If you watch The Wiz Live! on NBC-TV Thursday night, you’ll be seeing the work of Akron’s own Paul Tazewell.
If you’re lucky enough to score tickets to the Broadway smash Hamilton: same deal.
Tazewell is one of the nation’s top costume designers. He’s a five-time Tony Award nominee beginning with Bring in ’da Noise/Bring in ’da Funk in 1996, with Hamilton a good bet to add a sixth.
“We’ll see,” he said Wednesday in a telephone interview. “I never know. I try not to think about it at all. If I’m nominated, I’ll be grateful for that. And it would blow my mind if I won the Tony for that project because it has meant so much to me.”
A 1982 Buchtel High School graduate, Tazewell, 51, was already showing his skill in high school. An Akron Beacon Journal story from the time pointed out his accomplishments on and off stage and promised “you will be reading about Paul one of these days.”
At the time, he had ambitions as a performer. But even then, he said “you have to have a job while pursuing a stage career. That’s why I decided to study fashion design.”
His specialty changed when he went to college, at Pratt Institute and then the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. (He also has a master’s degree from the New York University Tisch School of the Arts.)
“Doing costumes was kind of a side interest but it wasn’t my focus back in high school,” he said. “But somewhere as an undergrad, I made a decision to really commit to being a costume designer, and that’s what I’ve been doing.”
Costume design “pulls together all of my interests. It’s about storytelling. I live vicariously through the actors. It allows me to be any character where, if I was a performer, I’d be typecast to be one kind of character or another. It allows me to do a huge amount of research, and I work with my hands, and I work with other people to create things. It provides an opportunity to explore things more fully, more wholly.”
A lot of exploration went into the new version of The Wiz, including an old Buchtel tie.
Costume design, Tazewell has often said, involves close collaboration with the director, in The Wiz’s case Kenny Leon, with whom Tazewell also worked on the stage version of A Raisin in the Sun co-starring Sean Combs. They had the stage version to consider, of course, and the 1978 movie.
Stephanie Mills, Dorothy in the original production, plays Auntie Em in this show. But all involved were also making something new, with performers also including Queen Latifah as the Wiz, Ne-Yo as the Tin Man, Amber Riley as Addaperle and newcomer Shanice Williams as Dorothy.
Overall, Tazewell said, “Kenny decided that he wanted to tell the story with Dorothy as a modern, teenage girl — and then, from there, all of our reference points kind of have to come back to her, and what her experience might be.”
That created vast possibilities. “It’s very easy for a person to have a strong imagination. So, knowing that, I began to cull through all the images I could find, looking at high fashion, looking at street clothes, and thinking about how can we reimagine Munchkinland? How can we reimagine the Emerald City? ...
“Hopefully, I’ve arrived at an original look,” he said. But somewhere in the back of his mind was a 1981 version at Buchtel, where he designed the costumes and played the Wiz.
“It’s interesting to think, even as I was inspired by the film and the original stage design, there are things that have remained the same year to year. Addaperle, the Good Witch of the North, is in blue, and she’s kind of patchwork. The way I did it at Buchtel was patchwork as well. ... Glinda is very golden. She is covered in fiber optics, so she lights up. And when I did it originally, she was in gold.”
While he said he did not think specifically about the Buchtel show when designing, “there must be some subliminal kind of trail I carry for how I tell the story in clothes.”
Doing a show for television also means accounting for differences in how the costumes will look compared to stage.
“You think about the fact that we’re close up, that we’re now shooting so much in high definition,” Tazewell said. “You’re going to see every detail. With stage, you always have a certain amount of distance that’s forgiving — if you need it to be forgiving.” On TV, you have to be “paying attention to what was around the face and making sure everything looked as perfect as possible.”
But this being a live production also “makes it very similar to Broadway. All of my crew needs to make sure it’s like a Broadway show, with no stops. There are commercial breaks, but even in commercial breaks we’re making changes. What we don’t have is an intermission, where you would get a lull of 15 minutes to 20 minutes to change sets, change costumes, makeup and hair.”
And mistakes happen, onstage or on live TV. “With anything, it would be somebody isn’t able to change their costume at the right time, or somebody busts a zipper — silly stuff that you can’t foresee. Hopefully, you’ve worked out all the kinks before you’re in front of an audience.”
The production has gotten up and running in a much shorter time than a Broadway show would have. Some of the TV preparation has been long in the making; Tazewell said he started work on the Wiz costumes nine months ago, and had roughly eight weeks to build the costumes. But there has not been a series of previews to fine-tune The Wiz.
Hamilton, the musical about Alexander Hamilton, went from workshop to New York’s 300-seat Public Theater before moving to its current Broadway home, the 1,400-seat Richard Rodgers Theatre. And it began trying out costumes during the workshop phase.
But whether it’s a musical based on The Wizard of Oz or a stage sensation inspired by an 800-page historical biography that provides the work, Tazewell is happy for a long career — more than 25 years professionally — and some great opportunities.
“I’m very, very fortunate and very grateful for the projects I’ve been offered,” he said. “It’s given me the chance to express myself creatively in wonderful ways, and Hamilton is life-changing. It’s such a beautiful piece, and really great people, and it’s made such a mark on the theater community.”
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal, Ohio.com, Facebook, Twitter and the HeldenFiles Online blog. You can contact him at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.