Angelina Avallone: My Three Broadway Monsters
Theatrical makeup design may not have the same high profile as costumes or sets, but try to imagine the impact of a musical like Young Frankenstein without it. For the past decade, Angelina Avallone has worked her magic on Broadway's most famous faces in shows ranging from Thoroughly Modern Millie and Sweet Charity to Curtains and The Color Purple. Along the way, the Bulgarian-born Avallone developed a specialty in shows featuring monstrous characters, beginning with the notorious Dance of the Vampires, plus Frozen designing creepy tattoos for the serial killer played by Tony winner Brian F. O'Byrne, Dracula the Musical, Sweeney Todd and Lestat. This fall, in addition to Young Frankenstein, she will be represented on Broadway by the larger-than-life title character in Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and the villainous sea witch Ursula in The Little Mermaid. But designing a show's makeup is only the first step. As Avallone explains, "I organize the entire makeup department and buy each and every pencil for every member of the company, down to the sharpener. I know exactly what is in every person's makeup box." Broadway.com asked this master artist to explain the process of creation for three of the season's most flamboyant characters.
I began my career in Florence, where I studied fashion and did some modeling. I loved the entire process of creating an image and a persona with clothes, hair and makeup. It's utterly transforming. I earned a masters degree from Yale in costume design, and I've dedicated my life ever since to working in the theater. I love telling a story through color and shape—it's about painting images onstage, layering the script, music, choreography, direction and acting with the scenery, costumes, hair and, of course, makeup. Creating the look of a character is a very important, very personal process of transformation for an actor. What the actor sees in the mirror before he goes out to face the audience informs his performance. It's like a second skin.
Ursula in The Little Mermaid
The Grinch in Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
The process of designing the look of Young Frankenstein's monster began for me as it always does, by reading the script. I researched Mel Brooks' movie and the classic Frankenstein monster and then consulted with director Susan Stroman, costume designer William Ivey Long and wig designer Paul Huntley, with input from Mel Brooks. Our monster isn't identical to the movie because the challenges of the stage are different. I have to think in terms of what will work for two and a half hours, eight shows a week, with an hour of prep before the performance begins. Then I come up with a formulation of theatrical makeup that will hold up under the lights and not come off on the other actors or their costumes. John Dodds, who designs prosthetics, and I experimented with a series of bald caps, eyebrows and scars to determine what will "read" from the stage. The trick is to find with a look that allows Shuler Hensley's expressions to come through. There's humor in the character but also humanity—ultimately there's something very appealing about this monster! The foam eyebrow piece and scars, which are hand-painted green, can only be used once; Dodds sends us 30 of them at a time. The monster's bald cap can be cleaned and reused for a week. Playing a character like this is a big commitment on the actor's part—the makeup has to be touched up at intermission, and it takes a half hour after the show to remove all the layers and glue from his face and hands.
After looking at the animated film of The Little Mermaid and consulting with director Francesca Zambello, costume designer Tatiana Noginova and the team from Disney, I started my work on the sea witch Ursula with swatch charts—blues, violets, certain greens—and did tests with a prototype of the character's wig. As I talked with Sherie Rene Scott, I began to see Ursula as frightening but also quite glamorous, like a movie star from the '30s. She's vain, with the sleekness of a predator. I took a field trip to the aquarium and read books on sea creatures to learn about their behavior. Octopuses are extremely smart! After all that research, the challenge became figuring out how to present the undersea world onstage without water. Ursula's makeup uses no prosthetics; all the shading is done with color and shimmer. It was a lot of fun to research the products. I looked at every glitter on the market, hundreds of them. We layer high-sheen products, pearlized products, glitter and eyelashes to create a contemporary, high-fashion, highly theatrical look.
My background in fine arts turned out to be a tremendous help in designing makeup for Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas! with a title character well known from Dr. Seuss' drawings. Jim Carrey played the Grinch on film in full prosthetics, but we wanted to avoid that because it would limit Patrick Page's facial expressions. Robert Morgan designed a wonderful fur costume with knobby knees, a belly, Grinch-like elbows and gloves with long fingers, so we thought, okay, let's not completely cover up this actor. Let's see if we can do this so he can use every muscle on his face. We went through two or three different looks—painting the face with cream makeup, shading and highlighting—and photographed every step of the process. The Grinch wears eyelashes and special green eyebrows, but everything else is done freehand; we use the musculature of the face to create shapes that are not there. In the end, we used four shades of green, two reds, a yellow, black and white. The Grinch has several four-show days, with seven shows on the weekend, and the role is so physical that the makeup sometimes has to be completely redone several times a day.