Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Creating Costumes in a Giant Ape's Shadow
Theatre Development Fund – TDF: Costume designer Roger Kirk didn't have to worry about dressing the title character for King Kong on Broadway. Apes don't wear clothes, even when a massive animatronic one is the star of the show. But the Tony winner faced many other challenges crafting the hundreds of costumes for this $35 million musical spectacle, which has been in development for the better part of a decade.
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Whenever there are new innovations, I feel like the theater world is one of the last to jump on it. Which is many cases makes sense because there are some forms of technology that wouldn’t perform well in a theater space, innately. But I think that this idea of animation and projecting is really neat. I feel like especially in this context, theater is really bring the movie screen to life and to audiences. Theater is known for conventional, more old school manners and I find it really exciting that people are branching out and exploring new things, let alone making the main character of a show an animation. It always hard for me to understand how people can work on singular project for years and years, and with this project the team did exactly that. It looks them almost a decade to create this musical and animation and I think it was well worth it. I feel like this show is something that no one has quite seen before and I can’t wait to see how the animations play in with the real life actors. I think the dynamic between human and technology is really being challenged in a new light with this production.
I had the opportunity to see King Kong just a few weeks ago. The show is an absolutely feat and truly a spectacle. After watching it I spent a good amount of time watching various videos and trying to figure out how they had achieved so many of the elements. It’s not surprising to me that the costumes felt overshadowed in the whole of it all. I can remember maybe three of all the costumes in the entire production and even then, not very well. I can say that they fit well into the world, which in a lot of ways means that the costume designer was successful at their job. Unfortunately it was not just the costumes that fell victim to the shadow of the ape, but a great deal of the various elements within the production, including the music. As more productions move towards such technical advancements, it’s hard not to wonder at what cost to the story telling these advancements may have. We will have to continually ask do all these amazing elements add or take away from the experience?
I think it's interesting, and a strong design choice that his clothing for the general cast is a pop of color against the black and white aesthetic. It helps set the two main actors apart from the rest, as they are dressed in silver and white. White always stands out to me, because, if you make the white a very bright hue, it's reminiscent of a light, and therefore my eye is always drawn to it. When the counterpart to your leading lady is a magnificent silverback puppet I think you have to go bright, or she'll just be lost in the action. Aside from color choice, it's interesting to see the pictures of the costumes, because they aren't plain, but they aren't overly, overly flashy, which is appropriate, because you don't want both the puppet and the costumes to upstage the actor. Another interesting point mentioned in this article is that these costume changes are ten seconds. Now I've experienced some close twenty second changes, but ten seconds is absolutely remarkable. I'm not a designer in any way so I can't even begin to think about how you would make the decisions on what to change in terms of practicality and design for these constantly changing costumes. It is impressive at how flexible he had to be during the process, yet while still creating strong finished pieces.
I have read so many articles about the puppet and technology in King Kong on Broadway, so reading this article about the costumes was really interesting. I think it is really important for everyone working on the show to know how their designs interact with the others and what is the main focus is at that point, so knowing when it is their turn to take a step back is very important. Roger Kirk seems to really understand the place his costumes hold in this show: making the characters pop on stage against all of the grey and black of the set and puppet. I think it is wonderful that Kirk has been involved on this show since the very beginning and I can’t imagine how rewarding it is to see the final stages of this show and his costumes after all of these years. The article mentions that he is planning on retiring soon which I think will definitely be a loss for the theatre community as he is a very talented costume designer. But it also sounds like he has had an incredible and successful career so I think he will be able to retire satisfied in his work.
This show is not necessarily a show I want to see just because I am not the biggest fan of the movies but I love costumes so I wanted to look at this article. I think that the puppetry in this show is amazing and hard to match so seeing the costumes is really cool. I thought it was really weird that one of the costumers had never sewn before because to me that it such an integral part of the job. I never really thought you could get past the first couple years of the job without having to sew. I love that part of the job because it allows me to sit and concentrate on something for a little while doing something that I find interesting. I also love that it changes all the time because of the different patterns and the stitch necesssary for the project. It was really interesting to look at the process and see what this costumer did.
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