Creating & Running LA BOHÈME Costumes with MARY SEASLY

Before last week’s final dress rehearsal of La bohème I was able to check in with longtime Seattle Opera staff member Mary Seasly (left, photo by Philip Newton), who works these performances as Mimì’s Wardrobe Attendant. But long ago, Mary also worked on the team that created these now-iconic La bohème costumes. She told me a little about her work both then and now, and a little about the legendary designer Martin Pakledinaz.

Mary Seasly outside Mimì's dressing room
Philip Newton, photo

Mary, what’s the difference between working on the Costume crew and the Wardrobe crew?
Different skill set in many cases. The Costume crew is a group of artisans that have skills in building, fitting, altering costumes; tailoring, dress-making and all things in between: millinery work [hats]; and there’s often some footwear that needs to be modified or built, depending on the production.

And Wardrobe?
We are engineers. We make the costumes work for the production. That sometimes involves specific rigging, if there’s a quick-change...as we go forward in the rehearsal process you often find out those little specific things.

So it’s Applied Costuming; getting the costumes on this particular group of people, for this staging of the show.
Right. And in addition to getting the costumes on and off we support the performers in their performance: getting them dressed on time, making sure they’re comfortable, making sure they have water or whatever they need for their vocal production. (Sometimes that’s little candies or mints or something like that.)

It’s an intimate collaboration: you’re in the dressing rooms with them, sort of their ground crew.
That’s true. We are there for them, for whatever comes up.

You’re working Wardrobe now; but you also worked at the Costume Shop when these amazing La bohème costumes were first created.
Thirty years ago! Summer of 1991, I was a cog in the wheel of building these exquisite costumes. It was a huge crew, with many artisans from different theaters in Seattle.

What was it like to work in the Costume Shop in those days? They were over in the building that’s now the Armory, in those days the “Food Circus...”
They called it the “Center House.” We had a lot of space up there on the Fourth Floor. It was an old 1920s-30s building without air conditioning, so the windows would be wide open in the summertime, and we’d hear all the sounds of everybody enjoying the Fun Forest at Seattle Center.

In the story of La bohème Mimì is a seamstress...sounds like where she would go to work.
Exactly. She might have been building her own little pink hat. It was a great group, well-managed by some longtime employees of Seattle Opera. We were split between dress-makers and tailors, producing the women’s garments and the men’s garments.

Brandie Sutton in Musetta's Act 2 Costume
Philip Newton, photo

Musetta’s big yellow dress is iconic for this production of Bohème; but the guys look very smart, too.
Glad to hear that, we worked diligently. It was a hot summer and we were working with all those wools and velvets. Martin’s designs were superbly specific to the era. There was not a detail that was missed. The men’s coats, vests, and trousers all have fully-functioning pockets. Sometimes in costumes something appears functional but it’s not. But Martin required the real thing.

The choice was made to set the opera in the 1890s, around the time of composition. Which is not actually when the book takes place...the book is fifty years earlier.
Right, but it works beautifully.

Martin Pakledinaz designed costumes for a lot of great Seattle Opera productions over the years: Orpheus and Eurydice, Lohengrin, Iphigeníe en Tauride and the Ring cycle.
He was a joy to work with. Not always easy! But just impeccable designs. And thirty years later, we’re presenting them again, and they still stand.

Is it rare, for costumes to have that longevity?
This production has been used frequently by Seattle Opera, and rented out to other companies. There’s been a lot of maintenance, cheers to the Seattle Opera Wardrobe and Costume Shops for that. And it’s just as gorgeous as I remember it.

Do you have a favorite garment in the show?
I’m very fond of Rodolfo’s coats...but that little pink hat!

La cuffietta, the bonnet Rodolfo buys for Mimì!
There’s such a tenderness to what it represents. I think it’s a lovely little piece.

Elizabeth Caballero as Mimì and Francesco Demuro as Rodolfo remember when he bought her that pink bonnet in Seattle Opera's 2013 La bohème
Elise Bakketun, photo

It’s so distinct, it sticks out, you can’t miss it. And you get why someone would become fixated on it.
Why she would have it on her deathbed.

Is there anything unusual about your specific Wardrobe duties for this Bohème?
All of us in Wardrobe, our performers and everybody here in the theater, we’re all helping each other in this age of COVID.

The singers go out onstage unmasked; but is everybody masked, backstage?
We have a whole protocol of when the singers put their mask on, how they take it off, where they put it when they take it off...we use little Tupperware containers, clearly labeled with each singer’s name. The performer is responsible for handling their own mask, of course. Before they step onstage, it goes into the lidded container, and that’s reversed when they exit the stage and come back to their dressing room.

You guys have thought everything through!
We try.

A Center for opera—and for fighting COVID-19

Left: Susan Davis, Costume Director; photo by Alan Alabastro. In the Seattle Opera Costume Shop, Shanna Sincell, Laura Girardot, and Kate Hartman have assisted with the 100 Million Masks challenge.  

While the global pandemic has shuttered much of Seattle as we know it, a few people have still been hard at work in the Opera Center this spring. Rather than an opera destined for the McCaw Hall stage, these Seattle Opera staff members created masks to protect against COVID-19.

“Amid the stress that all of us are feeling, I am so glad that the opera could contribute in this tangible way,” said Seattle Opera Costume Director Susan Davis, who supervised an operation for Providence St. Joseph out of the Costume Shop. In less than four weeks—and working at least 6 feet away from one another—Davis’s team members produced 10,877 masks.

During the global pandemic, demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) has created a severe shortage across the world. While waiting for regular distribution channels to ramp up, Providence created the 100 Million Masks challenge to help in the interim.

Costuming Carmen

A toreador costume from Carmen. Trevor Giove photo

Seattle Opera sat down with Costume Director Susan Davis to learn more about the costumes for Carmen, which were envisioned by Gary McCann, Production Designer. Every Seattle Opera production takes approximately six weeks to costume from start to finish. This includes making garments from scratch, modifying or refurbishing existing costumes, and making any modifications that come up before opening night. This is the 10th time Seattle Opera has presented Carmen, and each time it looks a little different, Davis says. Bizet set his opera in the 1840s, and the fashions of this time period have an almost comical flair to modern sensibilities, Davis says. "But when you see an opera in a time period you recognize, it can offer audiences a closer connection to the story."

What’s your favorite thing about the costumes for this show?
It’s interesting to be doing this Carmen—it’s definitely new and different from what you saw on our stage last time, in 2011. Stage Director Paul Curran and his collaborator Gary McCann have set the work in the late 1950s. So onstage, you’ll see real clothes; vintage pieces (things you may recognize from your own closet if you were alive in the 1950s), and costumes used in Opera Philadelphia's production. As director of this work, Paul is thinking a lot about the haves, and the have-nots—from the factory workers struggling to make ends meet, to the upper-class in this story without a care in the world.

Staff Chat with Costume Shop Manager Susan Davis

Costume Shop Manager Susan Davis grew up abroad—Japan, Ethiopia, Egypt, among other places—and inherited her mother’s love of beautiful textiles. By her college years, she had taught herself to sew, got her first job in a costume shop, and a career was born. She first came to seattle in 1989 to work in Seattle Opera’s costume shop as a cutter. Several years later she co-founded her own company, Period Corsets, which sold handmade undergarments designed for use in theaters, and it was through this work that she learned the nuts and bolts of running a sustainable costume business. Since 2002, she has run Seattle Opera’s costume shop with the same eye for detail and an amazing capacity for coordinating her extraordinary team to make a bolt of fabric into the exquisite symbol of a character.

When did you first meet with Ginette Grenier, the Costume Designer of Nabucco?
I met Ginette in New York in April. We spent the week walking the garment district, looking for samples and selecting the fabrics. It’s a great way to get to know the designer because we’re together 15 hours a day, three meals a day, coffee break if we’re lucky.

Staff Chat with Lead Cutter MARY ELLEN WALTER

Lead Cutter Mary Ellen Walter has been making costumes for Seattle Opera for almost 30 years. Her expertise spans centuries of fashion trends, and she knows how to get our singers looking good and ready to perform with confidence.

What does a “Cutter” do in a costume shop?
We work in teams, with each team responsible for a certain number of costumes for an entire opera. As cutter, I develop the patterns, either by draping fabric on a dress form or simply working out measurements. The first hand on my team “chops them out,” as we say; and we have one to three stitchers on the team who put it all together.

How did you learn your craft?
By doing it. I got sucked into theater as I was working on a Bachelor’s degree in English, and since I was a girl, they made me work in the costume shop. When I moved to Seattle, working in multiple shops exposed me to lots of different cutters, different styles, different projects...that was my post-grad!

And how did you work your way up?
It’s not exactly seniority; it’s more skill-based. I was on salary at the Rep once when we had a slow season, so I made it a project to learn how to draft menswear.

What do you love about opera?
I need the whole package...music, scenery, acting, great direction. Stephen Wadsworth’s Orphée, in 1988, really opened my eyes to what opera can be.

You have some impressive equipment here at the shop.
Most of this is industrial equipment, such as the sergers that finish raw edges, and our button-holer. We have a foot-powered grommet-setter for laced-up bodices. Our crafts department is responsible for “distressing” costumes, making them look old and worn and ragged-out. For Parsifal, our team used cheese graters and rasps to destroy things, but it was so hard on their arms and muscles, Susan [Davis, Costume Shop Manager] bought a bench grinder.

When you create period costumes, are they historically accurate?
We consult historic pattern books...but eighteenth-century patterns are made for eighteenth-century bodies. People are much bigger today. Everybody goes to the gym, and opera singers are what they call in the tailoring book “chesty”—they have prominent chests. So you take the style lines, but not the exact patterns.

Do you have a favorite set of costumes you’ve created?
Mariusz Kwiecien sang Don Giovanni a few years back, and he’s a dream to work with—he loves clothes and always looks great. Marie-Therese Cramer designed a really fun set of costumes—based on historical shapes, but she twisted them. She and I got on a wavelength where she could say, “You know, a crazy cravat,” and twist her hands in front of her neck, and I knew exactly what she was talking about.

What about singers who aren’t as easy to costume as Mariusz?
We’ve certainly changed plans drastically if a costume just wasn’t working for a certain singer. Our job is always to make them look good.

Do you have strong feelings about updated productions, such as this one?
If it works for the story and characters, I’m all for it. I think it makes sense to set Rigoletto in the 1930s. It adds a bit more understanding for a modern viewer. We really know who that Duke is.

Can you take us through the process of creating costumes for the Duke?
We have Francesco Demuro’s measurements from last spring’s Bohème. It will probably take a week or so to draft his four costumes. We’ll do mock-ups, make some changes on the form, and then cut and stitch the real fabrics to the “fitting point”—sort of a rough draft of the costumes. Then, when he arrives, he’ll have a fitting, and we’ll make any necessary adjustments.

What are singers like during their fittings?
Some of them just want to get through it as fast as possible. Others are driven to entertain. And some of them, the “self-fitting performers,” may offer advice about how best to costume them—but the thing is, usually they’re right!

How do you make Rigoletto’s hump?
It’s mounted on a T-shirt, and goes on underneath his clothes.

I understand you were involved in selecting Aidan Lang, who will succeed Speight Jenkins as General Director later this year.
I was on a committee with the other collective bargaining units, and we met each of the candidates. The process was very transparent. I was flattered that our input meant so much to the Seattle Opera Board. And I think we got the right guy!

This Staff Chat first appeared in Seattle Opera’s program for Rigoletto in January 2014.
Photo by Alan Alabastro

Staff Chat with Crafts Supervisor LIA SURPRENANT

As the Costume Shop’s Crafts Supervisor, Lia Surprenant, more than per­haps anyone else at the company, knows how bloody the opera business can be. All of the countless opera singers who have been imprisoned, tor­tured, or wounded in the dramas enacted on Seattle Opera’s stage in the past nine years have worn a costume with Surprenant’s signature artistry.

You are the “crafts supervisor” in Seattle Opera’s Costume Shop. What falls under the category of “crafts”?
Crafts are everything you wouldn’t consider to be a standard cloth­ing item—jewelry, shoes, glasses, armor, hats, sometimes baldrics. Accessories, that sort of thing. And then I do all of the dyeing for the shop, unless we’re doing more than a 100-yard parcel, which we sometimes send out to dye in New York.

When we think about Lucia, we think of the iconic bloody dress. We don’t think about the person behind the scenes who has to clean that dress and make it bright white for the next performance. Are you that person? What goes into that?
Wardrobe cleans the dress each night, but I’m the person who figures out what type of blood to use and what solution we can use to remove it. Blood, honestly, is really difficult. With something like this show, where it’s a white dress that becomes bloodied and has to become white again, it’s a special challenge. You have to be careful of what kind of fabric you use. Generally speaking you can’t use silk—which is what we use for most of our costumes because it’s especially beauti­ful—because the washable bloods still stain it. Usually polyester is a good choice for fabric because almost nothing can stain polyester, but it doesn’t have that rich look that something like a silk or a wool or a cotton might have. I do a lot of testing and experimentation. Susan [Davis, Costume Shop Manager,] will usually give me several samples of fabric, and I’ll try different types of blood on different types of fabric and wash it out in different ways.

What are some “different types of blood”?
Right now our favorite kind of blood is Nick Dudman Blood, which we affectionately call “Harry Potter” blood. It’s what they used in the movie. It’s a very realistic color and it works really well. We’ve also gotten another new type of blood that we haven’t tried yet. It’s called ICU Blood.

ICU Blood?!
I should point out that most of the time when we do blood we do a permanent painted blood or a fabric patch blood. This is for somebody coming onstage already having been wounded, and it’s part of their permanent costume. That’s also challenging because directors always want that super shiny, bright fresh blood look and that’s really hard to do. It doesn’t really look like that when you get onstage under the lights, so we add things like super-fine glitter to the blood, or we’ll use silicone windshield sealant to make it shiny and wet.

Is there any carryover? Tricks of the trade that you find helpful in real life?
The best way to get blood out of a garment, if it’s a small quantity of your own blood, is to spit on it because there are enzymes in your saliva that take out your own blood.

You might be the only person I know who could dare to have a white rug and a white couch in her home.
I have too many ani­mals for that.

Aside from dyes and blood, what else do you do with costumes?
We also do a lot of distressing, which is prematurely aging a costume through physical means—sanding, using a bench grinder to grind the fabric, rasping it with rasp tools to make it look worn and shredded and then using paints to make it look dirty. There is at least one show every season where we have to age something so that it looks like the performer/character has been beaten up, tortured, or held prisoner.

Sounds like you’re seeing our singers at their worst.
We actually do see perform­ers at their most vulnerable, when they’re undressed, when they’re exposed emotion­ally as well as physically. We have to be very careful because we don’t want them to be uncomfortable. We want them to love what we’re making for them and feel that character coming out, so it’s kind of a tricky balance. I’m a shy person, and it’s difficult for me to invade someone’s personal space, but you have to do it some­times—get right up to them and do stuff on their bodies—and it can be very difficult.

Have you always worked in costume design for theater?
I’ve done a horror movie.

Of course!
It was called Night of the Beast. It was terrible; I don’t even know that it got released. All I know is that I worked on it and I never got paid.

-Jessica Murphy
Photos by Rozarii Lynch
This Staff Chat first appeared in Seattle Opera’s program for Lucia di Lammermoor in October 2010.

Staff Chat with Head of Wardrobe RON ERICKSON

When Ron Erickson isn’t teaching costume design for theater, opera, and dance at Cornish College of the Arts, he is backstage at McCaw Hall as Seattle Opera’s Head of Wardrobe. Always ready with a needle and thread or a calming word, he can handle any backstage costume malfunction or quick change with ease.

What are the responsibilities of the head of wardrobe?
My job is to make sure everybody has all the costume pieces that they need and that everybody gets dressed in the amount of time allotted. I check out the costumes once the shop has finished the work on them and move them to the opera house. I have to account for every item before every performance, from socks to hats and everything in between. I also hire dressers to dress the performers, and I maintain the costumes once we’re at the hall by doing laundry and repairs.

What kind of repairs?
A classic one was during The Marriage of Figaro. I got a page, “Please meet Cherubino in the wings with a needle and thread.” You don’t know what you’re walking into, but there was Cherubino and the back of her pants were completely split. She needed to go back onstage in about three minutes. We were holding flashlights so we could see backstage, and we stitched the back of her trousers shut so she could go back out for the rest of the scene. Other times it might be that somebody forgot a costume piece—a handkerchief, a hat, a watch—and we have to run with it because they usually notice it just before they’re going on. I love that part of my job, too. I like thinking quickly on my feet and coming up with a solution.

If you do the laundering, how in the world do you deal with stage blood?
Blood is the bane of my existence. For Bluebeard’s Castle, for example, we would boil the dress in a huge cauldron of chemicals, and it would come out pristine. I had this big spoon that I would stir it with; it was a head-of-wardrobe witch moment.

Are you involved in the quick changes? Can you walk me through that?
We start with a walk-through here in the costume shop: where do you put the jewelry, how fast can we pull the shirt off, and how to make the closures on the costume work to our advantage. Then we’ll do a quick-change rehearsal with the singers and dressers at the house. We choreograph it first without time. Then we’ll do it in real time and someone will be there counting down the seconds and we’ll see, did we do it? Do we need to do it again? The most problematic was The Magic Flute, where 8 blue-faced prisoners changed into gold priests in 90 seconds.

Do you get to know the singers?
To some degree, yes; it’s so exciting to have people come back. Some have even said, “You guys take such good care of us; we really appreciate it.” This job is not just about the costumes; sometimes it’s about making that person feel good because you know he has to go out there and perform.

What are Seattle Opera’s dressing rooms like?
They’re quite lovely. A nice suite, they’re large and private, and you’ve got that whole bank of mirrors with lights around them; it’s what you would hope a dressing room looks like. Costumes are in the dressing room with them, and there is also an outer greeting room, where the dressers and a husband/wife can sit and wait. Sometimes we’re the gatekeepers. We’ll ask, “Do you want this person to come in?” The performer will use a password to let us know what to do. The one person we can’t stop is Speight.

Do you ever get to see the show?
I can watch from the wings. I think it’s the best seat in the house. I wish the audience could see what I see, how it really works. It’s one of the things I love about the job.

-Jessica Murphy
Photo by Robert Wade
This Staff Chat first appeared in Seattle Opera’s program for La Cenerentola in January 2013.

"Distress" at the Costume Shop

Next week is Tech Week for Seattle Opera's production of Attila, when the company moves into McCaw Hall and one by one adds all the elements of production: the set, titles, orchestra, costumes, hair and make-up, lights, and finally the audience. So this week, at the Costume Shop, they're putting finishing touches on the costumes to get them ready for the stage and the lights. With the contemporary look Melanie Taylor Burgess has designed for Attila, finishing touches includes the curious process known as "distressing" the costumes.

Attila tells a down and dirty story of war, invasion, refugees, uneasy truces, and brutal power politics. The characters need to look as though they've been living hard for a while. So our skilled craftspeople in the Costume Shop distress the costumes, giving them the theatrical equivalent of years of wear and tear. Here, for instance, is a costume piece for one of Attila's men, before distressing:

And after, with dirt and texture painted-on:

The chain hanging from the pocket of this camouflage jacket is typical of the tools used by Jeanna Gomez, the artist responsible for distressing this piece; the heavy weight stretches the garment, bringing out the natural folds and wrinkles, and Jeanna then paints highlights onto the cloth, darkening the parts that get buried and brightening the spots where the lights will hit.

Stage light has a tendency to make everything look flat; the painting we're doing here, like stage make-up, fights that tendency, giving the pieces even more depth then they'd have in real life. When you buy new clothes off the rack, you want them to look flat and clean and spanking new. Distressing is the artful way of ruining that nice new look.

A couple weeks ago we posted photos of lots of our Attila costumes on our Facebook page. Those photos were taken pre-distressing:

Here, for instance, is Attila's great cloak, smudged as if he's gotten too close to one too many campfires while out on campaign:

You'll see some costumes getting destroyed onstage, too. The people who end up in Attila's entourage, whether soldiers or slaves, use the insignia of a big letter A. Here it is as painted, permanently, on a distressed costume:

But in the opening scene, you'll see Attila's men take several new prisoners and mark them in full view of the audience. They use a kind of chalk that can be sprayed at each performance and washed off between shows:

That way, the same costume piece will get distressed again and again--and the audience can see the process!