Tressed for Success

Alone in the soft sallow light of her last day, the woman reaches heavenward and in a gesture of anguish and submission, plucks the ornaments from her hair and turns to leave, her voice rising from the sudden dark veil. The sticks fall unnoticed to the floor. Cio-Cio San has once again lost her love, her pride and now her child. Soon, Puccini’s most tragic heroine will take her own life. But even at this bitter end, her hair is holding up beautifully.

It should. It has been treated with much deference and attention, coaxed and compelled to eloquence by Rick Geyer, wigmaster of the Los Angeles Opera. Weeks before this performance of “Madama Butterfly,” he and soprano Catherine Malfitano joined in earnest consult. Sitting in the wig room, reflected into infinity by the mirrored walls, they talked hair. First was the issue of the geisha wig and bridal hat worn in the first scene. Malfitano, who has sung the role numerous times all over the world, is brief and clear: The wig must be light and its ornaments well balanced, held in place by a minimal number of pins. Her own hair, dark and lovely to her waist, will be gathered in a dark barrette and tucked, with the peonies that will later adorn it, down the back of her dress.

For a moment, the peonies are discussed. The two Geyer has are too large and too small respectively--”I look like Carmen Miranda,” Malfitano says, laughing, holding the larger one just over her right ear. The flowers should be attached to the clip, not slipped into the hair because, she says, “I have had them fall out before, when I turn, so, and it is not good.” “Not a problem,” Geyer says.

Next, the length of the sticks for the second act when the wig has been removed and Malfitano’s own hair is piled on top of her head. “I must have two,” she tells him. “This is important, two will hold my hair, otherwise I need pins and then the gesture is ruined.” Geyer produces two that are deemed too long--”they are not pretty this long, and they must be pretty,” she says, tapping the sticks of the counter before her like jazz drummer.

“Not a problem,” Geyer repeats. He will cut them to the desired length and repaint them. Red? No, not red, the costume is blue. A more natural color, or black, with perhaps small ornaments on the end. Pretty. They must be pretty. Is the stage raked? Yes, and during rehearsal, Geyer says, he will watch the sticks as they fall and make certain they “don’t go clanging into the orchestra pit.” He will also make certain they are retrieved at the end of the performance. “Yes,” the singer laughs. “Once, in Vienna I think, they forgot to collect them and the next night, I had no sticks. I forget what we did, I think I used pencils.”

No pencils, Geyer promises. The two return to the wig for the first act. Behind them, four shelves high, waits an eerie gallery. In the six years of Geyer’s tenure, the L.A. Opera has performed “Madama Butterfly” four times; for each performance, Geyer and assistant Beckie Kravetz have made at least six hand-tied wigs--by the time they perform it again the opera will have the full set, 38 in all. (The few they do not have now, they rent.) Now, a dozen geisha heads, featureless faces framed by the curves of the singular hairline, silk flowers and ornamental combs, stare expectantly into the mirror over the shoulders of this Butterfly and the wigmaster.

One after the other, wigs are unpinned and set on the crown of the singer until a hairline that suits her face is chosen. With strips of white paper, the width of the bridal hat, which Geyer will make, is set. “She will be beautiful,” Geyer says when they are finished. The singer meets his gaze in the mirror. “She is always beautiful,” she says simply.

The title “wigmaster” seems suited for an Old World craftsman clad in buckled breeches and a lace cravat. Geyer, however is fortyish and fond of jeans and button-downs. He is a craftsman, though, and not so far removed from the Old World.

“Some people get weirded out when they realize we use human hair,” he says, bent over the black tresses of what will soon be a geisha wig. His fingers fly as he ties them, two strands at a time, onto the net of the caul cap that forms the base of the wig. He uses what looks like a cross between a rug hook and a dentist’s pick--a ventilator--and it comes in many sizes, depending on how fine the work.

“For a man’s wig, or for the back, we might tie three or four strands at a time,” says Kravetz, who sits a few feet away, also ventilating. They are both engaged in prep work, the actual wig-making that goes on pre-performance--during a show’s run, when they are not actually making up the singers, they engage in wig maintenance and work ahead on the next set of coifs.

The wig and makeup room of the L.A. Opera looks like Santa’s workshop would if Santa was a big old drag queen. There’s a red steel chin-high Craftsman toolbox at one end, its drawers marked, hilariously enough, “Pancake,” “Mascara” and “Nail polish.” It’s a mirror-lined room, with shelves above and below, shelves stacked with boxes and bins holding “Eyelashes,” “Jerri-curled, blond” “Silks and vegetable nets” and other items not found in your average workplace. The counters in front of Geyer and Kravetz are strewn with items that might fit a definition of “sundries”: glue guns, hairpins, makeup brushes, hair brushes, spools of thread, silk flowers, needle-nose pliers, pots of rouge, rollers, waxers, hair gel, hair spray, bits of wool and silk and damask and of course, hair, hanks of hair everywhere.

“Give us an hour or so, and we can turn you into just about anything,” Geyer says, brandishing a long, thick braid of red hair.

A hand-tied wig takes six to eight hours of work to make, but in a dire wig emergency, Geyer has been known to whip one up in two. Although they will use synthetic wigs in some cases--”if, say, a character has to get wet, or really be active but keep a complicated design”--most of the wigs they make for principal singers are from human hair. Asian and Indian hair is best for the main part of the wigs because it is generally coarser; European hair is usually finer and works better around the face. For elaborate 18th-century styles or for fantasy characters, wigs can be made of heavy-bodied yak hair.

Hair comes from a variety of sources, Geyer says. Some is purchased from convents where novitiates must relinquish their crowning glory, some from Indian temples to which widows donate their grief-shorn locks, and some is purchased from women living in rural villages in Europe and Asia. “Often, these girls have never cut their hair, just combed and braided it. It’s great hair,” he says.

Most female principals in an opera will wear a wig, sometimes several. “Even if a singer has long hair, she may have it written in her contract that she will wear a wig,” Kravetz explains. “That way her hair doesn’t get tortured.”

“And it’s faster to make her up,” Geyer adds. “Especially if she has a hair change. Five minutes to put a wig on, versus half an hour to restyle.”

Of the hundreds of opera companies in this country, only a few have a wigmaster; while there remain several schools of theatrical wig-making in Europe and Great Britain, the last one in the U.S., in San Francisco, closed a few years ago. Theatrical wig-making now is taught through apprenticeship, from master to student.

Geyer came up through the ranks of stage management, landing in 1981 at the Long Beach Civic Light Opera where he met Bruce Geller, who owned the hair goods company that made and rented wigs. The two struck a deal--”I did all the grunt and prep work for him,” Geyer says, “and he taught me how to make and tie.” Soon Geyer was freelancing wigs for operas and theaters in Los Angeles. Seven years later, the L.A. Opera decided it would be more economical, in the long run, to own rather than rent its wigs and they made Geyer the official wigmaster.

Geyer and Kravetz not only design, create and dress the wigs for each show, they also do the makeup. Kravetz came to the opera via a long and winding path that began at the Yale School of Drama and has run parallel with a continuous career in mask-making, both as artist and teacher. She has been under Geyer’s tress tutelage for about seven years.

After the operas are chosen for a given season, the two work with the designer and director to get a feel for what the vision of each opera will be. “Period is important, obviously,” says Kravetz, “and the story line. But more important is the vision of the piece, what the director is trying to do differently.”

For next season’s production of “Norma,” for instance, the 54 member chorus will all be bald. “An unusual choice,” Geyer says diplomatically. “A specific choice, quite effective, but unusual. And expensive.” Expensive because he will have to buy instead of make the bald pates--”the plastic you use to make them is very toxic and frankly we don’t have anywhere well-ventilated enough”--and hire a large crew to help on performance night. “You can put a wig on in five or ten minutes,” he explains. “To get the pate on, glue it down and make it up takes double that, easy.”

Makeup isn’t always a piece of pancake either. Geyer recounts the 1993 production of “The Magic Flute” in which the director wanted actual mud applied to the principals’ faces, a technique he had seen in another production. Geyer called the makeup artist for that production, who warned him that it hadn’t worked out all that well. The director insisted and so, Geyer says, “we go into dress rehearsal in mud. Which of course dries and cracks just like I said it would. But the worst was, the mud bits got in the singer’s mouths and, well . . . a tenor spitting out mud balls in the middle of his aria is not a pretty sight. Lots of storming off stage. In the end, Beckie came up with this ingenious mud look-alike. Everybody happy.”

This is, Geyer and Kravetz agree, the most important part of their job--keeping everybody happy. “The designer and the director have to be happy with how it looks and how it moves,” Geyer says, “but the singers have to be happy with how it feels. It’s hard enough to go out on that stage in weird hair and sing really loud and beautifully about how brokenhearted you are. If you think that a wig makes you look old or ugly, or if it makes your neck hurt, or if you really hate having a beard or whatever, it just makes the job that much harder. The most important thing to me is that the singer is comfortable. So if I have to choose between what I think is absolutely perfect for, say, Carmen, and what the soprano thinks makes her look and feel best, I’ll, well, I’ll argue for a while, but in the end it’s her role. Not mine.”

Their hair a galaxy of pin curls, faces blanched by makeup base, the women standing outside the wig room look more like coeds waiting on the showers than a gaggle of geishas. There’s not an Asian among them, though every other ethnic group, as well as size, age and shape, seems to be represented. Within the room, a team of freelance makeup artists is furiously daubing and stroking pancake and paint, making eyebrows disappear, eyelids lower and stretch and hair lines fade to the sculpted curves of the ornate wigs they handle. A voice from the heavens announces half an hour to curtain. The miracle squad hits fast forward and 40 minutes later at the summons of Goro, the marriage broker, a train of geishas, demure and gorgeous, accompany their friend Butterfly to her wedding. The 12 women are only onstage during that first scene, a total of 20 minutes. Hours and days and months of preparation and design, of close work and patience for an appearance shorter in duration than the time it took to make them up. But for those 20 minutes, their brows, their eyes, their hair make the whole stage absolutely beautiful, absolutely perfect.