Before Broadway, when “Goodnight, Oscars” was running at Chicago’s Goodman Theater, actress Emily Burgle was known to the staff as “the lady in the dress.”
As June, wife of troubled storyteller and pianist Oscar Levant, Bergl wears a floral dress and matching Chartreuse coat. The dress radiates the energy of Jackson’s Pollock canvas. Shimmering silver brocade with black and daffodil yellow is hand-painted to create the perfect sheen for the stage. In the show’s sea of perfect suits, it stands out.
Bergl calls it a dress.
“Even though the dress does half the job, I’m not denying my performance in ‘Good Night, Oscars,'” she said.
When Bergl first met Emilio Sosa, the costume designer behind this dress, he told her, “June Levant’s clothes are armor.”
“I knew right away that he completely understood the character and that I could trust him,” she said.
In a recent phone interview, Sosa said: “Listening to the actors is 95 percent of my design. I need them to be actively involved in the costumes they wear.”
This season, Sosa has dressed 94 actors in 450 costumes across five Broadway productions. He has been nominated for two Tony Awards for his costume design for “Goodnight, Oscar” and for his satire on modern black America, “Ain’t No Mo.” He also designed costumes for Neil Diamond’s biomusical A Beautiful Noise and revivals of 1776 and Sweeney Todd.
From sleek suits to sequins, from colonial American dresses to crayola-hued camps, the look has changed at a dizzying pace.
At her busiest, Sosa was on three shows at a time and averaged three hours of sleep per night. He follows a maxim he learned at an early age from mentor, ‘The Wiz’ director and multifaceted cultural figure, Jeffrey Holder. “‘Say ‘yes’ to everything. And think of a way to make it work.’ ”
Sosa, 57, says she wants to make herself clear, with a firm tongue, that she took 30 years to become an overnight sensation. Sosa made her Broadway debut in Susan-Lori Parks’ Top Dog/Under Dog in 2002. He earned his first Tony Award nomination for his second Broadway production in 2012’s Porgy and Bess of the Gershwins.
Sosa was also a contestant in the reality television contest Project Runway in 2010 and 2012, and he credits this experience with building his confidence to present himself and his designs.
During that time there was a lot of “struggling, struggling, trying to make ends meet”, including a lot of work in local theater. “I was a tough and hurt child,” Sosa said. “But I thought no one could beat me in art. So I developed it. That’s where the drive comes from.”
If Sosa’s diverse projects have one thing in common, it’s his passion for color. “In my culture, as Latinos, we’re not afraid of color,” he said.
One of his earliest memories is of the color blue. Sosa and his family moved to New York City from the Dominican Republic when he was three years old when he was three years old. Sosa loved the blue in the airline’s logo.
“Blue was the first color that I had feelings and memories about.
Growing up in the Fort Apache neighborhood of the Bronx in the 1970s, Sosa was fascinated by glimpses of color in burnt-out apartment buildings amidst “turmoil and destruction.” “Half the building was gone, so I could see the inner walls,” he said.
His father worked as a handyman in a supermarket. His mother worked in a plastic factory. He stuttered, couldn’t play baseball, and had trouble fitting in.
“I never felt like I belonged, I never felt like I looked right, I never felt like there was something right about me,” he said. “But my teacher tried to use art to get me out of my shell. She put a colored pencil in my hand and I never let it go.”
He designed his first clothes when he was 15. It was a blouse for his mother. He can still think of the gold, brown, emerald, and mustard prints he picked up at the fabric store near Union Square that he used to dread going into. (His aunt, who was a seamstress, sewed the dress, but Sosa didn’t dare to sew around her father.)
Initially, theater was not in Sosa’s interest. That all changed when he, studying fashion design at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, landed a summer job at Grace Costumes, Inc., founded by stage costume designer Grace Miceli. At the end of the day, he volunteered to clean up, watching Miseri and his craftsmen at work.
“It gave me an appreciation for the craftsmen, the makers,” he said. “It was better than getting a graduate degree from some terrible school.
After graduating, Sosa worked as an assistant wardrobe supervisor at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and styled music videos for Spike DDB, an advertising agency founded by director Spike Lee. In designing her short 15-second commercial, Sosa learned the importance of making an immediate visual impact. “Spike said to me, ‘You need to know who this person is the moment you step in front of the camera,'” she said.
But Sosa was more drawn to Broadway than anything else, and was intrigued by how one costume could say so much.
Ain’t No Mo’s director Stevie Walker-Webb said, “He’s a natural storyteller. He uses textiles for words and silhouettes for text.”
A haunting moment in “Ain’t No Mo'” involved a character named Black, the personification of black people who appeared on stage wearing a kilt. The idea for this costume came from a Zoom call with Walker Webb. Sosa realized there was something behind the director. It was a 150-year-old family quilt picture, sewn by the director’s great-grandmother and great-grandmother and passed down through generations. With that image as the seed, the character became “a pastiche that brings black history and culture to life,” according to Walker Webb.
“That sensitivity and curiosity make Emilio a valuable collaborator,” he said.
There is another project Sosa is taking very seriously. It’s more diversity behind the scenes. In 2021, he was elected president of the American Theater Wing, a non-profit organization that provides professional development opportunities to emerging theater artists. He keeps a close eye on his Springboard to Design program, which encourages and mentors students from an underrepresented community in the theater design industry. “They meet fellow costume designers who look like them,” he says. “We need more colorful set designers, more colorful lighting designers. I always try to encourage young kids to enroll in those departments.”
While it’s been a busy year for Sosa, it’s also been a year of learning for him. “I had to dig really deep, really focus and step up my game to get through the schedule,” he said. Even if a tight schedule becomes the new normal, he’s ready to pull it off.
“Airplanes, trains, cars. Buses, park benches. If you want, you can sketch in the middle of Times Square.”
