If you need to know how to get the perfect shade of Elphaba green, call Christa Kaimimoku-Wong. She is the makeup supervisor, a.k.a. the official greenifier, for the long-running Broadway production of Wicked, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary at the Gershwin Theatre. 

Hawaiian native Kaimimoku-Wong, who was also part of the recent Wicked panel at New York Comic Con at the Javits Center, studied illustration and painting but discovered her
passion for makeup after participating in the performing arts. Following her move to Manhattan, the makeup artist has worked in TV and film, at Fashion Week, and on Broadway, where she joined the Wicked team in 2015.

In the interview below for the Playbill series How Did I Get Here—spotlighting not only actors, but directors, designers, musicians, and others who work on and off the stage to create the magic that is live theatre—Kaimimoku-Wong shares her journey from painter to Wicked makeup supervisor and how the show saved her life.

What drew you to makeup design/supervision?
Christa Kaimimoku-Wong: To be honest, there wasn’t one thing in particular that drew me to a makeup design/supervisor role. I’ve always had a passion for character-based makeup and the art of telling a story. In 2014, I was asked to design the makeup for The Illusionists on Broadway,
and it was exciting. I would love to design more in the future if the
right opportunity presents itself. 

In 2015, I had the privilege of being
asked by the current supervisor at the time, Craig Jessup, to swing at Wicked and eventually take over the makeup supervisor position in 2021. As a swing, I was able to learn the ins and outs of what the job requirements are, so it was a smooth transition.

Where did you train/study?
I’ve been drawing and painting my whole life, which I believe plays an essential role in the art of makeup application. Through fine art, I was able to learn color theory, blending, and lighting. I tell every aspiring makeup artist to take art classes over spending thousands of dollars on makeup school.

When I was 15, I started working at a glamour shots studio at my local mall. That is where I learned the proper application of makeup for photo shoots. At the same time, I was active in the performing arts in school, so that is how I developed my theatrical makeup skills. I also think it’s helpful that I was able to experience theatrical makeup while performing so when actors have concerns, I can relate and help them easily.

I also worked at MAC Cosmetics for 11 years. During this time, I was able to work with and meet some of the best makeup
artists in the world. I was able to study and watch their technique,
and even sometimes having them critique my work. MAC also taught me how
to be a presenter, verbally and visually, in telling the story of makeup. I am grateful for my time with MAC and all of the people I met along the way.

Was there a teacher/instructor who was particularly impactful/helpful? What made this person stand out?
This
is a hard question because I’ve had the privilege of working with the
best artists in this industry. Every artist I’ve ever worked with has
been impactful or helpful at some point in my career. But to name a
few, all of my MAC retail artist family, the MAC Senior Artists, Craig
Jessup, Kabuki, and Joe Dulude.

Can you detail the nightly duties of a makeup supervisor? Do you work on other actors in the show or only Elphaba?
Depending on the show time, I need to be at the theatre an hour-and-a-half before to begin my show prep. During this time, I am delivering animal masks, prepping facial hair with Topstick, and painting/repairing masks as needed. At half-hour is when I head up to the principal hallway to begin greening Elphaba.

Are you able to be creative with the makeup or is it standard for the production?
Out of respect to the makeup designer, Joe Dulude, I do not make creative changes. Respecting
his vision is crucial in honoring the designer’s expertise and vision
for the show. The beauty of being in a show that has been on this long
is we’re constantly getting new faces to work with. This is when Joe is
able to get creative because not every actress has the same features or
skin color.

Tell me about a time you almost gave up but didn’t.
When I moved to New York in 2011, I hit the pavement dropping off my resume to every MAC Cosmetics location in the city. I
must’ve dropped off 20 resumes, and after a month of no callbacks, I
only had a couple hundred dollars in savings left and on the brink of
giving up. It was hard to accept that I may have to move back home and
give up this dream. 

By some miracle, the next day I had two callbacks
at the same time, and the rest is history.

What do you consider your big break?
I would consider getting the makeup swing position at Wicked
my big break. When I started swinging, it was a blessing because I was
in a very dark place mentally due to my day job. I was questioning my
purpose and place in this industry. The supervisor at the time, Craig
Jessup, saved me, and I owe so much to him. He saw something in me and
took a chance. This is the biggest production I have been a part of so
far, and it has definitely helped to get my name and work exposed to a
larger audience.

What advice would you give your younger self or anyone starting out?
I would tell anyone starting out to stay focused on your craft, speak up for yourself, and be humble. I
don’t have a huge social media following, and I don’t care because the
majority of the work I book has come from word of mouth. People will
always remember experiences and feelings, good and bad, so make sure you
are authentic and stand out respectfully. I am living proof talent and
kindness will take you far.

What is your proudest achievement as a makeup supervisor?
My proudest achievement was doing the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with Wicked in 2021. I was supposed to have an assistant, but due to circumstances beyond my control, it fell through. I only found out a few hours before my 5 AM call time. I
remember giving myself a pep talk prior, mentally preparing that I
needed to look over the entire ensemble while doing Glinda and Elphaba’s
makeup.

I was running around 34th Street like a crazy woman making sure everyone looked good. After
the performance, I was exhausted mentally and spiritually, and our
former company manager Susan Sampliner came up to me and said, “You
should be extremely proud of yourself—you did good.” That meant
everything to me. So, whenever I am having a hard day on the job, I look back at that time and tell myself, “You got this.”

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Check Out Production Photos of the 20th Anniversary Cast of Wicked

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In downtown Minneapolis, floating, twirling umbrellas have taken over one of City Center’s storefront windows, along with a couple of penguins and a 6-foot spoon, scattering faux sugar. At the center of it all stands a statue of Mary Poppins, the storybook nanny.

“Her magic is getting away from her and has taken over in the most whimsical way,” said artist Kada Goalen, describing her concept for reprising the star of Dayton’s 2006 holiday show.

Goalen, a St. Paul native, grew up going to the department store’s annual displays — 3-D versions of kid-pleasing tales such as “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” “The Wizard of Oz” and “Cinderella.”

In fact, those eighth-floor fantasy worlds sparked Goalen to become a noted mural artist. “I remember the magic of it,” she recalled. “It was a big deal, getting dressed up to see the figures on display and the wonderland that they created.”

Goalen’s vignette is one of 10 created by local artists to reintroduce the vintage Dayton’s figurines to Nicollet Mall storefronts, as of Nov. 25. Downtown boosters hope that the seasonal displays, along with four pop-up shops, can fill the hole left by Holidazzle’s hiatus and promote the city’s core as a holiday destination.

Reviving a tradition

Between 1963 and 2016, the Day­ton’s (and later Macy’s) hol­i­day dis­plays turned a day downtown into a holiday tradition for many Minnesota families, drawing rough­ly half a mil­lion peo­ple annually at their peak.

Over the decades, a huge team of artists sculpted and hand-painted thousands of animatronic figures — from reindeer and elves to Peter Pan and Harry Potter — and built elaborate, custom-made sets. When the downtown Minneapolis Macy’s was shuttered, the figures were dispersed among local institutions, private collectors and even Duluth’s Bentleyville light show.

Hennepin The­atre Trust acquired several dozen figures and connected with the Minneapolis Downtown Council about putting them on display. Shannon Fitzgerald, the council’s director of downtown partnerships, hopes the window scenes will generate the same warm feelings cultivated by the original Dayton’s/Macy’s shows, which brought people together to share an experience. And given that the vignettes will be accessible to all passersby, she noted, even more people can enjoy them.

Fitzgerald explained how spreading the figures out along Nicollet and presenting them in unique scenes dovetails with the approach downtown is taking to reinvent itself as retail and office use has diminished.

“Involving a number of different artists enables us to see a number of different perspectives, innovations and ideas, which really symbolizes what we’re doing downtown,” she said. “How do we look at a lot of ways to solve the problem from a lot of different perspectives?”

Imagination gone wild

Over at the Dayton’s Project, creating a chocolate landscape for a pair of Nutcracker dancers allowed Betsey Giles to realize an unfulfilled dream: Decades ago, she’d applied for a job as a store window dresser, but didn’t get the gig.

The Columbia Heights-based multimedia artist (she calls herself the Rockin’ Octopus, because she has tentacles in everything from stagehand work to event decorating to fashion design) designed a giant box of bonbons that looks good enough to eat. Though visitors will unfortunately have to use their imaginations to envision the once-animated dancers’ twirls and steps.

“She’s got some loose wires on her and is not functioning at all,” Giles explained. “And when we plugged him in, he just made a very loud grinding noise.”

Down the street at Meet Minneapolis, Jerry Carlson and his son Cyrus, 15, of Lindstrom, Minn., turned the Scandinavian elf houses they’ve been building into a habitat for Ratty and Mole, from 1995’s “Wind in the Willows.”

The father-son duo previously displayed their small wooden houses at the Lake Harriet Ice Shanty Projects, which inspired them to create an ice-fishing scene for Holidays on Nicollet. The Carlsons accessorized the elf-cum-rodent houses with papier-mâché toadstools, an antique ice scoop, minnow bucket and pole, and then positioned the unlucky fisherman to roast marshmallows over a faux campfire.

Kids can drop letters for Santa into Ratty and Mole’s mailbox, Jerry noted. He hopes that interactive element will deter kids from doing what they really want to do — try to get inside the charming abodes — which several attempted on Lake Harriet. “One kid was kicking in the windows,” Jerry recalled. “One was digging a hole underneath. I had to grab his feet and drag him out.”

Not so great for the artists’ creations — but proof they were working their magic.

IF YOU GO
As part of the windows’ unveiling, Meet Minneapolis will host an informal open house on Saturday from 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

The figures will be on display through Jan. 5, as will pop-up shops (at 50 S. 6th St., City Center, IDS Center and U.S. Bancorp Center) each Tue.-Sat. from 11 a.m.-6 p.m.

For more information on Holidays on Nicollet storefront windows and the pop-up shopping, along with artist bios, visit mplsdowntown.com/holidaysonnicollet.

As a late fall wind rustles through a field of tall marsh plants, students from Haskell Indian Nations University, in Lawrence, Kansas, harvest cattails. In the wetlands behind the school, MK Kerron is teaching the art of traditional thatching.

Kerron, a member of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and a master’s-degree student in geography at the University of Kansas, learned how to work with grass from her grandfather.

“His artist name is Wayneokchat,” Kerron says. “It means ‘yellow bird’ in our language.”

Kerron’s grandfather is well-known for the replicas of grass houses he creates for arts and crafts shows in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.

“I originally learned how to do thatching back during the COVID pandemic, so that was the hobby I learned during the COVID,” Kerron says with a laugh. “I just really loved it, and now I feel happy that I can pass along these skills.”

Generations ago, the Wichita built large grass homes from big bluestem, which can grow 6 to 8 feet tall. Grasses were sewn together using bone needles and tall cedar poles were used for support. But local prairie grasses are in short supply on Haskell’s campus these days, so they’re using cattails.

Kerron and her students take the cattails to a small field where several domed frames made of slender wood await.

“I always have wanted to learn how to thatch,” says Courtney King, a senior at Haskell. “I tried looking up YouTube videos and usually it’s white men in Britain doing it. That didn’t feel right to me.”

King is the lead student researcher at the Haskell Greenhouse.

“I’m Peoria and Miami,” King says. “My people built wigwams with cattails.”

King’s focus is restoring native species to the school’s campus. Finding a way to use the invasive cattails that clog the wetlands was her idea.

“It’s just to reconnect people with the land and partake in traditional ecological knowledge, as our ancestors have for thousands of years,” King says. “And many, many tribes thatched wigwams, grass houses, sweat lodges — not all of us are Plains Indians, as far as teepees and all of that kind of stuff. So we’re reconnecting with that culture and bringing that back.”

‘Rebuilding slowly but surely’

According to legend, in 1541, when the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado saw sunlight reflecting off the Wichita tribe’s domed, grass homes he thought he’d found a golden city.

“Our first encounter with colonizers was the conquistadors and in a lot of notes from way back then … they would describe grass houses to look like a beehive, which, you can kind of see it,” Kerron says.

With King’s help, she gathers the cattail’s narrow leaves and root stalks into tight bundles, soon to become the house’s walls or roof.

“Whenever we are thatching the grass in, you want to pack it tight,” Kerron says, “because this is the insulation back then, so you want it really tight.”

The cattail bundles are tied together with string and attached to the wooden frame. Once in place, Kerron trims the tops with garden shears to create a clean line.

Kerron says classes like this are an important way to keep Indigenous traditions alive, and, though thatching classes are over for the season, Kerron says they’ll be back at work in the spring.

“Haskell, at one point, was a boarding school where a lot of these traditions were taken away,” Kerron explains. “We’re here now rebuilding slowly but surely. And, you know, a lot of people say a lot of these things are going to die out, but I refuse to think that.”

Arts Briefs: Open art studios and a 1980s play revival in Easthampton, a Native American exhibit in Springfield, and more

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  Acclaimed guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson will be one of the featured performers at the Back Porch Festival when the roots music festival returns to Northampton in March 2024. Photo by Ron Sleznak

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  The Preservation Hall Jazz Band will be one of the featured performers at the Back Porch Festival when the roots music fest returns in March. Image from Preservation Hall Jazz Band website

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  Emily Fuller, left, and Erin Ferrentino are the directors and producers of “Bar Dykes,” a revival of a 1980s play that comes to CitySpace in Easthampton Dec. 8-10. Image courtesy of CitySpace

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  A new exhibit at the Springfield Museums, “Ways of My Ancestors,” explores the history and heritage of the Nipmuc people as well as the lives of the Nipmuc living in southern New England today. Photo by Scott F.L. Foster

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  Cara Taylor, a ceramic artist at Cottage Street Studios in Easthampton, is one of close to 50 artists who will open their doors to the public for the building’s Open Studios event Dec. 2, 3 and 9. Gazette file photo

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  The Parker Quartet, an acclaimed string ensemble based at Harvard University, will perform at Amherst College Dec. 1 as part of the school’s annual music series. Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Published: 11/24/2023 7:06:10 AM

Modified: 11/24/2023 7:05:15 AM

Back Porch Festival is coming back

NORTHAMPTON — Signature Sounds’ Back Porch Festival, which underwent a dramatic expansion earlier this year, is set to return next March in a similar format, with 50 performers playing in 10 different venues over three days.

Among the highlights at what will be the 10th annual edition of this roots music showcase will be appearances by Richard Thompson, the revered guitarist and songwriter, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, which — lineup changes over the years notwithstanding — has been a New Orleans institution since the 1960s.

The 2024 festival, which takes place March 15-17 2024, will also offer what’s become an especially popular part of the annual event: an evening dedicated to the songs of a celebrated roots musician, in this case Willie Nelson, performed by varied artists.

Past Back Porch festivals have similarly featured the music of Doc Watson, Dolly Parton, John Prine and others.

Weekend passes for the 2024 festival are now on sale at the Academy of Music, one of the venues for the event. Additional artists will be announced later.

Open studios, again

EASTHAMPTON — Artists at One Cottage Street will open their doors to the public for their annual winter open studios event next weekend, Dec. 2-3, and they’ll be back at it Dec. 9, giving visitors lots of options for holiday gifts.

Just under 50 artists and craft makers, such as Janna Ugone & Co., which makes home furnishings such as lighting, will be showing their work from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. all three days.

Much more will be on display and for sale: paintings and prints, ceramics, glass art, graphic designs, fiber art, mixed media work, even soaps and lotions crafted from goat’s milk, courtesy of Sage Meadow Farm.

Open studios weekend at Cottage Street dates to 1986, making it the longest running open studio event in the area, and since 1993 artists there have also hosted a spring open studios weekend.

More information can be found at cottagestreetstudios.com.

Some women walk into a bar …

EASTHAMPTON — In a look back to the cultural legacy of gay bars in the 1950s, lesbian playwright Merril Mushroom wrote the one-act play “Bar Dykes” in the early 1980s — a play that will now be restaged at CitySpace Dec. 8-10.

The new staging of the play, featuring a queer cast and crew, is by theater artists, producers, and directors Emily Fuller and Erin Ferrentino, who are both part of this year’s “Pay It Forward” program at CitySpace, which offers financial help and rehearsal and performance space in the building for artists to develop and stage their work.

In a statement, Fuller calls “Bar Dykes” a “snapshot of queer cruising culture of the 1950s — an era and space that is seldom represented in media or theater.”

In an age now dominated by dating apps that allow people to meet online, “We feel it is important, as queers, to understand and hold this history in the context of our present moment,” Fuller added.

“Bar Dykes” has been recently republished and staged “in community venues and spaces by queer casts and crews,” Fuller noted. “We hope to carry on this tradition of creating art outside the margins of mainstream culture.”

The play will be performed at the Blue Room at CitySpace at 7 p.m. on Dec. 8-9 and at 4 p.m. on Dec. 10. Tickets are available at cityspaceeasthampton.org.

Honoring Native Americans

SPRINGFIELD — The Springfield Science Museum has opened a new exhibit, “Ways of My Ancestors: We Are Nipmuc. We Are Freshwater People,” that’s designed to recognize both the history and the current lives of the Nipmuc people of central and western Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island.

The exhibit, on view through Feb. 25, 2024, features the dress, tools, and traditional arts of the Nipmuc people. It’s been guest-curated by Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines, Jr. and features photography by Scott Strong Hawk Foster, both members of the Nipmuc nation.

“We needed to create this exhibit for both public education and cultural revitalization,” Gaines said in statement. “The goal … is to create a space where people can not so much observe a display, but rather feel a presence of our people.”

“The objects, along with the pictures, paint a story of past, present, and future, and when we had balance with the earth,” Gaines added.

Foster, based in Marlborough, says his photographs reflect his travels in Massachusetts and “the ancestral homelands of the Native American Peoples of New England … my passion has become highlighting the resilient, rich, and diverse cultures and history of the Indigenous Peoples that are still here and all around us.”

According to Springfield Museums, this is the first exhibit featured in the Science Museum’s Native Hall that focuses exclusively on the Native people “who historically occupied this land.”

“I’m thrilled that, thanks to Andre and Scott, the Science Museum can offer an exhibit that shows traditional arts being practiced by living Native people in our community and region,” said Jenny Powers, director of the Science Museum. “This is one step toward improving Native Hall and elevating Native voices throughout our exhibits.”

Classical music, then and now

AMHERST — The Parker Quartet, a Grammy Award-winning ensemble affiliated with Harvard University, will come to Amherst College Dec. 1 to perform their program “Homeland,” which includes works by famed past composers and some noted contemporary ones.

The four musicians, on violin, viola, and cello, are Blodgett Artists-in-Residence at Harvard, where they serve as professors of practice in the university’s Department of Music. They earned a 2011 Gammy for best Chamber Music Performance, and they’ve won acclaim for what the Washington Post calls their “exceptional virtuosity (and) imaginative interpretation.”

The quartet first began playing in 2002 when the members were students at New England Conservatory in Boston.

Their Amherst College concert, in Buckley Recital Hall at 7:30 p.m., will include work by Beethoven, Haydn, Irish composer and conductor Donnacha Dennehy (age 53), and Ukrainian composer and pianist Valentyn Silvestrov (age 86).

Tickets for the show are available at amherst.universitytickets.com.

— Compiled by Steve Pfarrer

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