Flurry of activity on new ‘Nutcracker’ costumes
The weather outside was stormy and warmish. Inside the Houston Ballet’s wardroom shop, it was chilly enough to craft snowflakes.
There, in a space that looks like a cross between a kitchen and a laundromat, was Monica Guerra, squeezing silver “puff paint” from small bottles to create frosty-looking patterns that were about a foot long, with fanciful faces in the middle.
They were prototypes for Tim Goodchild, who’s designing the sets and costumes for Houston Ballet’s new production of “The Nutcracker,” choreographed by artistic director Stanton Welch.
No production means more, financially, to Houston Ballet than “The Nutcracker.” The 29-yearold version by Ben Stevenson, which was retired in December, generated more than $55 million in ticket sales during the past 11 years.
Aiming to create a 21stcentury ballet that will be just as popular, the company is spending a record amount to bring Welch’s vision to fruition. Executive director James Nelson has estimated it could cost $5 million, including music rights and staff and talent wages.
It’s a massive undertaking with many moving parts and a multitude of details, including the quality of these snowflakes.
Goodchild wants the tulle tutus for the Snowflakes to have two layers of piping on top, with an icy quality. Guerra doesn’t usually care for puff paint — “it’s so crafty,” she said — but the vinyl-like results were achieving the right effect.
“It’s always fun working on a show like this because you can’t go too far, in a way. It’s never far enough,” Guerra said.
More than snowflakes are taking shape.
Goodchild has designed more than 250 unique costumes for the production. His sketch for the namesake Nutcracker, which began appearing Thursday on early ads for the ballet, shows a doll with a more normal-size head than the one familiar to generations of Houstonians, with a pronounced row of nut-cracking teeth. And many of the mythical characters Welch has dreamed up are not your ordinary Nutcracker suspects. Some are animals borrowed from films such as “The Chronicles of Narnia.”
Guerra had several pots cooking on her workroom’s electric stovetop, testing dye colors for fabrics that will be made into pants for some of the ballet’s Cadets and Cooks.
Welch wants the costumes finished by August.
Opening night is the Friday after Thanksgiving, more than seven months away, but even that schedule hardly seems time enough to get everything sewn. Many of the pieces, including several dozen Snowflake tutus, must be made in multiples. The Snowflake tutus will be made in London; other designs will be sewn at shops in New York and Chicago, as well as Houston.
“There aren’t enough hours in the day, it’s such a mega-operation,” Goodchild said. “We’re into the logistics now. Coordinating it has been a nightmare.”
Makers from New York and Chicago had just visited for early costume fittings that didn’t help his imagination, he said, “because the preliminary fabrics bear no relation to the fabrics you’re going to use. You think, ‘Oh my god, is it going to work?’ ”
In the big, open studio adjacent to Guerra’s workroom, he stood amid a cluster of rolling racks with hangers full of opulent fabrics from Italy, London and New York as well as the Houston textile retailer High Fashion Home: shimmery pinks for the Sugar Plum and her retinue. Fluffy tulles and silvery embroidered laces for the Snow Queen and her “parade.” Outrageously colored and printed silks and lavishly embroidered velvets for Asian, Russian, French and Arabian characters.
And the textured, black, watery-looking stuff?
“That’s for the penguins’ coattails,” Goodchild said.
A rack of bright wool plaids looked downright homespun by comparison. They were for the Act 1 party-scene characters, whom Goodchild calls the “mortals.” But he doesn’t envision them as plain.
“They’re quite dandified, if you think of that as a jacket and a pair of pants,” he said. “The men of the early 19th century were really like peacocks.”
Souvenir, a London company that builds sets for many of the West End’s big shows, is realizing Goodchild’s set designs. They’re doing the new Harry Potter play at the moment, “so they haven’t quite started us, although it’s on the drawing board,” he said.
The masks and headdresses also are being made in London, by Robert Allsopp & Associates. “Allsopp has got a marvelous knack for these realistic-looking headdresses that are perfect for dancers,” Goodchild said.
His drawings lay in deep drifts among pens and pencils on a desk near the studio’s patterncutting tables. The initial designs were approved months ago, and he’s now down to details such as specifying the trims on jacket cuffs.
He sees himself as the captain of a ship that could easily be blown off course.
“It’s very fluid. That’s the nature of the game,” Goodchild said. “Everybody has new ideas, and for practical reasons some things have to change.”
Welch has said as much about “The Nutcracker” itself.