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The Italian Girl in Algiers What you can tell from the clothes -- and why?
St. Clair, the Philadelphia Opera's costume director, had to come up with a suitable wardrobe for the girl, her beloved, her "uncle" (secretly a suitor), the Algerian Bey who's smitten with her, his elegant wife, the wife's maid, a dozen and a half sailors, an equal number of pirates, the same number (this is not a coincidence) of harem eunuchs, the same number of Pappataci (members of an ersatz fraternal order of food-obsessed feminists)--plus 11 male and 4 female supers (i.e., extras) who'd play up to five roles each and would need costumes for all of them. At the time, he was in the middle of managing the costumes for the Opera's production of Salome; Vizioli would be directing The Italian Girl in Algiers. Vizioli's ideas for Italian Girl came tumbling out stream-of-consciousness style in a marathon four-hour conversation, with St. Clair madly scribbling notes not only about costumes but about sets, business, everything. By the end of the day, he was back in Philadelphia, thinking.
Besides being knock-out gorgeous enough to dazzle the audience, the costumes--like the sets and the direction--have to pick up a lot of the slack. They have to tell you who's who, where to look, what to expect, and how to feel about it. Example: Lindoro, with whom Isabella, the Italian Girl, falls in love, is another Italian kidnap victim, but he's been in Algiers longer, so he wears Italian trousers, but a jeweled Algerian-style vest--and a cummerbund the same shade as Isabella's dress to create a subconscious sense of inevitability: You know the two of them are meant for each other. Besides dealing with all the semiotic issues, you have to bring the costumes in under budget, which isn't easy: You're not going to find 19th century Algerian get-ups at Franklin Mills. The choice, basically, is rent them or make them, or some combination of the two. St. Clair found a fabulous rentable costume for Elvira, built for another opera and used only once, that would've cost several thousand dollars if he'd had to build it himself. And he found plenty of stock pirate costumes--"rough-and-tumble things in rough fabrics and warm colors"--as well gondolier hats for the sailors, and shirts with a subtle red-and-green-on-white stripe that would remind you they're Italian and show up well on camera. That was another consideration: Because Italian Girl would be simulcast on WHYY, he had to design costumes that would work for people sitting in the back row of the Academy of Music's top balcony, and also work in close-ups on TV. Usually, when he's shopping for fabric for costumes, he'll sling several yards over a table and walk as far away as he can, maybe all the way to the door of the shop, to see how it'll read to the audience. Because the camera sees so much more, he says, he had to "split the difference."
What did Algerians wear in the 1800s? He spent a day at the Free Library, piling through all the books the librarians could find in the stacks that might bear on the subject. Around three in the afternoon, he hit the jackpot: Le Costume Musulman d'Alger, a history of Muslim costume in Algeria published in French in the 19th century, and full of pictures. Now he was ready to shop fabric stores in Toronto, New York and Philadelphia. "You go shopping first," he says, "then you go back and design based on what you can get." He found lots of sari fabric for his Algerians in Toronto, which has a large Indian community. But, for Isabella, he wanted a striped silk with more of an Italian feeling. "So I went to M&J Fabric in New York, which has the best selection of silks, and found exactly the right thing. Then I had to figure out how to get it to Toronto. To get it across the border, I had to say it was 100% silk, that it was a job lot--I have no idea what that means, but it's what you have to say--and the price and yardage." Isabella would be sung by Stephanie Blythe, whom he'd dressed before. "I adore her," he says, "she was Baba the Turk in Rake's Progress and Mistress Quickly in Falstaff, and since then her career is through the roof. People are coming from New York to see her do this: It's the first of five Isabellas she's doing across the country. Anyway, I knew she liked pinks and purples," so he knew the magenta dress and striped underskirt would work for her.
The director wanted "soft colors, a floaty feeling" for the eunuchs, and St. Clair found "some wonderful sherbet-colored antique satins" on Fourth Street in Philadelphia--one bolt dated June 15, 1967. The shop had lots of it, in aquas and melons and avocados, 1960s drapery colors. "Then, to make it floaty, we added chiffon sashes." He also found "the grandfather of all ball fringe with these huge pompoms: We thought it would be funny if the eunuchs had these big orange and turquoise balls all over their costumes, hanging and dangling and jiggling around." At Manny's Millinery Supply in New York, he noticed an old hat block, pointy on top, that he could use to make sherbet-colored felt hats for them. "And Tinsel Trading had fabulous raffia onions for the tops of the pointy felt eunuch hats." But it isn't just about fabulous: He also had to deal with logistics. For instance, the chorus have to wear their pirate costumes under their eunuch costumes so they can make a quick change, with means the eunuch robes have to cover everything, and fasten down the front with Velcro for a fast exit. But the Pappataci robes couldn't fasten with Velcro "because they take them off on stage and if they all did it at once there's be this huge rending sound...." The Pappataci are a ploy: They ply the Bey with food and drink to give Isabella and Lindoro time to escape, all on the pretext of inducting him into their make-believe secret society. St. Clair had a sort of Carmen Miranda idea for their headdresses, but the director decided they shouldn't be all fruit. "So we're doing foam rubber shrimp and a giant fish for one, and another has a chicken with these fabulous styrofoam onions...." Mustafa, the Bey of Algiers, has maybe the most spectacular costume of all. "He thinks Italian girls are all that," St. Clair says, so when he hears an Italian girl has been captured, "he gets himself all dolled up" to impress her. St. Clair designed the Bey's robes with huge dropped sleeves borrowed from "Le Costume Musulman." He left the sketch he sent to Malabar uncolored because he "wanted to wait and use whatever fabric was the most fabulous." He found a turquoise stripe that rhymes with the turquoise cast of the sky, then lined the insides of the giant sleeves in hot pink silk and added lots and lots of gold braid and frog closures and buttons and jewels. Everything twinkles. "It's really gaudy," he says. "But the director wanted over-the-top." Patricia McLaughlin is a freelance writer and a syndicated columnist based in Philadelphia.
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Richard St. Clair flew to Boston one day last May to talk to Stefano Vizioli about what a nice 19th-century Italian girl would wear to be shanghaied by pirates and held captive in the harem of the Bey of Algiers.
Designing costumes for opera takes a lot of thinking. You're dressing performers who'll be singing their hearts out in a language most of the audience won't understand and at a distance that keeps most people from reading their facial expressions. It doesn't help that the plots they're enmeshed in tend to be, to put it kindly, far-fetched.
Being able to rent some costumes meant he'd be able to spend more to build the rest--some at Malabar, a costume shop in Toronto, some by his own staff at the Academy, and one by Ben Morelli at Philadelphia Costume Company.
For her vest, he found "this very special piece of embroidery left from Oscar Wilde's waistcoat in Gross Indecency, which I designed last year. Pieces, really. I sent all these leftover scraps to Malabar, and they pulled it off." It's lovely: You'd never guess it was made of leftovers.