TDF Stages

Stephen Cabral, the Director of the Collection, shares a few gems and lots of history as we prepare for our Costumes & Cocktails celebration on April 7

---

How do you measure, measure 50 years? That's what the TDF Costume Collection is figuring out as we prepare to celebrate its silver anniversary at Costumes & Cocktails on Monday, April 7 at TAO Downtown. A gritty-glam disco party, the sold-out event will feature pop-up performances, our annual Irene Sharaff Awards honoring the design community and a dazzling display of prized pieces that were donated to the Collection over the past half century.

Located in a spacious warehouse on the historic Kaufman Astoria Film Studios campus, the Collection offers more than 100,000 costumes (plus accessories) for rent to both commercial (Broadway! Saturday Night Live! The movies!) and nonprofit clients. With that many treasures to choose from, picking five to encapsulate the past five decades wasn't easy. But Stephen Cabral, the Director of the Collection, was up for the challenge.

"We have ten hats by Theoni V. Aldredge from A Chorus Line, which opened on Broadway in 1975, so, like the TDF Costume Collection, it's celebrating a milestone anniversary. It was a groundbreaking musical that revolutionized the genre, much like the Collection did with costume rentals. Before we opened, most costume rental places were making things to have as part of their stock. We only rented donated items and used sliding-scale pricing instead of package shows. To me, A Chorus Line is emblematic of 1970s Broadway. Aldredge's initial costumes for the characters are iconic. She created a specific look for each dancer so that when they began to move around, you remembered who was who—one even wore a TKTS shirt. But in the end, when they put on the gold suits and hats, it's the complete opposite. She wanted them to all look the same. If you're a theatre lover and you see those gold hats, you know immediately what show they're from and you hear the 'One' vamp in your head."

"Theoni V. Aldredge also designed and won a Tony Award for the costumes for La Cage aux Folles, which opened in 1983. It's significant in theatre history as the first Broadway musical that centered on a gay relationship and publicly acknowledged the AIDS crisis. But the clothes were also unbelievable because Theoni was given license to really go crazy. The costumes were so wild and beautifully designed—there had been nothing like it since the Ziegfeld Follies. It felt that grand and big and created for audiences to go, 'Wow!' The Collection received the donated costumes decades after the show closed on Broadway, right before the pandemic. They were used on countless tours so they're not in great condition, but they are historically important. This is one of George Hearn's costumes for when his character Albin was in Marlene Dietrich-style drag as Zaza, the star of the title nightclub. It's legendary."

"For the 1990s, I thought about highlighting Rent or Disney's first Broadway musical Beauty and the Beast. But I chose a piece from Jelly's Last Jam because that show is so important to the Collection. The costumes for this 1992 musical were designed by Toni-Leslie James—it was her first Broadway credit! The show was about Jelly Roll Morton and explored the origins of jazz and how it is deeply rooted in the African-American experience. I loved the designs because they went from the Reconstruction Era to the early 1940s, and then there was the whole aspect of Jelly being in a kind of limbo. So Toni had to come up with all of that. The costumes were donated soon after the show closed. We received everything: hats, shoes, every single piece. Fifty to 60% of the items are still in stock to rent. They were really well made! And they go out all the time. Even Toni has periodically come back to rent her own pieces from this show. This dress is from when Phylicia Rashad went in as a replacement for original star Tonya Pinkins."

"I picked The Light in the Piazza for the 2000s. Catherine Zuber designed the costumes and won her first (of eight!) Tony Awards. This dress was made for Kelli O'Hara, whose character is traveling with her mother in Italy in the 1950s. Cathy is a nut about historical research, and she wanted to make Kelli and Victoria Clark, who played her mother, look like quintessential mid-20th-century Americans. We don't rent this one but the sister dresses—that's what I call the copies made for alternates or replacements—go out all the time. They went out for Sunset Boulevard at the Kennedy Center and were just used in the stage adaptation of Schmigadoon! The Light in the Piazza closed in 2006 and the costumes took a while to get here. For almost a decade, they were stored in a barn and the boxes got rain and snow and critters in them. When the costumes arrived, we had them dry-cleaned and thankfully, they were all usable. Sometimes costumes don't arrive in the best condition, but we try to look through the years of horribleness to see what's salvageable."

"A good friend of the Collection, Gregg Barnes is being honored with the TDF/Irene Sharaff Award for Sustained Excellence in Costume Design this year. So I chose one of his costumes from Something Rotten!, which opened on Broadway in 2015, for the 2010s. Gregg is sort of like the Bob Mackie of Broadway, known for sparkles and glamor and beads. Something Rotten! is a musical comedy set in 1590s England and you're dealing with Shakespeare, so you'd think it would be dark and velvet and heavy. That's not what Gregg gave us at all. He chose vibrant colors and layer upon layer of sheer fabrics and beautiful trims. Not only is Gregg getting the Award for Sustained Excellence this year, he was also our inaugural Young Master Award honoree in 1994 (now rechristened the Kitty Leech Ascending Artist Award). When he received the first award 31 years ago, his career was just beginning. Now he's getting an award for everything he has done since then. And he's constantly working: BOOP! The Musical is in previews on Broadway, Disney's Hercules is starting this summer in the UK and I hear rumors of other projects. He has been and will continue to be one of the leading designers on Broadway and beyond. And he's been renting from us since he was a student at NYU! He often knows our stock better than we do. Also, Gregg is a designer who donates items to us. Getting donations from Broadway is never something that we assume. If a Broadway show is a huge success and runs a long time, the producers hold on to all the costumes because you never know when one will be needed for a last-minute problem. With a less successful show, some producers want to sell everything involved to try to make some of their investment back. Gregg has given us many costumes over the years. I am so honored to call him a friend."

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Learn more about the TDF Costume Collection, including how to rent or donate costumes.

All costumes photos were taken by Joey Haws.

---

TDF MEMBERS: Go here to browse our latest discounts for dance, theatre and concerts.