Linda Cho loves a big show. Or rather, she’s made it something of her specialty. She just won her second Tony Award for The Great Gatsby, a project that required close to 300 costumes. Her previous Tony was for A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, another period piece which had a cast of 12, but Jefferson Mays had over eight costume changes.
“I tend to do a lot of giant shows,” Cho exclaims, chuckling. “Actually, I find giant shows sometimes easier than small shows, because when there's three costumes on stage, that's all people are seeing. And so everything is this micro, precious thing, whereas when you have 25 people on stage and they're all moving, you can do these sort of big, big gestures anyway. And I have amazing people. None of this is possible without an amazing team.”
On Gatsby, that team includes associate costume designer Patrick Bevilacqua (who is also the show’s wardrobe supervisor) and assistants Elivia Bovenzi Blitz and Michael Schaffner. The directive for the look of this new iteration of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel came from director Marc Bruni. “In our early conversations, there were discussions: ‘Do you want to do an abstracted Gatsby? Should we do a sort of contemporary take? How do you want to do it?’ And Marc Bruni's direction was, ‘Let's do the Gatsby of people's imagination.’ For me, that imagination is something that is going to be decadent and beautiful.”
Cho and her team have created close to 300 costumes for Gatsby, which include the individual costumes for swings and understudies...READ MORE