Stan Dufford, wearing a blue surgical mask to keep from spreading his cold through Lyric Opera`s cast of Puccini`s ”Madama Butterfly,” presides with his usual calm over the chaos of Room 701 at the Civic Opera House.
Over in the corner, three half-naked bodies wait to be airbrushed white from the waist up. In front of the mirrored wall, a hairdresser jabs a pin into the knot of a jet black wig. ”Ready for your next victim?” asks a man wearing a white rubber skull cap, as he slides onto a stool.
It`s 38 minutes until curtain, and the phone rings. It`s for Dufford. ”I have to go down and calm a baritone,” he reports. Minutes later, he`s back with the casualty report: ”Somebody was seven minutes late. Something was forgotten. By the time everything was ready, the leading lady was calling for a hairdresser. It`s a real juggling of time and people.”
Before this kabuki assembly line is packed up and put away, 66 eyebrows, lids, lips and cheeks will have gone under the brushes. The finished products: B.F. Pinkerton, Cio-Cio-San, the Bonze and a cast of dozens.
At the helm of quality control is Dufford, wig master and head of makeup design at the Lyric Opera of Chicago for the last 20 seasons. And, not incidentally, the man who wrote the book on theatrical makeup.
Well, actually, Pages 606 and 607 of Volume 28 of the 15th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Every printing since 1974, the initials S.D. have appeared at the bottom of the entry titled ”Theatrical Makeup.” This signifies that the
Britannica`s university advisory committees, the ones who make recommendations for contributors to their Macropaedia or Knowledge In-Depth series, consider Dufford to be the top expert in the field, according to an encyclopedia spokesman.
Since he first ambled down Wacker Drive and through the stage door of the Civic Opera House, the house the Lyric calls its home, Dufford has picked up his knotting needle and plowed through pounds and pounds of hair plucked from the bellies of Tibetan yaks (the follicle of choice for theatrical wigs).
And he has dabbed his makeup brushes in palettes of paints with the names Strauss wine, Verdi green and Mozart pink. Over the seasons, he has made a red devil of Samuel Ramey (”Mefistofele”), a Moorish general of Placido Domingo (”Otello”), and a mistress of Marilyn Horne (”Falstaff”). He did not make a peasant of Pavarotti, he will have you know. ”I never went near the man. He did his own makeup.” And not very well, Dufford adds, not quite under his breath.
This season, in particular, with three mega-makeup productions-”
Mefistofel e,” ”Butterfly” and the upcoming ”Turandot”-has tested Dufford`s own theatrical makeup.
”It`s the most difficult season in 36 years in opera,” Dufford, 62, lamented last week, as he took a breather in the fourth-floor outpost he calls Wig World. It is stacked floor-to-ceiling with boxes and boxes of hair, yak hair mostly, and an occasional clump of human hair, ”first-quality European, $55 an ounce,” he says, clenching a curly black fistful.
To show just how hectic it has been, he pulls out drawer after half-empty drawer. ”We`re running out of hair,” he says, figuring the Lyric has gone through 8 pounds this season. At 3 ounces-or approximately 200,000 hairs-per wig, he calculates they`ve whipped up 42 heads of hair so far.
At the moment, Dufford has three assistants in the room next door making beards, mustaches and goatees at a rate of eight per day for ”Turandot.” One of the wigmakers, Rudi Robis, has been knotting hairs into a holey substance called caul net for the last two years, turning out 60 wigs, just to cover the women`s chorus for this season`s grand finale.
7,770 makeup jobs
In all, there will be more than 200 new wigs for next month`s Lyric production of David Hockney`s ”Turandot,” the unfinished opera of Puccini, the fairy tale about the Chinese Ice Princess who lops off the heads of all her suitors unless they answer her riddles and then melts under the ardor of Prince Calaf, the tenor who finally succeeds.
And before the final curtain falls, about 7,770 faces will have been made up this season. Not a little work for the crew that makes a canvas of the body human.
Backstage players
Dufford & Co. are but a few of the backstage players at the Lyric who never hear the applause, never see their names in lights, never take a bow.
”Every time the curtain goes up, someone is there doing the makeup,”
says Richard Stead, former wig master at the San Francisco Opera, which along with New York`s Metropolitan and Chicago`s Lyric is considered one of the Big Three opera companies in the U.S.
”Stan is among the very best in the world,” says Stead, once a pupil of Dufford`s and now owner of Richard Stead Enterprises, which operates a school for theatrical makeup and wig design in San Francisco and does makeup and wig work for films, most recently for the remake of ”The Night of the Living Dead.”
The fine art of face-painting has been around ever since Thespis, the first actor to step out of the Greek chorus in the 6th Century B.C., smeared his face with white lead and red cinnabar.
Dufford got into it at Upper Lake Union High School, in northern California, where he and 17 others made up the entire student body. And where, poking around the school`s book room one day, he found a box of drama makeup. On weekends, out on the farm where he lived with his parents and one brother, he`d play with the paint box and listen to the Metropolitan Opera`s broadcasts on the family`s old Bakelite radio.
”Can`t you turn down that awful noise?” his mother would yell. He couldn`t. Nor could he stay away from the paints.
Painting the greats
By the end of his first semester at the University of California at Berkeley, Dufford had dropped his chemistry major and switched to a triple major: English, speech and drama. For the next 3 1/2 years, he did the makeup for every campus production.
By 1956, he`d served four years in the Navy, earned a master`s degree in drama from San Francisco State College and nabbed a job at the San Francisco Opera, where he was a one-man makeup department. He stayed there until 1972, when he was lured to the Lyric.
At the Lyric, he has painted the faces and pinned up the hair of all the greats: Joan Sutherland, Jessye Norman, Jerry Hadley.
The hard part
Every now and again he dips into his chemistry set and concocts some stage formula. He is proud of his ”Blood Jello” recipe (mix theatrical blood and unflavored gelatin, refrigerate till firm, zap in the microwave for 15 seconds), which made for a sanguineous death scene in ”Antony and Cleopatra” earlier this season.
Somewhere in the job description, there`s a clause that says a wig master must be ”part painter, part sculptor, part shrink and part physical therapist, not to mention a good back rubber,” says Richard Jarvie, Dufford`s assistant at the Lyric since 1982, and a wig master in his own right.
He has headed the makeup department at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival`s third stage in Stratford, Ontario, the last five summers.
Dealing with personalities
It`s not the pretty little faces that attract the wig masters` favor.
”They`re difficult. They don`t project,” says Dufford. ”Remember this is a very large theater. Sometimes, very large, horsey faces are the easiest to work on. It`s like having a huge canvas, or as one makeup artist described it to me, `It`s like painting on a billboard.”`
And when you get right down to it, the wig masters say, the face paint and hair aren`t even the hard parts of the job.
”It`s the personalities. It`s the insecure people-the ones on the way up, the ones on the way down,” says Dufford, who has dealt with plenty of both, though he won`t name names for the record.
Some of the nasties
Dufford ticks off a few of the backstage nasties:
– ”They`ll tell you to put on the wig without touching the person.
– ”When we did `The Gambler,` the two most difficult were very minor singers. Very demanding. One couldn`t button his own cuffs, couldn`t put on his own gloves or his own shoes, and he insisted on a scalp massage before putting on his wig.
– ”The worst are the Jekyll and Hyde changes; some people are really nice until you shut the dressing-room door.”
In opera houses around the world, wig masters are not always known for their calm. Dufford, however, ”is unflappable,” says Jarvie. ”I know plenty of opera makeup designers who regularly throw tantrums.
”Stan is incapable of that,” he says. ”I`m convinced.”
While he might not like the meanies, Dufford doesn`t mind nursing a simple case of stage fright.
”We`re the last ones to be with them before they go on,” he explains.
”(The great diva) Elizabeth Schwarzkopf we practically had to drag on stage. She`d go to the bathroom as soon as they`d call her name.
”Leontyne Price once said to me, `If you feel bad at one performance, it will be all over the opera world the next day.` Because the opera gossip network is worldwide.”
”Sometimes you`re a confidant. You have to know when to listen, and when to talk,” says Dufford. ”You really have to be sensitive to a person`s needs. That`s why it`s been difficult hiring hairstylists. They`re used to being the star in their own salon.
”And there`s only one star in the dressing room, and that`s the singer.”
