Judith Dolan has the kind of charm that would fit right in at the state fair’s cherry pie stand, so it can be surprising to learn that she’s soared to the top of her field—costume design—on Broadway while also rising in the ranks as a professor of design and associate dean at the University of California-San Diego. Her unassuming demeanor impresses total strangers. Right after she was awarded a 1997 Tony for her work in Candide, her second show with pre-eminent director Hal Prince, she found herself in an elevator with a man from the audience who recognized her as a winner. He turned to her and said, with some surprise, “Oh, you’re just like one of us.” Dolan responded, “No, I am one of you!”
Dolan, MFA ’73, PhD ’96, says being down-to-earth is essential to her career. Her goal is to make the audience feel what it is like to be the character, by creating costumes that erase the separation between viewer and actor. “You have to know what it’s like to be in the audience to be good at anything in theater. That’s the key thing.”
Dolan’s most recent work is LoveMusik, a Broadway offering about the courtship and collaborations of composer Kurt Weill (The Threepenny Opera) and singer Lotte Lenya. Nominated for a Drama Desk Award, her work on LoveMusik features 100 designs that exemplify the two strategies she uses to facilitate that interaction between the audience and the actor.
Dolan teaches her students that a good costume allows the clothing and the performer to become one. She adds, however, “It doesn’t mean the costume shouldn’t make a strong statement. Sometimes, the costume pulls the actor up and asks them to do something they don’t usually do.” Exhibit A: Her costumes for a hilarious tableau depicting playwright Bertolt Brecht in 1940s Hollywood with three honeys. Dolan, who says she took some inspiration for this scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, dressed the actor playing Brecht in an olive-green, two-piece man’s bathing suit and a beige elastic belt. The three female companions evoke the domesticity and earnestness of the period—one has her hair in rollers, another sports a blue-and-yellow, polka-dotted smock (and a sponge and a bucket of soapy water) and the last shows off her Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses with a big smile.
At other times, Dolan aims to create costumes that call no attention to themselves. While she ostensibly deals with clothing, she says that her true focus is on supporting the actor in a particular scene, and she looks for the moment “when you see the costume disappear and the performer emerge.” Prince praises this quality in her. “Judy builds costumes so that actors can live in them as the characters they’re playing,” he says. “She has a beautiful eye, and she has as much integrity as any designer with whom I’ve ever worked. You cannot force Judy to do anything just for effect.”
Her process on LoveMusik was like that of a painter who sets up her palette, fills in the background and, with each stroke, goes into more detail until the last dab of paint completes a masterpiece: “I have said to Hal, ‘These are like dance clothes. This little black dress is a shadow. They flit in and out. There’s a sense of lightness. I’m going to put something very abstract up there—it’s not really Weimar, and it’s not really now. It’s just an abstract shadow, a little thing, a little jacket, and then in the middle of that, I’m going to put a real 1920s vintage dress to go with it in the scene.’”
This painterly approach is probably to be expected of a designer who began as a visual artist. She was born the second of five children of a family living in a steel town near Baltimore. From a young age, she liked to sew clothes for her dolls. (“They were a little offbeat,” she recalls. “I insisted you had to see the stitching.” She lets out a loud, easy laugh when she realizes that she is, at that moment, wearing a baby blue blouse decorated with small dark blue X’s stitched along the edges of her collar and pockets.) At Towson State College, she majored in studio art.
There she met professor Georgia Baker, MA ’63, who encouraged her to apply to Stanford’s now-defunct MFA program in theater. Afterward, Dolan landed a job as the head of the costume shop at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. There she married actor and writer Raymond Hardie, and had the first of their two children. The family moved to New York in 1978, and Dolan sent résumés to every producer and director in the city. In 1981, she was invited to show her portfolio to Prince, and he hired her on the spot for Willie Stark with the Houston Grand Opera. Two days later, he offered her Candide, and then a week or two after that, Merrily We Roll Along.
Dolan’s work has taken her from soap operas (One Life to Live) to the Lyric Opera of Chicago, from winning the Tony to scrapping the costumes in a show three days before its first performance (Merrily We Roll Along), and from film work (The Rosary Murders) to the ivory tower. Through the high and low moments, Dolan has managed to keep perspective. In Merrily We Roll Along, halfway through the first number of the first dress rehearsal, Prince cut all the costumes because he felt that he had misconceptualized the show. Dolan needed new costumes for every character and every scene in the show, whose intricate plot began in the ’80s and unfolded backward in time, with characters growing younger and their relationships untangling. The solution? T-shirts that stated each character’s role: BEST FRIEND, GIRLFRIEND, EX-WIFE, SHRINK, etc. Dolan now says of what was a brutal three days, “I wouldn’t say it was my finest hour, but it was my finest hour in the sense that I had a 40-year Broadway career compressed into 40 days.” She can’t recall having to change a costume for a show since.
Dolan’s practical perspective tempered even a high point of her career, her work on Candide. She had created a gorgeous peacock-like bird puppet/costume that was the favorite of the whole cast and the producers, but she pulled it from the musical because she felt it was too spectacular for a show that otherwise was driven by a “poor theater” aesthetic. At the Tony Awards that season, she talked with the actress who had just handed her the prize. The actress told her, “You almost didn’t take it. I saw you hesitate.” Dolan admitted she had paused, because she had the thought, “If I take this, is it going to change things in a bad way? Is it going to make me do things I’ve always been free not to do? Is it going to constrain me?”
Free and constrained both describe Dolan’s life right now. She juggles her students, her duties as associate dean of UC-San Diego’s division of arts and humanities, her costume design work and even directing. She is free to do everything she wants, which leads her to have the kind of schedule for which frequent flyer programs were made. Some people never in their lives see all the cities Dolan hits within a handful of weeks: Prague, New York, Berkeley, London and San Diego.
Now that LoveMusik, which took more than two years of work, is over, Dolan will be directing a play written by her husband: Stoker, about Dracula author Bram Stoker, featuring music by the English singer/songwriter Joe Jackson. She’s also designing three shows: a theatricalized song cycle, Beulah Rowley, by musician Mary Lee Kortes; The Machine Stops, based on an E.M. Forster short story; and another to-be-announced musical with Prince.
Dolan describes the effect of her costumes as “kissing the audience and then running away.” Running off to do another show, most likely.
LAURA SHIN, ’97, is a writer in New York.
