Hamilton musical: First look at costumes ahead of Australian premiere

To steal a line from the show, this is the room where the magic of bringing the Broadway smash, Hamilton, to life happens ahead of its Sydney premiere.

In 250 years, if someone is creating a musical about the tumultuous term of US President Donald J. Trump, they’ll be able to count on Kylie Clarke’s equivalent to get the hair right.

And that’s not being glib. Look at the endless fascination with the Trumpian do.

A Sydney wigmaker who works out of Leichhardt’s Canal Road film studios, Clarke is among more than 65 specialist artisans who are measuring, cutting, stitching and combing their way towards the March 17 Australian premiere of Hamilton, the multi-award winning musical inspired by another compelling character from American history.

Founding father Alexander Hamilton championed a strong central government for the newly-formed United States. He was a man of action who was killed in a duel with a political foe in 1804.

Costume supervisor Jude Loxley, and wig maker Kylie Clarke, working on the costumes for the Hamilton stage show. Picture: Tim Hunter

The Sydney staging of Hamilton is also keeping Jodie Morrison on her toes. Owner of Steppin’ Out studios in Canal Road, Morrison and her team are making all the boots and shoes for the show — a challenge, thanks to COVID-19 locking cast members in their home towns.

“We had to talk people through Zoom measurements,” Morrison says.

“We had all sorts of mums and sisters and wives and husbands down on the ground measuring feet.”

While Clarke and Morrison focus on wigs and shoes in their upstairs studios, downstairs Sydney Costume Workshop’s Leonie Grace and a team of dressmakers make gowns and other wearables. Grace’s little black dog wanders from table to table, letting himself be patted.

If you could order one of these 18th Century confections for yourself (which you couldn’t, because of copyright), you’d expect to pay $10,000, Grace says.

The costume creators hard at work on the Hamilton designs. Picture: Tim Hunter

A board showing the costume designs. Picture: Tim Hunter

Unlike a wedding dress that is worn once, these gowns are made for hard work. Outwardly feminine and lacy, the gowns are sturdily engineered to withstand being strenuously danced in eight times a week and thoroughly laundered by the costume maintenance team after each show.

“We’re building the costumes to last five years,” Grace says.

“There’s nothing cheap or ordinary about any of it.”

Upstairs, Kylie Clarke is likewise fastidious about her wigs and has consulted closely with Hamilton wig and hairpiece designer Charles G. LaPointe.

Clarke won’t consider using anything but top-quality human hair for the Hamilton wigs. Australian hair, tending to be too familiar with the dye bottle and the sun, simply isn’t strong enough so Clarke imports the best hair from the UK and Europe.

“There’s lots of different textures of hair in this production so it’s been quite a process with COVID, getting all the materials here,” she says.

Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton in some of the amazing outfits. Picture: Theo Wargo/Getty

Some of the completed costumes. Picture: Tim Hunter

The shoes are also created from scratch. Picture: Tim Hunter

Clarke’s tools resemble a medieval torture set, with names to match. The “hackle” is a mini bed of nails used for combing long hanks of hair. Some of the tools, collected from past wigmakers overseas, are almost 80 years old.

With 35 performers to dress (including Jason Arrow as Hamilton, Chloe Zuel as Eliza Hamilton, Lyndon Watts as Aaron Burr, Matu Ngaropo as George Washington and Victory Ndukwe as Marquis de Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson), Hamilton’s costume pre-production team numbers about 65 people.

Once the show opens, a specialised maintenance team of about 15 people will make sure the costumes look like new for every performance, Australian costume associate Jude Loxley says. Some of the costumes are washed at the theatre, while dry cleaning is done off-site.

Shoe maker Jodie E. Morrison with some of the boots that she has made for the Hamilton musical. Picture: Tim Hunter

One of the dresses for the Hamilton musical, sketched by Paul Tazewell.

One of the male Hamilton costumes, sketched by Paul Tazewell.

Loxley met Hamilton’s costume designer Paul Tazewell and his team in New York in 2019. Three years before that, Tazewell won a 2016 Tony Award for his Hamilton designs. And just recently, one of the Hamilton costumes was acquired by the august Smithsonian Institution.

“The thing I really like about these costumes is the beautiful aesthetic. It’s really incorporating a period style with full functionality for the performers,” Loxley says.

Hamilton became a phenomenon after its Broadway premiere in April 2015, winning Tony, Grammy and Olivier Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The show’s book, lyrics and music — a blend of hip-hop, rap, R&B and Broadway — are by Lin-Manuel Miranda, based on Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton. Miranda also took the lead role when the show opened.

In a move which removed the historical conversation from white custody, Miranda cast actors of colour in virtually all the roles in Hamilton. In Australia, the cast represents more than 16 nationalities.

Rehearsals for the Sydney show start on January 25, but for producer Michael Cassel seeing the costumes coming together is a meaningful step on the road to opening night at Sydney Lyric Theatre.

“You go through the casting process and you start to know who’s going to give life and voice to your show,” Cassel says.

“But this is the first moment where it’s tactile. You start to feel it. Audiences don’t necessarily realise how much of their joy in the show comes from these amazing costumes.”