Photo courtesy of Utah Symphony & Opera
Dressing for the Occasion
Utah Opera’s costumes earn applause nationwide
By Celia R. Baker
At Calgary opera, Arizona Opera, Hawaii Opera Theatre, or Washington National Opera in Washington, D.C., the music soaring into your heart flows through the genius of Wagner, Mozart, Verdi, or Puccini. But the costumes bringing the characters to life might have come from a repurposed warehouse on the west side of Salt Lake City.
Opera opens souls and reveals truths about the human experience, but to feed the heart, it must be a feast for the eyes, replete with visual cues that establish time and place as well as each character’s station, personality, and importance in the story. Done right, costumes can make an opera sing. Done wrong, they hamper performers and disappoint critics and audiences.
At the first dress rehearsal for Utah Opera’s recent production of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, the company’s costume director, Rose Brown, watched intently but heard hardly a note of Wagner’s dramatic musical score.
Wagner was an egotistical genius who aimed to control every aspect of the grand operas he produced. He might
not have admitted it, but his twisting, keening Dutchman leitmotifs—identifying snatches of theme music representing the characters, objects, and ideas—were only part of the recipe for breathing life into a ghostly sailor doomed to eternal wandering. As is so often the case, it took the right clothes to make the man. Brown saw it happen as she sat in the darkened hall.
“At that point, we are not paying attention to the singing,“ Brown said. “It’s all about the clothes, the hats, the shoes.“
Susan Memmott Allred, Utah Opera’s resident costume designer, sat beside Brown at the rehearsal, feeling the familiar thrill of seeing a show’s characters crystallized by clothes she designed for them. A pair of 19th-century greatcoats—one worn by the tormented Dutchman, the other by a young suitor, Erik—pleased her most.
Utah Opera enjoys an advantage many regional companies of similar size do not: an in-house costume shop staffed with a group of behind-the-scenes artists as committed to their work as are the singers they clothe. And the shop’s costume-making and rental business, Utah Opera Costume Shop, is getting recognition outside the state.
Making opera requires the talents of many, as orchestral and vocal music, drama, and visual design are combined into a cohesive whole. Opera’s art-melding nature so intrigued Wagner that he coined a new German word—gesamtkunstwerk, meaning “total work of art“—to describe it. Costume making depends upon layers of creativity and collaboration, just as opera making does. And the success of the enterprise is equally dependent on the talent and passion of those doing the work.
The process begins when Allred takes a director’s vision for an opera and creates carefully colored costume sketches for each character. A native of tiny Scipio, in central Utah, Allred grew up making costumes for school assemblies, working her way up to her job as Utah Opera’s resident designer. Her favorite career moments happen in the shop’s fitting room, each time she sees a performer try on one of her costumes for the first time.
“They change—they fill the part,“ she said. “It’s fun for me to think up the costume, then work with the cutter and stitchers to make it become what we all want it to be, and then to watch the character become that person.“
Allred’s artful sketches reflect an intricate understanding of what it will take to realize them: how much fabric will be needed and what it will cost; how it will drape and how it will look under stage lights; and the steps needed to create patterns and stitch the garments. She can do all the patterning, cutting, and sewing involved in turning her sketches to reality, and in Utah Opera’s early years, she did. Now, Allred relies on the costume shop at 336 N. 400 West, directed by Rose Brown, to turn two-dimensional sketches into three-dimensional clothing.
Brown is an energetic woman who keeps a magic wand in the pencil cup on her desk. The generous output of the shop she runs suggests that she uses it. Besides making all the costumes, hats, shoes, and accessories for Utah Opera productions, the shop does a brisk rental and costume-building business that brings nearly $300,000 each year into the opera company’s coffers. A long list of repeat customers testifies that the shop is doing something right.
“The quality of the workmanship is always very good,“said Ann Piano, who directs costume shops for Opera Colorado and Colorado’s Central City Opera. Piano relied on Brown’s understanding of what opera singers require from their costumes when Utah Opera’s shop built principal costumes for Central City’s Don Giovanni and rented others for its production of The Ballad of Baby Doe.
“Rose is a good listener and understands the right questions to ask,“ Piano said. “Building costumes for opera is different from making fashion or ready-to-wear clothing.“
Steve Hogan, chief financial officer for Utah Symphony & Opera, said the shop’s income from renting and building costumes for other companies helps balance Utah Opera’s books while providing convenience and professional finesse here at home. “Financially [the costume shop’s income] really adds a bit of stability into our overall budget process,“ Hogan said.
“The rentals cover a majority of the cost of the shop’s expenses,“ he added—no small feat in the nonprofit world, where enterprises rely on grants and donations for much of their funding.
Brown gravitated toward costuming after a midlife return to college. Her childhood love of playing dress-up lured her away from her nursing major and into the school’s theater department. When she settled on theatrical costuming, friends were supportive but bemused.
“They said they felt like I had run away and joined the circus,“ Brown said, laughing.
Now, she is ringmaster of an operation centered in the brightly lit room where Utah Opera’s tailors, drapers, and stitchers ply their crafts. The many, many things they create are stuffed into a series of ever-larger spaces deep in the cavernous warehouse.
One room is jam-packed with gloves, tights, belts, cummerbunds, and shoes and boots of all sizes and styles. Another holds costume weapons and armor of every historical age, all carefully cataloged for quick access. And, of course, there is a locked room sparkling with heirloom and costume jewelry.
“It’s not opera unless there’s a lot of bling on stage,“ Brown said.
In the “distressing“ room, costumes for The Flying Dutchman’s undead mariners were roughed up—shot with spray paint so wearers would look like scurvy sailors. In the millinery room, Carmen Killam’s handiworks—hats of every description—decorate the walls.
Killam can’t resist adding a secret bit of whimsy. An elaborate hat for a leading lady in last summer’s production of The Gondoliers includes a couple of items audiences can’t see: a tiny model of a shipwreck sunk among ribbons and feathers, and a plastic figure of the Disney clownfish, Nemo, found at last.
Most of Brown’s staff came to their positions as she did, satisfying their stage-struck souls through careers that keep them near the stage, if not on it.
Ken Burrell, head draper and cutter for women’s costumes, performed in choir and dance productions through high school and college, switching from a major in art to costume design along the way. Burrell found deep satisfaction in the dress he created for Senta, heroine of The Flying Dutchman, which was constructed to accommodate the opera’s most emotional moment. When
Senta leaps from a cliff to join the Dutchman in immortality, her dress must tear away in an instant, leaving her clothed in a gleaming white robe. The costume worked perfectly.
Brown is glad her staff members make a living wage but knows they make sacrifices to pursue the life they love. “You don’t do art because you want to, but because you have to,“ she said.
For tailor Milvoj Poletan, that’s literally true—in more ways than Brown means.
Growing up in Bosnia, Poletan knew little of opera and never imagined himself as part of the arts world. Following the example of his grandfather, he studied tailoring, and then earned a college degree in fashion design. Later, at a menswear factory in Bosnia, he supervised a staff of 72 cutters and stitchers. But that was a former life, obliterated by politics and war.
As an Orthodox Christian, Poletan found himself part of a persecuted minority after the Bosnian War and determined that his family had no future in their homeland. Shortly after immigrating to Utah in 2002, Poletan applied for a job at Utah Opera’s costume shop. He couldn’t speak enough English to tell Brown about the extent of his training.
“Rose said she would try me out for 15 days,“ Poletan remembers. “She didn’t say anything when the time was over, so I kept coming.“
Allred remembers that Poletan had to be taught costume tricks such as cutting extra-wide seam allowances to allow for refitting costumes on different performers. He caught on quickly.
“He was so grateful to be here, to have a job doing something he loved,“ she said.
Celia R. Baker holds a master's degree in music literature and history from the University of Utah, where she taught courses and conducted choirs. She is a pianist, singer, and lifelong arts enthusiast—and a member of the Mormon Tanernacle Choir. She writes for such publications as The Salt Lake Tribune, the Sondheim Review, Dramatics, and Critics Quarterly.
