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[0:10] Rob Russo: Welcome to DANCIN'' Man, a Fabulous Invalid podcast featuring exclusive behind-the-scenes interviews with the cast and creative team of Bob Fosse's DANCIN' on Broadway.

[0:18] Jamie DuMont: I'm Rob Russo, I'm Jamie DuMont, and we're your hosts.

[0:21] Rob Russo: We're also excited to be co-producers of DANCIN' on Broadway and thrilled to be back in the Roosevelt Cocktail Room at Civilian for another conversation.

[0:29] Jamie DuMont: Yes, and if you're a frequent listener of the show, you'll know that we don't only talk to cast members of the show, we also talk to members of the creative team.

[0:36] Rob Russo: And this week we are really excited to be talking to Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, who are the incredible costume designers.

[0:43] Jamie DuMont: Reid and Harriet both met at FIT, we'll get into that, and have been very, very successful designers, mostly in the dance world for ballet and modern dance companies.

[0:53] Rob Russo: They make their Broadway debut with DANCIN'.

[0:56] Jamie DuMont: And if you've seen the show, you know precisely why they were hired.

[1:00] Rob Russo: And it was thrilling after the show opened to read all the reviews and to see that their costumes got raves across the board.

[1:07] Jamie DuMont: Well, let's talk to them.

[1:08] Rob Russo: Let's do it.

[1:20] Jamie DuMont: Welcome to the show. We are talking to you just a few days after opening night, which you must be exhausted.

[1:27] Rob Russo: The show got great reviews, and we couldn't help but notice that every review raved about your work.

[1:32] Jamie DuMont: In fact, our favorite was the critic who called them zesty.

[1:36] Rob Russo: How are you feeling today? Are you feeling zesty?

[1:39] Harriet Jung: Maybe zesty's not the word.

[1:41] Reid Bartelme: I'm not yet zesty.

[1:43] Harriet Jung: Not yet, I think we're on the calm down.

[1:45] Reid Bartelme: I feel really relieved, relieved, and exhausted, but glad.

[1:53] Harriet Jung: Glad you both know we've been working on this since last fall, winter because we soft opened at the Globe in San Diego.

[2:03] Reid Bartelme: So it's been a very long time.

[2:06] Harriet Jung: You know, we've spent a long time with DANCIN'.

[2:10] Reid Bartelme: And the show wasn't frozen until the week that it opened, which was, you know, last week, right?

[2:15] Jamie DuMont: Which I imagine means that the costumes weren't frozen until then. Is that accurate?

[2:19] Harriet Jung: No, I don't think we really froze them until the day before.

[2:22] Reid Bartelme: There you go.

[2:23] Harriet Jung: Okay. I mean, minor shifts. I don't think anything like skirt hems, things like that.

[2:28] Reid Bartelme: Sure.

[2:29] Harriet Jung: Yeah. I mean, we were making substantial changes maybe like a week before, putting in whole new things.

[2:35] Reid Bartelme: It's been our whole life for quite a while.

[2:38] Jamie DuMont: Now is that it? No more costumes for DANCIN'? Is that, are you done? Or are there any things you didn't get around to that now you will get around to?

[2:48] Harriet Jung: We have fittings tonight already scheduled for some of the understudies.

[2:53] Reid Bartelme: So still working on some things.

[2:56] Harriet Jung: Yeah, there's still incoming built costumes.

[2:59] Reid Bartelme: There's six understudies.

[3:00] Harriet Jung: Right. And right now their tracks are like mostly complete.

[3:05] Reid Bartelme: And then when they've had to go on during previews, we've improvised.

[3:09] Harriet Jung: So they still have like special garments coming in for fittings. Most of it's done, and it's just the little few fittings, which is fine.

[3:18] Reid Bartelme: Yeah, and as much as we sort of it'd be nice to walk away from the project, we also hope that there's a future for DANCIN', as like maybe it'll tour.

[3:28] Harriet Jung: I feel like they'd love it in Europe. There's not a language issue.

[3:33] Reid Bartelme: They'd love it.

[3:33] Harriet Jung: So we're hoping like things go on.

[3:36] Reid Bartelme: I mean, it'll be hell to put it back up on new bodies, it'll be awful.

[3:41] Harriet Jung: But yeah.

[3:43] Reid Bartelme: But a good way.

[3:44] Harriet Jung: In a good way.

[3:44] Reid Bartelme: Yeah.

[3:45] Harriet Jung: Yeah.

[3:45] Reid Bartelme: Yeah.

[3:45] Harriet Jung: Well, we're also hoping that it has a very long and successful life.

[3:48] Reid Bartelme: Yeah.

[3:48] Harriet Jung: Tour the world, tour America.

[3:51] Reid Bartelme: Wow.

[3:51] Harriet Jung: Run on Robbins.

[3:52] Jamie DuMont: How many times have you seen it?

[3:53] Reid Bartelme: I keep telling people a redacted number of times, but I've actually lost count.

[3:57] Harriet Jung: I know the number, but I'm not gonna tell you on it.

[4:00] Reid Bartelme: We've been there a lot.

[4:01] Harriet Jung: Yeah, and we've been there a lot.

[4:02] Reid Bartelme: And we've spied you standing at the back of the orchestra.

[4:05] Harriet Jung: In fact, we had the great privilege of sitting in the row behind you opening night.

[4:08] Reid Bartelme: I watched you all watching the show, which was really a treat.

[4:13] Harriet Jung: You got into it opening night.

[4:15] Reid Bartelme: Wow.

[4:16] Harriet Jung: The sense, the relief mixed with this amazing show and, you know, a bit of wine, and I was having the best time of my life.

[4:24] Jamie DuMont: Okay, before we get into your costumes, because we've been asking all the dancers this, what's your favorite moment in the show? As an audience member on opening night, what was your favorite moment in the show?

[4:33] Reid Bartelme: My favorite has been consistent this whole time, and it's, um, ooh, can I say calypso?

[4:39] Harriet Jung: Yeah, I think though it's called percussion.

[4:42] Reid Bartelme: Percussion three, right?

[4:43] Harriet Jung: Three is my choreographically just the performance.

[4:48] Reid Bartelme: I love our costumes for it.

[4:50] Harriet Jung: We love that part best.

[4:51] Reid Bartelme: But opening night, I have to say, after sing sing was like a very exciting moment.

[4:57] Harriet Jung: Oh, yeah.

[4:58] Reid Bartelme: Crazy, right?

[4:59] Harriet Jung: Yeah.

[4:59] Reid Bartelme: The audience just went bananas.

[5:02] Harriet Jung: They should.

[5:03] Reid Bartelme: Yeah, we love a berserk audience.

[5:05] Harriet Jung: Really exciting.

[5:06] Jamie DuMont: Well, we're gonna get into all the little nitty-gritty about your costumes and your process, which we're really excited about.

[5:11] Reid Bartelme: No, in a fun way, in a fun way, Reed. Don't worry, don't worry.

[5:13] Harriet Jung: We hope we remember things.

[5:17] Reid Bartelme: Yeah, we might have to slide.

[5:18] Harriet Jung: We might have to.

[5:19] Reid Bartelme: No one is gonna question you.

[5:21] Jamie DuMont: Before we get there, we had read that you both met at the Fashion Institute of Technology. They do very different backgrounds. I believe Reed, you had a career as a dancer, and Harriet, you were like a scientist, right? Like cellular biology or something.

[5:35] Harriet Jung: I do have a major, a degree in molecular and cell biology.

[5:39] Reid Bartelme: I know all these things.

[5:40] Harriet Jung: I was a little research, you know.

[5:43] Reid Bartelme: Wow. So we're wondering if you could share with our audience just a little bit about how you met and how you started your partnership.

[5:49] Harriet Jung: We both enrolled at FIT at the same exact time, I guess with the aim of a kind of career transition.

[5:56] Reid Bartelme: And we were both doing the evening and weekend program for people who have jobs.

[6:02] Harriet Jung: So we were in the women's wear program together, which meant we had a bunch of our classes together.

[6:08] Reid Bartelme: And I was sort of drawn to Harriet. I was like, she's quiet and she's talented, and I forced her to be my friend and talked to me about the work we were doing because there wasn't a lot of like intellectual discourse about the sort of tasks we were doing at FIT. It was just a lot of work, and I wanted to like talk about it more and understand what we were doing, and Harriet would allow that.

[6:34] Harriet Jung: I was very focused. I was working and very focused on this like career transition I was trying to make happen in New York. I'm from California actually, and so I wasn't really paying attention to the people around me or even interested in making friends at that point.

[6:51] Reid Bartelme: But Reed early on, I mean, he's a charmer, he's a talker. Immediately was like, What are you doing?

[6:58] Harriet Jung: Yeah.

[6:59] Reid Bartelme: We had a really good teacher our first semester at school named Mary Bridgman who sort of encouraged discourse and talking about design presentations, and I just that just sort of didn't exist in other people's classes, but I just carried it with me through the whole curriculum.

[7:14] Harriet Jung: And then what happened?

[7:16] Reid Bartelme: Well, I finished the program in two years, and then I got, you know, my dream job as a women's wear designer with Jill Stewart in New York.

[7:26] Harriet Jung: And then Reed, I took another year to finish because I was also being a dancer through the whole thing. So there was I would miss key classes certain semesters. So I had to pick up the slack with the last year.

[7:38] Reid Bartelme: And then I started asking, people started asking me in the dance world, oh, now that you know about clothes, will you make my costumes? And I was like, uh, costumes was kind of like a bad word at FIT.

[7:52] Harriet Jung: You know, if you were being critiqued on your project, like the word costume was an insult.

[7:57] Reid Bartelme: Why is that? Do you think?

[7:58] Harriet Jung: There's an association with like a kind of broadness and a kind of on-the-noseness with costumes that like fashion tends to try to shy away from. Fashion wants to like figure out what is new and what is cool and what is sexy, and costumes are kind of looking, there's a different frame of reference at times.

[8:19] Reid Bartelme: I don't think that's always true, and it doesn't have to be true. And I think Harriet and I have like made a lot of effort to make that not true in our work.

[8:28] Harriet Jung: So I was resistant, but it just felt like another thing to try, another way to like figure out how to make clothes. And at a certain point, I was overwhelmed with school, and a couple people at that time were asking for costumes for various things, and I asked Harriet to collaborate with me on a couple projects in my last year, and that was that.

[8:48] Reid Bartelme: We just kept going.

[8:50] Harriet Jung: Off to the races.

[8:50] Reid Bartelme: Off to the races.

[8:51] Harriet Jung: And one of our first earliest clients was Justin Peck.

[8:56] Reid Bartelme: He was also just starting sort of asking us to design a duet for like a youth grand prix gala.

[9:06] Harriet Jung: And this is before Justin was established really as a choreographer at New York City Ballet.

[9:10] Reid Bartelme: We really treated it like we are we want this duet we were applying for a fashion job. We created a full new collaborative portfolio for Justin.

[9:20] Harriet Jung: And after that, he was like, okay, but I think he would have probably said okay, either way.

[9:25] Reid Bartelme: Yeah.

[9:27] Harriet Jung: That became a very fruitful partnership that you had, right? Together.

[9:29] Reid Bartelme: It continues.

[9:30] Harriet Jung: Continues.

[9:31] Reid Bartelme: Yeah.

[9:31] Harriet Jung: We've done like 15 to 20 dances for Justin Peck, and then we have two more coming up this spring and summer.

[9:38] Reid Bartelme: So yeah, it's on and on.

[9:40] Harriet Jung: So primarily you've worked in the world of ballet, is that fair to say? Or just dance in general?

[9:43] Reid Bartelme: Yeah, ballet and dance.

[9:45] Harriet Jung: Yeah, dance in general.

[9:46] Reid Bartelme: Yeah.

[9:47] Harriet Jung: Yeah, like the breadth of our work goes from the ballet and then to sort of more esoteric performance-based dance work.

[9:56] Reid Bartelme: Um, and then even like more classical modern dance companies.

[9:59] Harriet Jung: So dance in general.

[10:01] Reid Bartelme: New York, a lot of the time.

[10:03] Harriet Jung: And now Broadway.

[10:05] Reid Bartelme: And now Broadway.

[10:06] Harriet Jung: Now Broadway.

[10:06] Reid Bartelme: Now Broadway.

[10:07] Harriet Jung: We're Broadway.

[10:08] Reid Bartelme: Now and forever.

[10:09] Harriet Jung: This is our first Broadway show.

[10:11] Jamie DuMont: So how did you come to DANCIN' or how did DANCIN' come to you?

[10:15] Reid Bartelme: We got an email from Joey Parnes, which we thought was fake.

[10:20] Harriet Jung: Yeah.

[10:20] Reid Bartelme: Because we didn't know that that's how you can get a Broadway job.

[10:23] Harriet Jung: Nor did we had we heard of Joey Parnes.

[10:26] Reid Bartelme: So we thought this is a scam.

[10:29] Harriet Jung: We don't know anything about Broadway. Who is this person? This is a con artist.

[10:32] Reid Bartelme: And so I texted Justin Peck. I said, Who do you know who Joey Parnes is? And he was like, Oh, yeah, he was one of the partners of XYZ and worked with me in Keras.

[10:43] Harriet Jung: I don't know.

[10:43] Reid Bartelme: D he said it was real.

[10:45] Harriet Jung: And so we were like, wow.

[10:46] Reid Bartelme: Wow. And so then we had to do a Zoom with Joey.

[10:47] Harriet Jung: Zoom with Joey.

[10:51] Reid Bartelme: It went well. Then we had to meet with Wayne Cilento.

[10:55] Harriet Jung: Also went well.

[10:57] Reid Bartelme: And then we sent them a follow-up email to say, like, what do you want us to do next? And they said, You're hired.

[11:05] Harriet Jung: That's incredible.

[11:06] Reid Bartelme: So did you have to present them with any like initial designs or anything? Or they just looked at your portfolio, all the work you've done and said, yes, we want them?

[11:13] Harriet Jung: They looked at our website, had some, you know, got to kind of talk to us and get to know us. And then I think they perhaps vetted us through people we knew who kind of bridged the gap between Broadway and dance.

[11:26] Reid Bartelme: I think Corinne Herrera is the one who really knew who we were.

[11:31] Jamie DuMont: Well, it's fascinating because if you look historically at the original DANCIN', Willie Kim was the costume designer.

[11:37] Reid Bartelme: Iconic.

[11:38] Jamie DuMont: Iconic, right? And she was revolutionary in terms of the material that she brought to Broadway, right?

[11:44] Reid Bartelme: And in terms of the actual fabric, right? Like the literal makeup of costumes, but also had a dance background as well.

[11:50] Jamie DuMont: It would make sense that the impulse would be, okay, well, let's find people who know how to costume for dance since we've got an all-dance show.

[11:57] Reid Bartelme: Right.

[11:57] Jamie DuMont: Right. So I'm curious, as you were getting to work on the show, once you were hired, once you got through all the Zooms and the calls and the vetting, how did you start your process? Was it a lot of research? Was it sort of, you know, kind of looking to your own vision and not wanting to focus too much on what had been done in 1978? Share a little bit about how you approached your designs.

[12:19] Reid Bartelme: Well, for me, I felt early on the message I got from Wayne was he is we are not interested in looking too much to what happened visually in the 70s in the original DANCIN'.

[12:35] Harriet Jung: So we did a, I did, you know, we looked at a little video footage, we looked things up online, but I personally did not do too much research and mostly focused on what I'm interested in now and what this show sounds like, looks like now.

[12:56] Reid Bartelme: At the time it felt like there was very little to draw on in terms of physical research. There was a crummy video, and there was like a couple drawings that Christine, who was one of the stagers, sent us from Willa's archive.

[13:11] Harriet Jung: But yeah, we were going on very little, and we were in conversation with Wayne and Corinne, and then we put together a kind of visual bible of ideas and color codes and things that we could draw on to make sure the show would sort of hold together once everything was designed.

[13:31] Reid Bartelme: And then it was really just a process of like presenting ideas to Wayne and then shifting them until he would have a comfortable reaction to it. And that continued up until last week.

[13:47] Jamie DuMont: And I imagine, I mean, since you're coming from the dance world, you're very experienced at taking something that's either new, like a new collaboration with Justin Peck, right? And creating a world and a sensibility from whole cloth. Or even if you're interpreting something that's been done before, you know, dance is obviously a more abstract art form. There's story and there's character, but lots of times that story and character can be, again, very abstract. And you've already referenced one number in the show, Percussion, which is one of the more abstract parts of the whole show. So, you know, I imagine it can be both very freeing to not have like, you know, if you're doing Wicked, right? There's a very set story and characters and a world that you can sort of that you're kind of confined to. With this, I imagine you had sort of a freedom to come to it with any ideas you wanted and then to see what would stick. Was that your experience?

[14:40] Reid Bartelme: The first section we saw in one of the early workshops was Calypso. And then in a next workshop, we saw Ding. And I thought this is they were smart to hire us for this. Seeing what those sections offer to the show, as we kind of tried to understand more of what this show was and how varied the mood and the way in which the show sort of touches down with narrative, then things became a little bit more challenging for us. We had to exercise design muscles that we don't often have to, that we're not called upon to exercise. Like people started asking us about hats. And I had no idea, I don't know any hats. What is a fedora? What is a pork pie? What is a Stetson? I have no idea. So this was a whole education for us in like shapes of hats, shapes of jackets, shapes, you know, things that we don't normally deal with in abstract dance. Wayne was instrumental really in helping us to find our way into sections that were more sort of conventionally costume, like theater costume.

[15:49] Harriet Jung: Big City Mine would be an example, right?

[15:51] Reid Bartelme: Yeah. Well, and sing singing too sing, yeah. Well, sing sing came more from our own desires and our visual research. Harriet found an image of it. I really was looking at Cher and sort of Bob Mackie, kind of frothy, sparkly images, and we felt that that was right for this thing. And that stuck from day one. Like our very first design presentation for sing sing is very close to what it is today.

[16:22] Jamie DuMont: What's an example of something that is wildly different from what your initial concept was?

[16:28] Reid Bartelme: America.

[16:29] Harriet Jung: Whoa.

[16:31] Reid Bartelme: Have you seen new footage of the or were you at the Old Globe?

[16:36] Harriet Jung: We were at the Old Globe.

[16:37] Reid Bartelme: Yeah. And honestly, I remember what Ida was wearing, right? I remember how I that's the first thing I clocked was how different Ida's costume is. And then obviously the we call them the superhero suits. Please forgive us.

[16:49] Harriet Jung: That's fine.

[16:49] Reid Bartelme: Um which I don't recall at all, but I don't remember any other costume in America. They were cobalt blue, and they had these like kind of bolero jackets with a satin sash. Like we were referencing like drumline stands and stand uniforms.

[17:09] Harriet Jung: Yeah, we never liked them, I should say.

[17:12] Reid Bartelme: You made them but you didn't like them.

[17:14] Harriet Jung: Yeah, we liked like the sketch part we were into when we sketched it, we were like, this seems like it could work. Also, this was based on seeing rehearsal, which is very bare bones, no projections.

[17:31] Reid Bartelme: Right. And it felt like it could work in the rehearsal space, and then we got to San Diego, saw all the other elements, and it just became too comical, and that wasn't the message clearly that they were going for. Um, and the whole band element didn't make sense anymore. We regrouped, we realized it had to be kind of more stripped down. And the dance, the final number of America has this incredible choreography with all this pivoting. And so we had this idea that the clothes needed to be different on each side. So you get this effect of the pivoting. And so we went with black and white, which is easy to create like a stark contrast.

[18:19] Harriet Jung: When did the gloves and the bowler hats come into the picture?

[18:24] Reid Bartelme: Really last late in the game.

[18:25] Reid Bartelme: Late in the game. We weren't sure if they just hadn't been ordered in time or if that was something that you just you added on.

[18:26] Harriet Jung: Yeah, we noticed it late in the previous game.

[18:32] Reid Bartelme: Wayne called me on a Saturday afternoon and left me a message. And he said the night before that, I had run into Wayne just like as I was leaving. He was like, What about bowler hats for America? I was like, okay.

[18:47] Harriet Jung: You famously not knowing a lot about hats, and suddenly now.

[18:51] Reid Bartelme: I know. Oh, he said a derby, and I was like, I literally know what that is, which is incredible.

[18:58] Harriet Jung: Thanks to this project, right? Now you're a hat expert.

[19:00] Reid Bartelme: Yeah. Well, I am curious, since we're talking about it, you both obviously had to learn some new language in terms of the costuming that you were doing. What's the biggest surprise? Like, what's your favorite thing that you hadn't worked with before or hadn't costumed or hadn't even thought about that? Now you're excited about.

[19:19] Harriet Jung: When I watch the show now, I get kind of like a kick out of like sloppy menswear. So like Manny Herrera's track I really love. Like I feel proud of his costume track because it feels real and lived in, and like he seems so comfortable in it. And that's new for me to like experience like something looking disheveled and being like, I love it.

[19:47] Reid Bartelme: I would imagine you didn't expect you to be doing prison wear.

[19:50] Harriet Jung: Well, the twice in one show. I mean, Big Deal takes place in the 30s. There was a lot of visual research that was pulled, and I was initially going to do these like very correct prisoner costumes with like broad blue and white stripes, but it wasn't meant to be in terms of like money and time when we were at the Old Globe. And so we just pulled all these distressed jumpsuits that they already had, and then Wayne and Curran loved them. And so we just went forward with those for the New York production. But they weren't the original intention.

[20:20] Reid Bartelme: Well, something that you've already referenced at the top in the context of, um, you know, future productions, right? Let knock on wood. That means fittings. That means new bodies, that means, you know, a whole process that has to happen. We interviewed um William Ivey Long on this podcast years ago, actually, before the pandemic. And one thing you said to us that stuck with me is that he knows he's done it right when during the fitting he gets a smile from the person he's, you know, fitting, right? How do you know at what point in the process that you've like you've you've nailed it? You've got it exactly right. Do you have is it in the fitting? Is it when you see it on stage? Is there no one moment?

[20:59] Harriet Jung: Well, I want to just go back a little bit to say that another thing that Wayne and Curran really made important about costuming the show is that let's treat these performers as individuals, even within the show. So even if it's a group look, we were, you know, very interested in knowing these people as you know, actors, but also people and what they enjoy wearing, what makes them look good, what makes them feel good, what's gonna make them perform their best in these specific sections? For us, sometimes it's very clear because we created an environment where I think they all pretty much felt comfortable telling us this is no.

[21:43] Reid Bartelme: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[21:45] Harriet Jung: So we've had um, yeah, we it was always there was always dialogue happening and getting to know these actors, we knew what made them feel good, also what highlighted what they wanted highlighted on their bodies. It was always very clear with this group, whether they liked it or not, they would tell us.

[22:02] Reid Bartelme: Yeah, yeah.

[22:03] Harriet Jung: Was that new for a director or choreographer to say to you, I want you to costume based on, or I want you to consider the individual and the personality? Was that something you'd never heard before?

[22:14] Reid Bartelme: A lot of times in dance, we do sort of one look for this entire group, especially in ballet. There's sort of a uniformity that's in, you know, encouraged. Um not always, but yeah, you know, that does happen often. So it was it was made, it was interesting to have Wayne be like, I would I really want them to be themselves also.

[22:39] Harriet Jung: For you as designers, how was that creatively? Knowing that you you weren't gonna be doing uniform looks throughout the show, that you were gonna be able to design multiple looks for different personalities as an artist. Did that feel was that daunting or was it liberating?

[22:56] Reid Bartelme: It was both. It was way more work, you know, like a number like Crunchy. It's just one number, but it is individual looks for everybody. And it's not just 16, it's 22. Right. Because the understudies are also their own thing. They can't duplicate anyone because you never know who they're going in for. But it was also an incredible challenge that I loved doing. And it, you know, hope hoping this show goes on. If there are other cast members, we will have to put on our dance and design hats again and create individual looks for them because they also can't just be repeats of something.

[23:36] Harriet Jung: And you want the job.

[23:37] Reid Bartelme: I want the job. We want the job still.

[23:41] Harriet Jung: Yeah. Well, it's very clear from at least observing all the social media that the cast does that they really love working with you and that they are so proud of their costumes and how they feel in their costumes and how they look in their costumes. Um, and I imagine that bond that you've created with the dancers, you know, came as a part of working with them one-on-one, you know, on specific looks and and and how they felt in the clothes themselves.

[24:10] Reid Bartelme: Yeah. I mean, we've spent hundreds of hours with these people. We've seen every surface of their bodies. Like it's a very intimate situation to be in fittings for so long. And also, like you it's so vulnerable. It's a really vulnerable situation to have to be a dancer and perform on stage and then also be in this environment where someone else is deciding what you're gonna wear. And there's a kind of like negotiation that has to take place between us and their feelings and what we want and what they want. And it's just a lot of like emotional labor in the room to get through all these fittings and they go on, which is really insane. I mean that we've been fit doing fittings with these people for over a year now.

It's really incredible. But yeah, we're very like, we have an intimate relationship with all of them at this point. And having been able to spend time with them for this long and having this, the chance at the Old Globe to do a soft opening was really crucial in being able to design these individual looks that they all love for Broadway.

[25:19] Harriet Jung: It was interesting. When we interviewed the playwright Matthew Lopez, he said to us that theater is all about limitations. So often it's about what you can't do, um, but also challenges, right? Because unlike film and TV, you're working in a live medium and you know, you've got a certain number of things. One of the limitations is always a budget, right? Um, which for costumes is not a small thing, I imagine, right? When you're sourcing materials and making decisions about, you know, how you're gonna build and all that. So I wonder if we could tick through a couple of the like different factors that play into a design that might be limitations but also opportunities. One that comes to mind for me is lighting, right?

Because you can design a costume that you think looks amazing and looks amazing on the person, and then they get on stage and the light hits it a certain way, and you go, Oh crap, you know, this isn't gonna work. So, how how does lighting work in figure into your process? Especially because usually that's a later part of the process. You might not discover it until you're very far along.

[26:15] Reid Bartelme: It's a complicated relationship because you want you need to be able to trust the person lighting the clothes, and you hope that with every costume that comes out on stage, they will adjust to what you have done. And perhaps it's selfish to say that, but like we cannot go back and go through our process again because their lights have now made something look bad. They can change the lights with the click of a switch. Right. So at that point it's like, fix it. This is not our responsibility. This is your responsibility. Yeah. So we always hope to have a kind of like good relationship to lighting designers so that we can go to them and ask that something shift if a fabric is kind of radiating in a way that was unexpected.

And in a show like this, there's just so many costumes and many lighting cues that you kind of just have to like prioritize what really matters and then let other things go. And David Grill, the lighting designer, really evolved the lights over time. So things would change by small increments every day. And it was just a matter of kind of like being patient and waiting to see what happened.

[27:29] Harriet Jung: Yeah. Do you ever, when you're designing or even picking a fabric, think ahead to, oh, this is really beautiful, but no matter how it's lit, it's not gonna work.

[27:39] Harriet Jung: Always all the time. And we're always, uh, we love doing this thing where one of us holds up the fabric and one of us tries to stand as far away as possible in the shop. And we ask ourselves, is this going to be effective on stage with lights? Like, does it matter? Does it matter? Cause sometimes a beautiful fabric that's five hundred dollars a yard will do nothing on stage. Just be flat or whatever it is. It will look like nothing, even though up close, it's gorgeous. So that's like a constant, um, and we've been doing that since we started working at the ballet.

[28:18] Reid Bartelme: Yeah, we huge stages. Yeah. We made, we used to make fabric, I mean, we still make fabric mistakes, but we would make more fabric mistakes in the past because we would get very attached to how a fabric felt or what it looked like up close. And that came from our fashion education of being like, isn't this exquisite? But really from the stage, oftentimes just trash looks the best.

[28:42] Harriet Jung: It's true. And that's, and that's the difference between a costume and perhaps a piece of, you know, fashion. I'm doing air quotes right now. I mean, it's all fashion, but you know, right? The distance is a factor. Um, and Reid and I are sort of known for working with very nuanced colors, sometimes very subtle variations in color. And one of the things I, we shifted moving from San Diego to Broadway was let's amp up some of these sections that per in San Diego we did like a palette of pinks. For Broadway, we got something like electric pink, berry. So that was one of the things we really worked on, just amping up some of the colors.

[29:25] Reid Bartelme: Yeah, yeah, making it all pop a little bit more, right?

[29:27] Harriet Jung: Yeah. Uh, when we spoke to William, he told us a story about during the original, uh, process of DANCIN’. He happened to be with Will A. Kim in her studio one day, and he watched her take a bunch of different pink fabrics, dip them in water, and pin them on a board. And he said, why are you doing that? And she said, well, this is a dance show. People are gonna be sweating. I need to know what these fabrics look like when they're wet. Right. And he clocked that, and I was like, okay, that's a lesson.

[29:55] Reid Bartelme: You work in dance, so sweat is a familiar, uh, limitation or challenge that you must encounter. How do you plan for sweat with costumes?

[30:05] Harriet Jung: I think we've become pretty facile at understanding like how a fabric will react to moisture and movement. And you know, again, we've made mistakes over the years. A lot of fabrics that seem like they'd be really great for dancing are made of rayon because they have this like beautiful kind of drop to them. And when rayon gets wet, it becomes like a board because it's made of wood fiber. So suddenly it like becomes wooden. And that's, I know it's very strange. So like we've, we've, you know, move away from certain fabrics that we know won't work. We know certain colors will take water and become very black. So you stay away from those. But you know, we're not yet dipping fabrics in water. I mean, that's a good lesson for us. We've definitely designed things where we're looking at it and we're like, that dancer is sweaty and it's showing through, and we're like, you know what? They're working hard. They're working hard, and that's okay. You like real life.

[31:03] Reid Bartelme: Yeah, that's part of the experience.

[31:05] Harriet Jung: Yeah, dance shows. You want to see a little sweat. How many costumes are there in the show?

[31:11] Jamie DuMont: Reed, do you know?

[31:13] Reid Bartelme: I, well, I recently just made a kind of like track sheet. There's about 200. Well, 22 dancers, 16 on stage on any given night. Yeah. So some people have like, there's, but there's some between like 10 and 14 costumes a piece.

[31:28] Harriet Jung: Yeah. So a couple of them have a track of like Peter has the least because Peter doesn't have costume changes in the big city.

[31:37] Reid Bartelme: Oh, right.

[31:38] Harriet Jung: Oh, right. Yeah, right. Which is like that section is when everyone's changing costumes every two seconds. So because Peter just has the one, he only has nine costumes in the show. He wins the award.

[31:47] Reid Bartelme: You know, Yani.

[31:50] Harriet Jung: Who has the most?

[31:50] Reid Bartelme: Yanni?

[31:51] Harriet Jung: Yanni and Colton.

[31:52] Reid Bartelme: Yeah.

[31:53] Harriet Jung: They have 14. In San Diego, were there things where you were raiding drawers at the Old Globe, or did you come in with everything kind of ready to go?

[32:02] Reid Bartelme: San in San Diego, big deal was all pulled from their stock.

[32:09] Harriet Jung: Yeah.

[32:09] Reid Bartelme: So they had a really good stock of period clothes that we pulled from, and those clothes are not meant for dancing and so they got totally trashed.

[32:16] Harriet Jung: You're designers. You design the costumes. Sometimes you're sourcing things, but generally, you know, you come up with a design. Who builds the costumes? Do you build some or are they all built by other, you know, shops, so to speak?

[32:32] Reid Bartelme: We've had many shops build this show, but we've also built some of the pieces in the show. So essentially we have drawings of everything. Yeah. And then they get contracted out to shops, and shops bid on the things they want to build. So then the whole catalog of clothes is then contracted out to a million different shops. And occasionally a piece will come in where the amount of time it would take to kind of reconcile what we actually want and what has been kind of offered to us in a fitting is so, it's such a chasm that we're like, it'll be faster if we just do it ourselves. Because Harry and I have a lot of experience building the costumes that we design. So though we don't really want to be the people building the clothes, occasionally it's just a big financial and time saver if we just take on little things that will make it alleviate a lot of stress for everybody.

[33:28] Harriet Jung: And is that a sort of typical? Is that your sense of like how things usually work or it seems like that is not typical?

[33:35] Reid Bartelme: No, I don't think I, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a Broadway designer who would build anything for their show. Beyond like gluing a jewel on something.

[33:41] Harriet Jung: Yeah. And in the dance world, is that the same? Or are you accustomed to doing more building yourself in the dance world?

[33:49] Reid Bartelme: So in dance, like anything that's not ballet, a lot of ballet companies have a costume shop attached to the facility, or they spend the money to shop the clothes out. Beyond that, like everyone, the expectation is that the designers either build the clothes or figure out the production themselves. So this is modern dance companies. This is people who present their own work with, you know, freelance dancers. So we for all those jobs, like we do build the clothes.

[34:21] Harriet Jung: At opening night, my seat mate turned to me at intermission and said the first thing she said was how many costumes were in the show, right? So hence now we know roughly. The second thing she said is everything looks so pristine and so crisp and like beautiful, as if they haven't like been dancing in them nonstop for weeks. That maintenance, I imagine, is part of your process, right? I mean, obviously, you're not doing the maintenance itself, but when you're designing, I imagine you're thinking ahead to okay, this has to be danced in and it has to be danced in repetitively, hopefully forever, but also on a day-to-day basis, the costumes have to be tended to. So who does that work and how does that figure into your process?

[35:02] Reid Bartelme: We try in the initial process of designing, you don't want to think about that. You don't want to have that be a parameter in the design process, but because we have experience, we, it just comes with the territory. So we do understand. Once the designs start to be considered by the people who are building them, then there's an entire wardrobe team headed by a woman named Jessica Dermady on DANCIN’ who also participate in making decisions about how will this go on the body? And does it need a lining that will keep it from getting destroyed over time? So then suddenly there's a whole collective of voices involved in figuring out the best way forward for construction and for also just the choreography of getting in and out of a costume.

So that's something that does get considered, and we try not to let it interrupt our design process. You know, with the wardrobe team. They give us feedback on the quick changes. What kind of closure would be best for certain garments?

[36:18] Harriet Jung: Yeah, there's definitely a collaboration with the whole wardrobe team constantly.

[36:21] Reid Bartelme: Right.

[36:22] Harriet Jung: Yeah. And we kind of learned the hard way on this project about what are the implications of a quick change in a show like this. I mean, we've never been involved in a show where people had to change this quickly. And so the DANCIN’ Man suits became this like huge question of like how is this going to be possible to have, you know, 16 performers change in one minute into pants, jacket, shirts, and bow ties and bolt boater hats. So in San Diego, they came up with a solution wherein the pants are attached to the shirt at the waist, like a jumpsuit, and they zip all the way up from the crotch. It then created this really unfortunate situation where having a zipper at the center front of a dress shirt does a really unfortunate kind of bubbling. And so weirdly, over time, those zippers have softened and they look okay now, but there are new pants and shirts going into the show soon. They're not yet in the show.

[37:26] Reid Bartelme: Yeah.

[37:27] Harriet Jung: But the new construction is that the shirt is mounted onto a pair of trunks that then sit into the pant, and the whole, the shirt and the trunk zip up the back through the collar. So they can just step into the shirt, it zips up the back, the tie is already set, and they just put on their pants and their jacket. I'm sorry, I know that was a lot of detail, but that's the detail we're looking for.

[37:50] Reid Bartelme: That's fascinating.

[37:51] Harriet Jung: Those things that like make Reid and I really sad. It's like a really unfortunate reality of things like that because ideally you want them to go out in beautiful suits that like just go on like normal clothes, but sometimes it's not possible. Sometimes the rigging of it all and the hardware and the things that need to be done to make this costume wearable in the show will affect our design vision, which does make us sad sometimes.

[38:21] Reid Bartelme: Do you ever look at a mic pack and think it's ruining what I've designed?

[38:26] Harriet Jung: All every day.

[38:35] Reid Bartelme: Yeah. Just that's, there's not, you know, we've asked about it. There's just nothing. We occasionally do cosmetic little additions to hide it. Like we put bows on the back of the massage parlor costumes. But yeah, it's just, I guess unavoidable in a show like this. So you just divorce your mind from looking at them.

[38:55] Jamie DuMont: So you've been working on the show daily, nonstop for a year plus, right? And so I'm curious now that you're sort of at the end of that time and you've spent a lot of time in the world of Bob Fosse. What does Bob Fosse mean to you?

[39:07] Reid Bartelme: Bob Fosse, after a year of being inside of this show, has kind of moved into a place of importance in the kind of canon of American choreographers, where in the past I'd not considered him to be. That's only because I didn't know a lot about their body of work. But at this point, um, now that I have a much more comprehensive understanding of their contribution to American dance, and having kind of generated this very iconic form in terms of style, I now think of Bob Fosse as one of the great 20th century American choreographers.

[39:48] Harriet Jung: That's, that was perfect. We'll leave it there.

[39:51] Reid Bartelme: Yeah, I think that's pretty good. The only thing I'd say is I feel like this is sort of the beginning of my kind of education on who Bob Fosse is. So I feel like I, I feel like there's still more for me to learn, which is nice that this show has introduced me to his work in this way.

[40:14] Jamie DuMont: Well, thank you so much for joining us. It was an absolute pleasure chatting with you both.

[40:18] Reid Bartelme: Thank you.

[40:19] Harriet Jung: Thank you for having us.

[40:21] Reid Bartelme: This was nice.

[40:23] Harriet Jung: A dancing man.

[40:26] Reid Bartelme: A dancing man.

[40:28] Harriet Jung: A dancing man with footsteps on the sets. Bob Fosse's DANCIN’ is now on Broadway at the Music Box Theater. For tickets and more information, visit dancinbway.com.

[40:42] Jamie DuMont: DANCIN’ Man, a Fabulous Invalid Podcast, is a production of OM Etcetera and the Fabulous Invalid LLC, and a proud member of the Broadway Podcast Network. Special thanks to Civilian for hosting us and to our audio engineer, Kyle Moore. If you liked this episode, we've got over a hundred episodes of the Fabulous Invalid Podcast that you can check out, including a two-parter on the life, work, and legacy of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon. You can find us online at the FabulousInvalid.com and on social media at Fabulous Invalid and on iTunes, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.