Vogue Australia: The year was 1986. Her Majesty’s Theatre in London’s West End was buzzing with anticipation as audiences gathered beneath its ornate nearly 100-year-old ceilings, unaware they were about to bear witness to the beginnings of a cultural phenomenon. For composer Andrew Lloyd Webber was about to debut his newest musical to the world—an adaptation of a modestly successful novel by French author Gaston Leroux about an outcast living beneath the bowels of the Palais Garnier in the 1880s.
5 comments:
In my opinion the way you can get away with a lack of historical accuracy is simply to make it look good, and this staging of Phantom of the Opera, as well as every other professional commercial staging before it, succeeds in that regard. This play is so beloved to me primarily because of the design and the interplay between different design areas. It’s an absolute visual spectacle that, in my opinion, is always worth it, regardless of the story quality (which, for Phantom, at least has good music, no matter how you feel about the plot.) Adapting and recreating costumes for a show that has such recognizable iconography not just in terms of set, but of costumes, is definitely no small task and I really love the way it looks here, especially to be designed on a much larger audience scale and to have to also withstand the elements.
I think this was a really interesting article, because it deals with redesigning, in a sense, one of the most well-known musicals that closed just a few years ago. I feel like this is honestly a really hard thing to do, not only because of historical accuracy, but also because of the exposure that this show has. I think it is interesting that they are doing a revival in Sydney only three years after the show had closed on Broadway, and I am curious about how it is going to turn out. I do think that no matter what, this show will make a profit, no matter where it is produced. I enjoyed that the article brought up the movie and the costume designs from that because that movie was on repeat for me as a kid, and was how I got exposed to Phantom in the first place. I am very curious to see these designs and will be on the lookout for new production photos.
Characters that find themselves in dramatic pieces of media tend to come with a characteristic or attire that makes them unique. Masks are a quite common example of a character's distinguishing trait. Superheroes are some of the most mainstream mask bearers as anyone could spot a batman mask from miles away and still recognize the character. The Phantom is quite similar as he dawns his half face mask. The phantom mask tends to be a more recognizable mask as it does not fit the common shape and color of many other characters in media. He uses the masks as extensions of his face and wears it proudly as he never wants to reveal the face that hides below. I love how his mask does not function as an addition to the character but rather the face that the character chooses to wear for the world. This is very similar to many people's everyday life as they alter their personalities to more easily connect with others.
I think designing for the stage and for large spaces definitely creates this challenge they describe of being bold with the design choices you make in order for them to read across large spaces. but especially with the period that the Phantom is set in there is a lot of Detail work that helps to inform the audience of the time period. So it's important to balance the dramatic and bold with, as they say, the intimate. I think it's definitely a big challenge costuming something that is super well known already because you don't want to copy what has already been done but you also want the audience to recognize the characters and understand the story in the same way that the original designer intended. There's definitely a balance of mimicking previous elements and also adding with the individual designers style in order to create a really unique and incredible show.
The article makes it really clear how much Phantom of the Opera depends on its visual identity and how difficult it is to touch something so recognizable without people immediately comparing it to everything that came before. Tylesova is basically working inside a world where the costumes already live in people’s heads, shaped by both the original stage production and the film, so even small changes feel loaded. I like that the piece doesn’t romanticize that process too much and instead shows how practical constraints like weather, distance, and scale end up shaping creative decisions just as much as artistic intention. Designing for an open air arena also changes what “detail” even means, since things that read beautifully up close can disappear completely from far away. It makes sense that everything has to be bigger, bolder, and more durable while still trying to keep some intimacy in the designs. It’s a constant balancing act between recognition and reinvention.
Post a Comment