is worn eight times a week and much of it is washed every day so part of my role is to oversee the team who work in the theatre, and they can tell me if any of the choices we’ve made need altering: something might look incredible on stage but is just impossible to look after. I watch the show regularly to ensure that the visual quality is as high as possible. It should be as fresh and beautiful as it was on the first night – it’s only fair on the audience who might only see the show that one time.