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Throughout the pre-Broadway run of “Good Evening, Oscar” on the Goodman Theater in Chicago, the actress Emily Bergl was recognized to the workers as “the girl within the Gown.”
As June, the spouse of the troubled raconteur-pianist Oscar Levant, Bergl wears a floral costume and matching chartreuse coat. The costume radiates the vitality of a Jackson Pollock canvas — black and daffodil-yellow on shimmering silver brocade, hand-painted to generate the right luster for the stage. It stands out in that present’s sea of impeccable fits.
Bergl calls it the Gown.
“I’m not discrediting my efficiency in ‘Good Evening, Oscar’ after I say that the Gown does half the work,” she stated.
When Bergl first met the person behind the Gown, the costume designer Emilio Sosa, he instructed her, “June Levant’s garments are armor.”
“I knew instantly that he understood the character fully, and that I used to be in good arms,” she stated.
In a current cellphone interview, Sosa stated: “Listening to actors is 95 % of my design. You’ll want to have your actors actively concerned within the costume they’re going to put on.”
This season, Sosa has dressed 94 actors for 5 Broadway productions in 450 costumes. He has earned two Tony nominations for his costume design, for “Good Evening, Oscar” and “Ain’t No Mo’,” a satire on up to date Black America. He additionally designed costumes for the revivals of “1776” and “Sweeney Todd,” and was co-credited with the designs for the Neil Diamond bio-musical “A Lovely Noise,” alongside Annie J. Le.
It has been a dizzying blur of appears, from smart fits to sequins, from American colonial-era costume to Crayola-colored camp.
At his busiest, Sosa discovered himself engaged on three exhibits without delay, averaging three hours’ sleep an evening. He follows a maxim he picked up early on from his mentor, Geoffrey Holder, “The Wiz” director and multifaceted cultural determine: “‘Say ‘sure’ to every thing — then work out tips on how to make it work.’”
Sosa, 57, describes himself — tongue firmly in cheek, he needs to be clear — as an in a single day sensation 30 years within the making. Sosa made his Broadway debut in 2002 with Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog.” His second Broadway present, for which he earned his first Tony nomination, was “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” in 2012.
Sosa was additionally a contestant on the truth TV competitors “Undertaking Runway,” in 2010 and 2012, an expertise he credit with constructing the boldness that allowed him to current himself and his designs.
In between, there was numerous “hustling, struggling, and making an attempt to earn a dwelling” together with loads of work in regional theater. “I used to be a damaged child with a troublesome upbringing,” Sosa stated. “However I found out, within the arts, nobody may beat me. So I developed that. That’s the place the drive comes from.”
If there’s one thing Sosa’s numerous tasks have in widespread, it is likely to be his enthusiastic embrace of shade. “In my tradition, as a Latino, we’re not afraid of shade,” he stated.
One in all his earliest reminiscences is of the colour blue. Sosa and his household immigrated to New York Metropolis from the Dominican Republic when he was 3 years outdated, flying Pan Am from Santo Domingo; Sosa cherished the blue of the airline’s brand.
“Blue was the primary shade I connected an emotion or reminiscence to. I bear in mind the brand, the colour of the carpeting, the style of the meals, the flight attendants’ uniforms. That shade has all the time stayed with me.”
Rising up within the Fort Apache part of the Bronx within the Seventies, Sosa was fascinated — amid the “chaos and destruction” — by glimpses of shade inside burned-out condo buildings. “You may see the inside partitions,” he stated, “since half the constructing was gone.”
His father labored as an excellent and handyman; his mom labored at a plastics manufacturing unit. He stuttered, couldn’t play baseball and had bother becoming in.
“I by no means felt I belonged, I by no means felt I seemed proper, I by no means felt something was proper about me,” he stated. “However then a trainer of mine used artwork to attempt to get me to return out of my shell. She put a coloured pencil in my hand, and I by no means let it go.”
He designed his first piece of clothes when he was 15: a shirt for his mom. He can nonetheless image the print — in gold, brown, emerald, mustard — acquired at a cloth retailer close to Union Sq. he’d as soon as been afraid to enter. (His aunt, a seamstress, sewed the garment; Sosa wouldn’t dare sew round his father.)
Initially, theater wasn’t on Sosa’s radar. That modified when, whereas learning trend design on the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, he took a summer time job with Grace Costumes, based by the stage costumer Grace Miceli. On the finish of the day, he would volunteer to comb up, sticking round to look at Miceli and her artisans at work.
“It gave me an appreciation for the craftspeople — the makers,” he stated. “It was higher than getting a graduate diploma from some tony-ass faculty. It was, ‘We’d like this costume achieved by 12 o’clock.’”
After commencement, Sosa labored as an assistant wardrobe supervisor for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and styled music movies for SpikeDDB, the promoting company based by the director Spike Lee. Designing commercials, some solely 15 seconds lengthy, Sosa discovered the significance of creating a direct visible influence. “Spike instructed me, ‘The viewers must know who this individual is the second they step in entrance of the digital camera.’”
However Sosa felt drawn to Broadway most of all, intrigued by the best way a single costume may communicate volumes.
“He’s an innate storyteller,” stated Stevie Walker-Webb, the director of “Ain’t No Mo.’” “He makes use of textiles as a substitute of phrases, silhouettes as a substitute of sentences.”
A memorable second in “Ain’t No Mo’” concerned a personality named Black — an incarnation of Blackness that bursts onto the stage carrying a quilt. The concept for the costume emerged from a Zoom name with Walker-Webb. Sosa seen one thing behind the director; it was a photograph of a 150-year-old household quilt, stitched by the director’s great-, great-, great-grandmother and handed by way of many generations. With that picture because the seed, the character turned, in accordance with Walker-Webb, “a dwelling, respiratory pastiche of Black historical past and tradition.”
“It’s that sensitivity, and curiosity, that makes Emilio a useful collaborator,” he stated.
There’s anothers challenge Sosa takes very severely: bettering variety backstage. In 2021, he was elected chairman of the American Theater Wing, a nonprofit that provides skilled growth alternatives to rising theater artists. He intently observes the Springboard to Design program, which inspires and mentors college students from communities underrepresented within the theater design business. “They meet fellow costume designers who appear to be them,” he stated. “We’d like extra set designers of shade, extra lighting designers of shade. I’m all the time making an attempt to push younger youngsters to get into these departments.”
As busy as Sosa has been, this was additionally a 12 months of studying for him. “I needed to actually dig deep, and actually focus, and step my recreation up simply to outlive my schedule,” he stated. If an intense schedule is the brand new norm, he’s ready to make it work.
“Planes, trains, and vehicles. Buses, park benches. I may sketch in the midst of Occasions Sq. if I needed to.”
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