LOS ANGELES — Step into the wardrobe department at the LA Opera, and it’s easy to see why Danyele E. Thomas is tickled pink.
Every rack, shelf and shoe has a rosy hue.
“Some people say a little Pepto Bismol pink,” Thomas said as she placed a particularly hot pink garment on a hanger.
Thomas is a wardrobe dresser at the downtown institution, in this show assigned to Gabriela Flores who plays Tisbe, one of the stepsisters. While pressing an iron to a ruffle, she jokes that she and are team are “modern day Cinderellas,” but that’s not a complaint. For her, this job is a dream come true.
As a little girl, Thomas loved clothes.
“My mother says I always changed like two or three times a day,” she explained, “and she says, ‘look at you doing it professionally now!’”
She also loved watching musicals, something she and her mother would do together. Costume changes? Musicals? It’s almost like a fairy godmother stitched this job together just for her.
“I’m in La La Land,” she beamed. “I mean come on. It’s a good world.”
But it's also a very busy one. The costumes for LA Opera’s Cinderella — otherwise known as Rossini’s "La Cenerentola" — were rented as part of a package from the Dutch National Opera, and it keeps the wardrobe department on their toes. Or their knees.
“See what we have to do,” Thomas said, pointing to a colleague who was down on the floor, carefully steaming each of the six delicate layers of the lead soprano’s gown. “This is the grind. This is the grit and grime.”
Onstage, the singers don’t miss a beat and offstage, neither does the wardrobe team as they cater to every rogue thread and loose sequins.
This is not your traditional Cinderella. No evil stepmother. No glass slipper. No helpful, harmonizing mice.
And unlike most operas, there’s no female choristers. Instead, the chorus is made up entirely of male singers in costumes that are just as pink and puffy and even include bustles.
“How fantastic is that?” Thomas cooed as she held up a transparent, fuchsia jacket.
Even more unique are their other costumes, dapper dress coats made of Tyvek, the same material used to make FedEx envelopes.
“It’s actually made of paper,” Thomas said. “They can’t sit in these costumes, OK, because you can’t iron them, you can’t steam them.”
Even the hats are made of paper, decoupaged with Tyvek squares and topped with long shredded strips instead of plumes.
“Isn’t that fun?” Thomas exclaimed. “It’s so delicate!”
Ultimately those hats will rest on perfectly coifed heads thanks to wig master Raquel Bianchini who's been working on this show for months now.
“We’ve been dying pink wigs since August,” she admitted, shooting down the suggestion that she might be tempted to dye her own mane magenta. “Absolutely not. I’ve seen enough pink for a while.”
Each of 40-plus wigs in the show represents about 40 hours of labor. These were not part of the rental package but instead were created in house, custom dyed to match the costumes and then carefully styled and curled.
“This is all yak hair,” Bianchini said. “Yak hair takes a curly like nobody’s business.”
Bianchini and her team work meticulously to make sure not a hair is out of place, even though the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is a huge house and they know the tiny bows and braids likely won’t be seen past the third row. But that’s beside the point.
“Even if the tiny bits of it aren’t going to read to the back row,” Bianchini said of the small details, “it still kind of creates a world and a texture and a variety of colors on stage that do make a big difference.”
“Every person in every department is part of the show,” Thomas said of the artists who put hours into those details that a majority of the audience won’t see. “It’s a puzzle. We all work together to make this production happen.”
It's like a crew full of fairy godparents, working hard to transform FedEx envelopes and yak hair into something truly magical.
