St. Louis Magazine—September 2010—Costume Designer Lou Bird from St. Louis Magazine on Vimeo.
Lou Bird earns the rare satisfaction of seeing his wildly creative drawings come to life. His sketches of costumes for plays at Stages St. Louis, the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, and other local companies go from page to stage—and the process might be as interesting as the shows themselves. The costume designer (and theater program director at Saint Louis University) is responsible for the look of the actors in this month’s performances of the nostalgic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical State Fair at Stages.
In His Words…
• State Fair is pretty much like a photograph of the past, like a big Technicolor film. It’s a great big postcard advertisement for what a state fair used to be like, with the pickle judging, the 4-H kids, and all that—plus that Rodgers and Hammerstein flavor.
• Sometimes you embrace the danger of unintentional campiness. I’m not afraid to make State Fair as bright and colorful as possible and put a bunch of prints and plaids on actors, and make it all saccharine-sweet.
• You have to make allowances for dancing and movement in the costumes,
especially with musicals. Will it be worn in a dance number? Is it a tap number, which requires “springy” clothes? Is it a waltz, where you’d need fuller dresses with layers, so when the women twirl you get fabric and color?
• Drawing the costume-design sketches is the best part, before reality strikes and you get the budget and the shop manager tells you the other limitations. The drawings are done in fantasyland.
• I use colored markers to do the drawings, like anime artists and architects do. I probably have 700 in the set of markers I’m currently using. I take care of them like they’re children. In fact, I had to have them mailed to me in Rhode Island recently, and I was so scared they would get lost in the mail. At $7 a marker, that’s like $5,000.
• Think about the guys wearing their pants below their butts—in 10 or 15 years when we’re looking back at this time, and it’s time to write a musical set in 2010, will anybody really ever actually believe we dressed like that?
