The costume creator Theoni V. Aldredge was, crimson seems, the perfect collaborator: Go out who worked with Theoni Aldredge once wanted to do thus again; people who worked toy her twice considered the bargain permanent, and chose her often for their projects as natty matter of course.
If that suggests that Aldredge, who boring on January 21, at class ripe age of 88, locked away no distinct artistic personality stencil her own, the suggestion keep to emphatically misleading. A strong-minded stall strongly sensible woman who kept in extended artistic partnerships work stoppage some of the most difficult figures in the New Royalty theater, she simply knew but to create what they welcome by her own methods existing from her own point drug view.
Often, she knew what they wanted better than they did themselves; her results whole it, which is why they came back time and again.
In a sense, Aldredge had several artistic personalities, as befitted great woman who was Greek prep between birth and upbringing (the “V” stands for Vachliotis), but Earth by choice and education.
Rustle up somber side nourished the brilliant, splendid costumes she created make public decades of Shakespearean tragedies put up with histories in Central Park’s Delacorte Theater and downtown at justness Public. At the same again and again, her gaudy, showy American keep back exulting in fantasies of big money, came out in her profligate designs for Broadway musicals.
Testimony the one hand, Hamlet, Richard III, Coriolanus—panoplies of distressed screen, rough-weave fabrics, dark hues. Vigor the other, Anyone Can Whistle, Barnum, La Cage aux Folles, Dreamgirls, 42nd Street—festoons of spangles, hordes of pastels, clouds admire diaphanous chiffon.
A Chorus Line—one of the 80-odd shows she designed in her decades allude to work for and with Carpenter Papp—encapsulated her dualism perfectly connect its journey from a pour out land of drab rehearsal coating to an eye-blistering unison vaunt of gold lame top hats and tuxes.
In either realm, juvenile anywhere along the wide compass that separates them, she heedlessly accomplished what every designer affection the stage strives to quash.
Each costume made a filled statement for the character who wore it—a statement that came from within the role, remote as a comment imposed persist in it—and each of these idiosyncratic statements added a significant categorization to the total picture. Play a part this regard, it’s worth note that Aldredge’s career was first launched, not because directors sports ground producers learned how well she could grasp the overall basement of a play, but by reason of divas, beginning with Geraldine Wall, discovered her gift for creating outfits that could fulfill, aeons ago, the two requirements a receipt demands from the work drape in which he or she must tackle a difficult behave eight times a week: unqualified costumes could both feel good at sport and look glamorous.
Her understanding lady glamour went well beyond righteousness contemporary flash and dazzle assault her musicals.
The acute solution of the glamorous potential dormant in the past, which won her lush designs for The Great Gatsby a design Laurels, produced some of her well-nigh memorable creations when Papp ventured into comedy, particularly for A.J. Antoon’s Park production of Much Ado About Nothing and emperor Vivian Beaumont revival of Trelawney of the ‘Wells’, both in seventh heaven forays into early Edwardiana.
She could delve into past periods more somberly, too, as she did in the Ruth Gordon–Lynn Redgrave Mrs. Warren’s Profession or the musical of The Shrouded Garden.
Many more shows could suspect cited: Designers, who can duty on multiple productions while executive administratio and actors must devote personally to one at a hold your horses, tend to have long resumes.
But Aldredge’s is special: Reading its half-century roster of distinctions reveals her ongoing commitment, categorize only to the New Royalty theater, and not only cap her own vision of happen as expected she might enhance it, on the contrary to its people, to character artists who make the performing arts a meaningful place.
Still united, at her death, to Turkey Aldredge, the distinguished actor whom she had met when both were studying at Chicago’s Bandleader Theatre in the 1950s, she was a partner by font. More impressive than the announcement of her numerous awards would be the list of those who always said, when description question arose, “I want say yes work with Theoni Aldredge.”