![]() ![]() I came back, I gave my company three weeks notice, and I showed up at Tom Watson’s doorstep. ![]() I got a leave of absence from my company, moved to Santa Fe, and at the end of that he asked me if I would come work at his wig studio to be the studio manager back in New York. He asked me to help him at Santa Fe Opera that summer. It wasn’t until 2005 that I made the right connection to switch careers full time, when I went to Tom Watson, who was the wig master for the Metropolitan Opera, the wig designer for Wicked, and was also wig master for the Santa Fe Opera. The other thing that New York doesn’t have is community theatre! So I just slowly started making connections while I was working in mathematics full time. ![]() I opened the yellow pages and was looking for community theatre. From that point, I had to just start making connections. I was in Chicago at the time-I’m born and raised in Chicago. The first job I had promoted me to basically head mathematician for North America, with the job located in New York. This is what I want to do.” My mother was obviously very supportive.īut I had to make a living, so I got a job in mathematics. But I was graduating, and so I called my mother at the end of the run of that show, one week before graduation, and I said, “Oh my God, I’ve made a terrible mistake. He taught me all the basics that I really needed right then. So basically, a mathematician and a physicist walk into a makeup room, right? It’s like the beginning of a joke. When I was finishing school back in ’94, I was complaining to a friend of mine that I had nothing to do for the last month before I walked down the aisle to graduate, and she said, “Why don’t you come help out at the theatre?” So I showed up, and she said, “We need help in hair and makeup.” I was like, “Okay, if you say so.” So I walked into the hair and makeup room, and the guy who was designing the show, doing hair and makeup, is today a physicist. JARED JANAS: I had a completely different career for 11 years-I was a mathematician. How did you get into hair, wigs, and makeup, and costumes, respectively? And what drew you to the theatre?ĮMILIO SOSA: I’ll let Jared start, because he has a more interesting trajectory than I do. Let me congratulate you on the amazing designs that you’ve accomplished thus far. American Theatre caught up with Emilio and Jared over Zoom last month.ĪLEXANDRA PIERSON: You both have had very busy seasons. Sosa also lent his talents to 1776 (with Neal) and A Beautiful Noise with Luc Verschueren, while Janas worked with Tony nominee Paloma Young on & Juliet and Sarah Laux on Kimberly Akimbo.Īnd though there’s no official Tony category for hair, wig, and makeup design, it’s clear that Sosa views those departments as part of a team effort. Sosa has two nominations for this year’s Tony Award for Best Costume Design for Good Night, Oscar and Ain’t No Mo’ (the latter of which he worked on with hair and wig designer Mia Neal, and makeup designer Kirk Cambridge-Del Pesche). The two designers are eager to support each other, even when working on separate projects. This year, they joined forces once again to work on Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and Good Night, Oscar. They share a shorthand, a similar sense of humor, and heaps of mutual respect. The two close friends and collaborators have known each other for over a decade, and it shows. Costume designer Emilio Sosa has five projects on Broadway this season, and hair, wig, and makeup designer J. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |