by erin thursby scopes1925@msn.com
What: Shout! The Mod Musical
When: September 12-16, 2007
Where: Wilson Center for the Arts, FCCJ South
Looking at the song list of Shout! The Mod Musical, I got all nostalgic, and I wasn’t even alive when these songs first hit the radio. Still, they’re all great, recognizable songs. Of course what I was really interested in were the costumes. I’m a fan of vintage stores, and I troll the Internet for fashion sites with patterns and silhouettes of by-gone days. I enjoy knowing what a bifurcated garment is. (FYI, it’s just a fancy way of saying ‘pants.’)
So, of course, when faced with the choice of who to interview for a musical revue–style show that takes us through the 60s year-by-year, I choose the costume designer.
One of the first things that costumer designer Phillip Heckman made clear was that the costumes have a firmly British basis.
“When you research American 60s and British 60s,” says Heckman “they’re completely different…two sets of teenagers…that came from completely different worlds. I think the 60s teenager in London was much more fashion forward. They had the whole boutique culture in London…The boutiques offered high fashion to young, attractive, cool girls. Everything was very graphic…very eye-catching. It’s all based in British research. There is an American girl…but she wants so bad to be a British girl…so we never really venture into the American 60s look, until we get to the 70s, when we do have a bit of a hippie moment, as a little bit of a throwback to the American look. Generally…it’s all very, very British.”
Shout! The Mod Musical, didn’t begin as a large production on tour, as it is today. In fact, there was a time when it was staged in a petite black box theatre. Costume designer Phillip Heckman was part of the original team that put together the concepts and design of the musical.
“When we did the show in beginning of 2000 the show was done as a cabaret piece in a small cabaret here in New York and it was strictly music. There was no book [then]. It was just five girls doing the songs…I came up with, specifically, ‘Why don’t we just assign colors to them- to separate them’…The main reason for that in the very beginning was because we were just in a tiny black box, so we wanted something that would really pop, and we had no scenery…
“The more we did research; we found out that these colors were actually such a big thing for girls in the 60s. There are articles in old Vogues that say ‘If you’re this type of girl, you should wear yellows’…It’s just one of those funny, kooky 60s things that ended up working out in our favor.”
Once the musical became a larger proposition, it gained a set, and the set designer used the costumes as a jumping off point.
“I worked very closely with the set designer. We knew what the colors were (I just presented him with the shades of what each girl was) and David, the set designer, worked around that.”
Where the girl’s costumes stick to fairly solid, though dramatic colors, the wild set pulls colors from all of them, splashing the colors throughout the scenery.
Each girl, though separated by colors, also has her own sense of character, reflected in costume.
“We were trying to figure out how to costume them and the director suggested, ‘Well, we should have an all-knowing bad girl, a schoolgirl, fashion plate’…It’s a good example in costume design, of what I call designing characters. It’s not like…a fashion designer would design gorgeous, beautiful clothes, I sort of tackle projects… [by] ‘designing character’ and then the clothes are just sort of borne from who we think these characters are.”
Heckman constantly works on various projects, from magazine shoots to his own line of swimwear to his current project for T-Mobile.
“Six T-Mobile employees submitted dance…audition tapes and are going to be paired with Broadway dancers…They’re going to do a whole dancing with the stars type evening…They needed someone to costumes these Broadway dancers, and also these…real people.”
His swimwear line, which launched about a year ago, are fun, speedo-type suits. You can see his various works on philipheckman.com, or just see some of his costuming in person during one of the performances of Shout! The Mod Musical.
Tickets are available by phone via the FCCJ Artist Series Box Office at (904) 632-3373 (toll-free outside of Jacksonville at 1-888-860-BWAY) Or you can get them online at artistseries.fccj.org.
SHOUT! Showtimes at FCCJ
Wednesday, September 12 – 7:30 pm
Thursday, September 13 – 7:30 pm
Friday, September 14 – 8 pm
Saturday, September 15 – 2 and 8 pm
Sunday, September 16 – 1:30 and 7 pm
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