Broadway Costumes: FIT TO BE DANCED IN.

The Museum of the City of New York is currently exhibiting a treasure trove of costumes from Broadway plays and musicals.

In the days when dresses were "frocks" and "costumes" were something less theatrical, the leading ladies of Broadway frequently wore outfits from their personal wardrobes onstage. Indeed, when stars like Ina Claire and Gertrude Lawrence appeared in a Coco Chanel design or Irene Castle, of the famous Broadway dancing couple, bobbed her hair, it was big fashion news. What determined fashion was frequently initiated in the theater, as testified by the current exhibition, "Fashion On Stage: Couture for the Broadway Theater 1910-1955," on view at the Museum of the City of New York through February 2000.

Over the years, the museum has rightly given theater plenty of display space. In 1996 it mounted a comprehensive exhibition, "Broadway!" which chronicled New York City's theaterland, from the 1866 hit The Black Crook to the most recent revival of Kern and Hammerstein's Show Boat. Since then, additional items and updates have fed what is essentially a permanent exhibition.

Just recently, however, a show with a more detailed focus on fashion and the theater, put together by Phyllis Magidson, curator of costumes and textiles at the museum, and Barbara Stratyner, a curator with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, highlights the golden period of the relationship between couture and the stage. Such designers as Madeleine Vionnet, Valentino, Jean Lanvin, Jean Patou, Chanel, Molyneux, Charles James, and Hattie Carnegie are represented.

The show emphasizes how the right costume for a given play or musical is of the utmost importance. (The backstage fights between some ego-driven stars and their designers before opening night must have been more than just a beloved cliche of stage and screen). Theatrical tantrums aside, there is no denying the importance of designers like Mariano Fortuny (favored by Isadora Duncan and Ethel Barrymore) and the ubiquitous Lucile Ltd., founded by Lady Duff Gordon, with salons in London, Paris, and New York, which designed for Alice Joyce, Billie Burke, Castle, and a host of others; or Margaret Pemberton, a prototype of today's stylists, who, working with director Antoinette Perry, read scripts and watched rehearsals, then picked out clothes from such exclusive sources as Saks Fifth Avenue, Bonwit Teller, and Henri Bendel.

"These beautifully tailored, detailed versions of everyday clothes were the hallmark of the best-dressed actresses onstage and off during the 1940s and 1950s," says curator Magidson. "Things changed after the fifties because, for the most part, the drawing-room comedy had had its day." She tells how the painfully shy Mainbocher, despite many invitations, refused to design for the theater until 1943, when he attended a backer's audition for One Touch of Venus and saw Mary Martin rehearsing: "Instantly he changed his mind and designed some superb Grecian-style costumes for the show. That year his `Venus Pink' took the fashion industry and public by storm."

When it came to designing for dancing stars such as Castle, the house of Lucile Ltd. took enormous pains to get the fabrics and cuts right. Lucy Christina Sutherland (Lady Duff Gordon) knew how to cut the fabric for the fox trot (danced squarely facing a partner), decorating the back of a gown with opulent layers of trim. For the maxixe the decorations moved to the side, where they would be best seen. For the tango, leg slits were demurely screened with weighted drapery. When Dorothy Dickson danced the One-Step and the Hesitation, she wore a flexible pleated underskirt fashioned by Lucile to emphasize the movement. Sutherland's designs for the Castle movie Whirl of Life were so exquisite, with their diaphanous effects and hidden panels, that Magidson says, "Irene Castle seemed to float on air."

With a silk Chanel label in a garment, a great actress could feel confident of superb fabric, workmanship, and detail. But as synthetics came in, sleek bodies, often in tights and leotards, dominated musicals, and couture designers were in less demand as stage design took a new tack. One of the most gifted and innovative designers of modern stage costuming was Patricia Zipprodt (see "On the Cutting Edge," Dance Magazine, February 1991, page 66), who died in July. She is now being remembered in "A Tribute to Patricia Zipprodt" at the Museum of the City of New York, an exhibition complementary to "Fashion On Stage." Zipprodt's particular understanding of dancers' costume needs placed her in demand by the likes of Antony Tudor and Peter Martins. It was Jerome Robbins who tapped her for Fiddler on the Roof (1964).

Initially determined to be an artist specializing in surgical drawings, Zipprodt willingly switched goals after attending a performance at New York City Ballet. Seeing Karinska's gowns for Balanchine's La Valse made Zipprodt instantly want to design for dance. Subsequently, from her studio in a Greenwich Village walk-up, she did everything from designing to sewing and dyeing costumes.

Zipprodt won three Tony Awards for her work on Fiddler, Cabaret (1966), and the 1986 revival of Sweet Charity. She costumed the original 1975 Chicago (Chita Rivera's Velma Kelly costume is on view in the exhibition), and created a sensation with her designs for Pippin (1972), which, Magidson says, "used the then-unusual plastic latex for armor. But it had its down side, because the material is highly perishable. It just crumbles away with the passage of time, making conservation almost impossible." It's a challenge, emphasizes Magidson, that applies to much contemporary costuming.

Other musicals graced by Zipprodt's special feeling of fluidity and style were 1776 (1969) and Sunday in the Park with George (1984). "She had a feeling for a level of reality, not fantasy, that is rare," says Magidson. "Her 1776 costumes paralleled the closest thing to the real period construction. The costumes for Fiddler looked real--old, worn--what people really wore."

Zipprodt's work lives on in the dances that are still seen on ballet stages and in exhibitions like the one at the Museum of the City of New York. This very special institution, which mounts anything germane to the city from "The New York Century, World Capital, Home Town" to "A Forgotten Gateway: The Abandoned Buildings of Ellis Island," should be commended for its efforts to bring the theater arts of the area into rightful perspective.

Hilary Ostlere is a senior editor and the theater columnist of Dance Magazine.