The Minds Behind the Designs

The productions of 2019 feature over 650 costumes created by 49 company members—plus lots of volunteers—and by the end of the season OSF wig artisans will have crafted 80–100 wigs and hair pieces. In this photo essay, explore their handiwork in three shows—Alice in Wonderland, Hairspray — The Broadway Musical and Mother Road— along with the considerable thought, effort and history that went into designing them.

Costume Designer: Helen Q. Huang
Wig Designer and Wig Master: Cherelle D. Guyton
Costume Design Assistant: Sarah Beata DeLong
Wardrobe run crew: Kayla Bush, Breena Cope, Courtney Cunningham, Zachary Morrison
Wigs and hair run crew: Tiffany Zellner

“I want to emphasize that the costume designs by Helen are really the most important visual statement in our show. She has her design foot in two centuries. You will see she has re-interpreted the clothes the 19th-century characters might have worn, combined with a very quirky and up-to-date design sensibility.” —Director Sara Bruner

Bruner envisioned Amy Kim Waschke’s Queen of Hearts wig as “a red heart with blue veins.”

“When you see Alice in Wonderland, what I’m hoping for is that you’ll be able to see how the hair, along with the hair sculptures, tells a story—the differentiation between the Queen of Hearts’ and the Red Queen’s hair, where the highlights are placed and the lowlights are placed, the size and shape and scale of the sculptures they’re wearing.” —Cherelle D. Guyton

It took Guyton seven months to design Miriam A. Laube’s Red Queen headpiece, and building it was a nearly two-month process. Guyton enlisted her 8-year-old niece, Chloe, to help design Emily Ota’s pink hair color and curls for this 21st-century Alice.

Costume Designer: Susan Tsu
Costume Design Assistants: Carolyn Brooks and Sonia Alvarez
Wig Master: Micheal Iran Leon
Wardrobe run crew: Breena Cope, Courtney Cunningham, Lito-John Hechenova Demetita, B. Reeves
Wigs and hair run crew: Jazlyn Borkowski, Micheal Iran Leon

“In 1962 I was 12 years old. On Saturday afternoons we would practice all the latest dance moves in my girlfriend Julie Miller’s basement. We would work it out how to do the Frug, and the Mashed Potato and the Jerk to get those moves exactly right. Then at night, if we were having a sleepover, we would get out the orange juice cans and roll our hair on them, which were virtually impossible to sleep in. We tried anyhow. We learned those dance moves from watching Dick Clark and American Bandstand. “Fast forward a little bit, I have discovered this amazing array of information that I kind of thought I knew, but really, I learned a whole lot more. You can see the fruits of some of the research up front. I learned that Dick Clark integrated the dancers in his group, he took people on tour, and if they were refused service or housing, he left. The entire group left and went elsewhere to find a place to be, which I think is really inspiring. Back in those days I don’t know if I really had a grip on the depth of feeling that I would eventually have today about the Civil Rights Movement, about inclusion, about fairness in terms of body and race and sexual identity and all those things that are brought up within this musical.” —Susan Tsu

Costume Designer: Carolyn Mazuca
Wig Designer and Wig Master: Cherelle D. Guyton
Costume Design Assistant: Sarah Beata DeLong
Wardrobe run crew: Laura Coe, Lito-John Hechenova Demetita
Wigs and hair run crew: Klint Flowers

“Octavio has written such a beautiful world for these characters to live in. I grew up in Texas, not in Oklahoma, but it’s close to this area, and so I remember reading [the play] and thinking I know exactly who he is talking about and who these people are, and that they’re searching for home and history, and how their pasts are connected to the future and how the future is connected to the present, and how the present is again connected to the past, and how everything is just building on each other—so that William and Martín can come together as both the past and the future to create the present.” —Carolyn Mazuca

Mark Murphey’s wig was designed and constructed with an OSF colleague’s hair with damaged ends to create William Joad’s terminally ill look, while Jeffrey King’s wig includes hair from an OSF donor and two OSF company members.

“What I wanted to do was incorporate real, natural hair from different people, from all walks of life. After reading the work, I really wanted it to be more intimate, rich in culture, just real. It’s a little bit more challenging because it’s not based on the spectacle of a design. It’s based on knowing the history, knowing the family values, knowing the culture, and also knowing your actors and how they’re feeling about wearing it.” —Cherelle D. Guyton

Compiled by Julie Cortez. Find tickets and information at Alice in Wonderland, Hairspray and Mother Road.