*


Setting the Stage, Offstage
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

The dressing room Harvey Fierstein used when he played Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray” was legendary for the way he decorated it.
\
by PENELOPE GREEN
Published: March 20, 2008

URSULA the sea witch idolizes Leona Helmsley, Jerry Falwell and Gloria Swanson, which is why their pictures are part of a collage hanging in Sherie Rene Scott’s dressing room at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater. Like many stage actors, Ms. Scott, who plays Ursula in the Disney play “The Little Mermaid,” uses her dressing room to get herself in the mood of her character. Unlike most Broadway actors, however, Ms. Scott has scored a dressing room the size of a Manhattan one-bedroom, and it comes with features: French doors opening onto the street and a pink bathtub (put there for Elizabeth Taylor in 1983, when she was in “Private Lives”).

Sherie Rene Scott, who plays Ursula in “The Little Mermaid,” enlisted the help of friends who are decorators to give the place a little class, as she put it.

Lin-Miranda Manuel, of “In the Heights," has created a room to please his inner 8-year-old boy, with Transformers sheets and video games.

Andrea Martin, who plays Frau Blucher in “Young Frankenstein,” needs “comfort and order” to do a good show, she said.

So Ms. Scott, 41, has made the most of her good fortune, enlisting the help of her friends Matthew White and Frank Webb, who are decorators, to give the place a little class, as she put it. “I’m from Kansas, so what do I know about class?” she said.

On a recent Thursday evening, Beck was playing softly in the very swanky environment that Mr. White and Mr. Webb have created for her. (The designers come with posh credentials, having just completed the banquet rooms of the Carlyle.)

There were Capiz shells cascading over a standing lamp and starfish hot-glued to a Chinese paper shade; a taupe pleather daybed, for naps on matinee days; and, the pièce de résistance, a seven-foot-high rococo mirror made by the artist Clare Graham from thousands of buttons strung on wires that curl out like tentacles. This pleases Ursula greatly, because she is an octopus.

Broadway dressing rooms come in many shapes and sizes, but the actors who inhabit them fall into just two categories: monks and nesters. Monks, as Harvey Fierstein, a nester, pointed out, decorate with not much more than “a racing form and their costume,” whereas nesters go all out.

“The cliché is that nature hates a vacuum, but Harvey seems to hate it more,” said Mr. Fierstein, whose dressing rooms for his roles in “Hairspray” and “Fiddler on the Roof” were legendary for their accouterments, and who sews his own curtains. (“Doesn’t everyone?” he asked.)

And right now, in the middle of what many consider to be an unusually good Broadway season, there are an unusual amount of nesters out there, particularly in the musicals.

Laura Bell Bundy, for instance, has made her windowless subterranean dressing room at the Palace look like, as she put it, “the aftermath of a fight between Paris Hilton and Barbie.” It is certainly very pink, and very girlie.

“I used Sleeping Beauty Pink on all the walls, which is a Disney color, and really bright,” said Ms. Bundy, who plays Elle Woods, the pink-hearted lead of “Legally Blonde: The Musical.” Ms. Bundy, who’d been speaking softly to save her voice, broke into the “Sleeping Beauty” theme song, “Once Upon a Dream,” from that Disney movie, before continuing. “It’s the most like Pepto-Bismol pink, which is the look I was after.”

Ms. Bundy, who is 26 and from Kentucky, lives nearby in an apartment with black walls and a white lacquer piano. She chose this shade of pink because “I wanted this to be Elle’s room,” she said. She scavenged PBteen furnishings that were left over after Elle’s onstage bedroom was assembled, including a pink framed cork bulletin board and many pink pillows. There are other visual touchstones for inspiration, like a page torn from Star magazine, when Ms. Bundy was on its worst-dressed list; photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein; and the ad for the casting contest for the next Elle Woods.

A Red Bull fridge, given to her by the energy drink company, sits against a wall; Ms. Bundy, who will celebrate her 380th performance tonight, gains stamina from her four-Red-Bull-a-day habit. The couch, across the room, is the site of post-matinee debating sessions with Kevin Pariseau, who plays her dad. “He’s a philosophy nerd like me,” she said. This month they’re reading Epictetus and Krishnamurti.

“Dressing rooms are only as wonderful as the people in them,” said William Ivey Long, the celebrated costume designer, who has seen one or two. “They are private nests and they are there to succor their inhabitants. They are there to do what I do, which is help the actors become someone else. Some need pictures to inspire them, or a feeling or look that’s like their characters, and some want it to be like their bedroom at home.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s dressing room is literally a bedroom, albeit a very small one. The kinetic 28-year-old star and composer of "In the Heights," the new pan-Latino pop opera that celebrates the Inwood-Washington Heights neighborhood Mr. Miranda grew up in, has outfitted his room at stage right like an 8-year-old boy’s, with items that speak to his own affinities, not his characters’. There are Transformers sheets for the bunk bed that’s above his dressing table, a television set and PlayStation 2, and a G.I. Joe Cobra Commander poster on the door. The stuffed monkey next to his pillow isn’t a transitional object, he said. It’s a prize from a claw machine in Times Square. “I’m only good at two things,” Mr. Miranda said, “writing music and the claw. And I’m unbelievably good at the claw.” He proffered his guest book, which has been signed by his parents, his grammar school music teacher and his director, Thomas Kail, who wrote, “You are all hype.”

Besides the bunk bed, the other notable feature of this closetlike room is its grass cloth walls, put there, as the bed was, for Joel Grey when he played Amos Hart in “Chicago” in 1996.

“Everything bad happens to Amos,” Mr. Grey said last week. Hence the mingy dressing room. Grass cloth, as it turns out, is a Joel Grey signature. “It hides a multitude of sins,” as he explained, so he always negotiates a grass cloth clause into his contract. “It’s a blessing and a curse,” Mr. Grey said, being an actor who is also a visual person. “You spend a lot of time in your dressing room and so the key is to make it into some kind of peaceful place.”

Andrea Martin chose a soothing living room look for her dressing room at the Hilton on West 43rd. The Hilton, built in the late 1990s from pieces of the demolished Apollo and Lyric theaters, has spanking new dressing rooms that are clean and capacious but look a lot like treatment rooms in a medical clinic.

Unlike many actors, who won’t decorate a dressing room until the reviews come in, Ms. Martin, who plays Frau Blucher in “Young Frankenstein,” always nests thoroughly and immediately. (The reviews, when they came, savaged the play while celebrating the impish comedic talents of Ms. Martin, a Second City Television and Broadway veteran.)

“It’s important for it to feel right, right away,” said Ms. Martin, who painted the walls sage green and brought in a couch, an upholstered club chair rocker from Crate & Barrel and photographs — of Armenia, Africa and India — for the walls. A curtain of black beads separates the dressing area from the rest of the room; a fountain burbles audibly, out of sight. “I need comfort and order in order to do a good show,” she added. Frau Blucher, of course, isn’t particularly cozy, but Ms. Martin has given her a restful backdrop.

Ms. Martin acknowledged that her dressing room is unusual for the actor-nester in that it is clutter free, with few pieces of play memorabilia. (There is a photograph on the dressing table of Dame Judith Anderson playing Mrs. Danvers in “Rebecca,” her steely gaze the inspiration for Ms. Martin’s rendition of Frau Blucher.) She recalled the elaborate décor of Mr. Fierstein’s dressing room when she starred with him in “Fiddler on the Roof,” and the fact that he was often to be found there “e-Baying between scenes.”

“We are in our dressing rooms more than we are in our houses,” said Mr. Fierstein, who works hard to make his a home. “Architecturally, most dressing rooms are pretty horrifying — the bare walls painted seven thousand times. There is magic in the theater, but it’s not in the dressing room.”

At least not in its undecorated state. When he played Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray,” Mr. Fierstein, too, chose a Pepto-Bismol pink for his dressing room suite at the Neil Simon Theater. He found hot pink, glow-in-the dark Tinker Bell-patterned fabric at Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft from which he made curtains for the windows. He sewed an orange and purple Hawaiian print fabric into curtains that replaced the bathroom door, which was removed to make room for his barber’s chair. Then he began to layer the walls of his anteroom with photographs. He took pictures of every one of his visitors and taped the prints to the walls, an act that cemented his role as mother of the company, as Mr. Long pointed out.

Themes emerged, Mr. Fierstein said of his photographs. “Celebrities peeing in my toilet, that sort of thing. When I left ‘Hairspray,’ I took a picture of the walls and made a card for the cast and crew that said, ‘If this is what loving you did to my dressing room, imagine what you did to my heart.’ ”

Then the objects came: the plaster lamps with Venetian shades, the sign from a defunct Canal Street business that read “Harvey’s” and the peanut warmer, labeled “Hot Nuts,” where he kept his makeup and jewelry. When Mr. Fierstein left the show, he left most of these things behind (except those Venetian shades — “they were really good,” he said). And all the Ednas who have followed, he said, have kept “the encrustation," as Mr. Fierstein called it.

“Here’s the funny thing about theater people,” he said. “When you do a movie, when it’s over you have the movie as a memory. But with a play, what we do every night is gone. So I think that ephemeral feeling makes us cling to everything. So we collect crap. The posters. The postcards. The reviews. Anything that has the name of the show on it.”

Next week, Mr. Fierstein begins previews for “A Catered Affair.” He has chosen his dressing room at the Walter Kerr Theater, but won’t decorate it until the reviews come in. He will bring, as is his habit, a photo of Ethel Merman, his once and future muse, but beyond that, he said, “you don’t need to bring things. If you are Harvey, they will accumulate.”