Atascocita woman creates bold costumes for ‘Potato’
Costume designer Colleen Grady approaches every show as if it’s never been done before, but that’s actually the case with her designs for the world premiere of “The Sweet-Potato Queens” March 17-27 at Theater Under the Stars in Houston.
“It’s a musical about lifting women up together in all their fabulousness,” said the Atascocita resident, who is married to stagehand Mark Grady.
She has been aboard the project since early 2015 when composer
Melissa Manchester, lyricist Sharon Vaughn and writer Rupert Holmes approached TUTS with the idea of creating a musical based on Jill Conner Browne’s 1999 best-seller, “The SweetPotato Queens’ Book of Love: A Fallen Southern Belle’s Look at Love, Life, Men, Marriage and Being Prepared.”
Grady hadn’t read Browne’s book, she said, “But when I Googled it, I recognized the book cover. Obviously, I hadseen it displayedat book stores.”
The book cover fea- tured six Southern women dressed the same, in red wigs, cat-eyed glasses, green-sequined miniskirts and long pink gloves, which is what Browne’s first group of Sweet Potato queens wore when they scandalized onlookers the first time they rode in a St. Patrick’s Day parade in Jackson, Mississippi.
Brown called the group “the only female drag queens in existence, complete with fake rear ends andmajorette boots.”
Grady’s job as a costumer was to add hot pink feather boas, as well as design and build costumes that would juxtapose the group’s flamboyant fashions withhowthey dressed in the humdrum, everyday lives they desperately want to escape.
“I did resear chinto what Jill Conner Browne was all about, and the musical is basically her story,” said Grady. “A lot of what she espouses is ‘to love who youare.’ ”
Grady embraced the SPQ philosophy of empowerment “and ran with it,” said Marley Wiskoski, who co-directed the musical with TUTS artistic director BruceLumpkin.
“She put together a sto- ryboard with sketches for each character, and she totally ‘got it.’ ”
Lumkpin has played a big role in Grady’s life, she said, including hiring her at TUTS and introducing Grady to her husband when the three of them worked together on “Texas,” an outdoor musical at Palo Duro Canyon State Park. Grady grew up in Saskatchewan, Canada, where she danced in high school musicals, including “Guys and Dolls,” “Finian’s Rainbow” and “Swing Time,” whichshe calls “the ‘HighSchoolMusical’ of its time.”
At the University of Regina, Grady studied interior design, which meant she had to take an art class, which was next to the theater building.
“I was swept into theater,” she said, and because of her interest in set design and the influence of her father, who was an architect, “I got pulled into the costume shop.”
On her way to earning a fine arts degree in costume design, Grady spent summers working at the Main State MusicTheater, where Lumpkinwas a director.
There, she worked on musicals such as “Evita,” “The Who’s Tommy” and “The Music Man,” as well as her favorite show, “Carousel.”
“Its music is so beautiful,” she said. “It ran for three weeks, and every night wewould stop for the song ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone,’ and I cried every single time.”
If there is a song in “The Sweet Potato Queens” that can make Grady weep, she said, it would be “a sweet song” that the main character, Jill, sings in a duet with her younger self. Don Maines is freelance writer