Trash creates perfect costumes

The show's costume designer scoured the streets of New York.
NEW YORK (AP) -- It's 2 a.m. and Tobin Ost is walking through the East Village on his way home from a party. A glimmer from the gutter catches his eye -- the remnants of a snack bag. He pockets it, a fragment of New York destined for Broadway.
Ost, the young costume designer for "Brooklyn The Musical," has been on a two-year scavenger hunt.
Just days before the show opened in October, Ost was still searching behind garbage cans and through Dumpsters for the detritus of New York that he has fashioned into costumes.
"All the ideas for the costumes originated in the streets of the city," said the 31-year-old, as did the idea for the show, an urban fairy tale about an orphan named Brooklyn (Eden Espinosa) who rises to pop stardom as she hunts for her missing father.
Her arch rival is a streetwise diva called Paradice, played by a super-energetic Ramona Keller, who feels threatened by the newcomer with a powerful voice.
Outrageous costumes
Near the end of "Brooklyn," Keller arrives on stage in a shopping cart and alights wearing an extraordinary gown made of black garbage bags and silver duct tape, embellished with a fanciful flounce of bright yellow police-caution ribbon.
Supporting the recycling motif, she asks rhetorically, "Trash never looked so good?" The audience explodes with laughter and applause before she can sing a word of her show-stopping song "Love Me Where I Live."
In another scene, director Jeff Calhoun has Keller twirl on a catwalk to display a cape styled from dirty, white stuffed animals, mostly teddy bears, stitched into a street version of an ermine stole.
The runway bit gives the audience time to "get over the costume before I can start to sing," Keller says backstage at the Plymouth Theatre.
"We scoured every Salvation Army in Manhattan looking for slightly used stuffed animals," Ost says during an interview in the theater's wardrobe room.
Ost, a graduate of Yale School of Drama, joined the production two years ago when his friend, set designer Ray Klausen, asked him to assemble some basic outfits for a workshop to entice potential backers.
The musical, set at a street corner under the Brooklyn Bridge, has the look and feel of musicals like "Rent" and "Fame" and ends with an "American Idol"-like contest.
Show's budget
The initial minimal budget ($700) fit perfectly with Ost's plans: "Lack of money at first was a stimulus because we were forced to search the city for the resources."
During this time, he spent "many happy days and nights" poking around the streets of New York for the bits and pieces he turned into imaginative outfits for the show's five-member cast.
Ideas for the costumes began to come when Ost started walking the streets. He'd find things discarded in Dumpsters, gutters and garbage cans. He also stretched his funds by tracking down other items in thrift stores. The final costume budget was $46,000, low for a Broadway production.
"The first piece of the garbage-bag dress was torn from a barrier in Chelsea," said the designer, who recalls where he discovered most of the costume materials.
The gown worn by Keller was assembled by wrapping the black bags around the actress and then "cutting her out up the back like opening a lobster."
For the song "Superlover," Keller wears a Carmen Miranda-like headdress fashioned from shiny snack bags. Ost found the heavyweight rubber gloves Keller wears in the scene outside a Manhattan meatpacking plant.
Putting it together
Director Calhoun wanted "Brooklyn" to evolve in an organic manner, with sets and wardrobe developing along with the music. "Costumes became props and props became costumes," the designer says.
In a key storytelling moment, Karen Olivo, who portrays Brooklyn's mother, morphs into an angel. With a neon halo over her head, she stands against a silhouette of wings formed from wire coat hangers Ost acquired from a dry cleaner. The wings are attached to a fence, not the actress.
She wears a wide skirt that Ost made from umbrellas by removing the frames. A U.S. mail bag found in a street became the skirt's lining, and the umbrella fabric draped around it.
The quick costume changes perpetuate the show's energetic pace. "Brooklyn The Musical" runs about 100 minutes without an intermission. "Since the characters are making something out of nothing anyway, letting the audience view the changes is part of the intrigue," Ost says.
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