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Hair and Makeup Design
The Tempest
For all of Miranda's design elements, I kept asking myself: "What would a teenage girl with infinite time choose to look like if she was under absolutely no societal pressure to become a woman?" She is a princess, after a fashion, and I wanted her to give off a slightly other-worldly vibe. Not strange and offputting, but a young girl who has never worried about what other people think about the way that she looks.
I had the unique advantage of the show being cast shortly before designs were due. The actor playing Ariel had just recently gotten braids, and I incorporated the idea from the very first iteration of Ariel's design. The visual effect of the braids reminded me of the idea of an android plugged into a super computer, cables and wires connecting Ariel to every part of the island at all times. I debated various makeup looks for the face reveal at the end, but ultimately decided that the effect was more powerful if Ariel was completely unadorned, simply human underneath the visor.
Alonsa and Gonzala are textually, approximately the same age as Prospero. The actors did a wonderful job applying age makeup and greying their hair. I didn't think that Alonsa needed a crown to communicate her royalty, so the crown braid hairstyle was picked to evoke the same idea. I 3D printed small gold earrings to match the ornamental pennants that the Neopolitans wear as signs of rank. Gonzala does not have a military rank, but I modified the pennant to work as a hair stick, giving her some bling and reinforcing this motif as a symbol of their court.
Stephano and Trinculo needed hairstyles that were put together enough to look like they could reasonably appear in court, albeit with very little decorum. Each scene that they reappeared on stage, they had more and more blush applied, to give the impression of becoming increasingly flushed from intoxication. Trinculo's makeup was meant to give an impression of clownish-ness, without being overtly circusy. Retrospectively, I think that it needed to be exaggerated a little bit more to be legible from the audience.
Originally we wanted to add silicone prosthetics to look like fungi, coral and scales growing out of Caliban. We weren't able to find a prosthetic adhesive that didn't cause an allergic reaction, so the idea was scrapped. Instead, The side of his face was mottled in green and grey eyeshadow to support the illusion of decay. The actor and I briefly discussed partially unpicking his hair, or having two different styles of twist to give the impression that Caliban has been rotting away on this island, barely taking care of himself. Ultimately, this just wasn't practical.
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