Rodriguez, Krysta

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    How Does a Dressing Room Get Into Character?

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    As a child, the actor Krysta Rodriguez would mentally rearrange unfamiliar rooms as a way of soothing herself. The fixation followed her everywhere, from friends’ houses to historical sites. She remembers visiting a clothing store in Paris with her family when she was 11 and obsessing over where she would put a bed if she lived there. “As I’m thinking about it, it was probably a control issue,” she says. “I immediately try to figure out what a space wants to be. Is it a midcentury house that got renovated in the ’90s with all this incorrect architecture? I clear it away.”Over the past two decades or so, Rodriguez, 39, has mostly channeled this aesthetic intensity into her character work, for roles on both the stage and screen (including a memorable turn as Liza Minnelli in the 2021 Netflix series “Halston”). In 2022, while appearing as Jean-Michel Basquiat’s fictional girlfriend in the Broadway play “The Collaboration,” she arranged her dressing room to look like a messy artist’s loft, filled with the kind of ratty ’70s furniture that her character would have grabbed from the streets of the East Village in the ’80s. She says the actor Nathan Lane, with whom she co-starred in “The Addams Family” musical in 2010, helped her realize dressing rooms could be taken seriously when he turned his into an extravagant lounge, complete with a full bar. She also credits the actor Michael Cerveris, who painted his walls blood red and brought in a vintage barber’s chair while starring in a 2006 revival of “Sweeney Todd.” “I try to use these spaces as a gateway,” Rodriguez says of her own dressing rooms. “I want to have some sense of the character, even if it’s not my personal style.”Nestled among framed photos of Jordan’s friends and family are mementos from previous performances, including a bobblehead doll of his character on the TV series “Supergirl.”Blaine DavisIn 2020, when acting work slowed during the pandemic, she turned her interest in interior design into a full-fledged business, renovating the homes of clients in her native Orange County, Calif., and beyond. But it wasn’t until this spring that Rodriguez decorated a dressing room for another actor. When her friend Jeremy Jordan was preparing for his leading role in the Broadway musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” he asked Rodriguez to lend her design expertise. She took inspiration from the subtle details of the character’s Jazz Age world rather than creating what she calls a “Party City Art Deco theme.” Jordan’s only request was that she make the windowless room, deep within the Broadway Theater, feel cozy. Rodriguez decided to reimagine the space as a sunroom in Jay Gatsby’s Long Island mansion, with a soothing watercolor wallpaper of a Japanese maple tree, to reflect the era’s affinity for Japonisme, and a marine blue love seat whose tropical plant print pillows match a nearby bird of paradise.Jordan’s Jazz Age costumes. Linda Cho won the Tony Award for best costume design for her work on the production.Blaine DavisRodriguez sourced period photographs online to help Jordan get into character. Next to a bottle of Buchanan’s whisky — a reference to Gatsby’s love interest in the story, Daisy Buchanan — is a framed image of a champagne tower similar to one featured in the production.Blaine DavisWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Review: A Genderqueer ‘Cabaret,’ at War With Itself

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      A revival of the 1998 revisal of the 1966 musical highlights the stories of trans and nonbinary performers.The revival of “Cabaret” that opened on Sunday at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., has a bad case of the Underwear Problem.It’s not the only time the affliction has struck the 1966 musical set in a skeevy Berlin nightclub; indeed, it’s a chronic condition. “Cabaret” first caught the sniffles in 1972, when the Bob Fosse movie amped up the eroticism and rolled down the stockings. And it fully succumbed in 1993, when it was nearly stripped naked for a London production that came to Broadway five years later.In that revival, Sally Bowles, the minimally talented chorine at the center of the action, still wore the “lacy pants” mentioned in “Don’t Tell Mama,” one of the many great songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb — but now she and the other Kit Kat Girls wore little else. The club’s Emcee was no longer the weird, tuxedo-clad marionette that Joel Grey created in the original production; instead, as played by Alan Cumming, he was a denizen of an S&M dungeon, with rouged nipples peeking out from a strappy leather harness.This was a purely contemporary idea of loucheness, employed to shock and titillate audiences who might no longer respond to period sleaze. Shock is a losing game, of course. “This same production in 10 years would probably look very tired if we remounted it,” Kander himself predicted.And because the plot still hinged on the rise of Nazism around 1930, the more modern outlook also ate away at the show’s period concept, which depended on a clear alternation between commentative cabaret numbers like “Two Ladies” and naturalistic “book” scenes dramatizing the lives of the characters. Blurring those realms — which the original director, Harold Prince, had taken pains to keep separate — turned Sally, a Weimar party girl in Joe Masteroff’s book, into a neither-world negligee zombie.That’s the Underwear Problem: the perspective confusion that sometimes results from surfacing the subtext and emphasizing interpretation over story. You may, of course, gain something in return; not for nothing did the 1998 revival win four Tonys, run six years and itself get revived in 2014. But when you strip away the social conventions from which a show’s crisis develops — prudery, repression, outerwear, what have you — you leave the action unmotivated and unmoored. It shivers in the conceptual cold.The Barrington revival embraces that denuding and deracination, which is nice for the eyes if not for the drama. That’s not to say it isn’t occasionally gripping and novel at its extremes, as when Sally (Krysta Rodriguez) sings the title song in tatters and with cataclysmic abandon. (The inventively sordid costumes are by Rodrigo Muñoz.) And the book scenes between the widower Herr Schultz (Richard Kline) and the widow Fraulein Schneider (Candy Buckley) — a Jew and a gentile who must eventually face facts — have a graceful dignity when not pushed too hard.Krysta Rodriguez, center, as Sally Bowles performing the song “Maybe This Time.”Daniel RaderBut more often this “Cabaret” oversells itself, laboring to exemplify values that, however naturally they match the “live and let live” ethos enunciated by the Emcee (Nik Alexander, channeling Eartha Kitt) are not a natural part of its storytelling. No matter how much you may respect a production that “celebrates queerness, centers the stories of trans and nonbinary performers and acknowledges that many people of color were also harmed by the Nazis” (as the director, Alan Paul, writes in a program note), that respect cannot hold the musical together.To be clear, I support the nontraditional casting. That three of the Kit Kat Ensemble (as it is now called) are played by trans or nonbinary performers (Charles Mayhew Miller, James Rose and Ryland Marbutt) helps push the 1998 revision’s flirtation with gender diversity in a more serious direction. That Alexander is Black adds an eye-opening racial dimension. And Paul, who is Barrington’s new artistic director, uses the casting expressively instead of merely paying it lip service.That, however, is part of the problem. The original script, and especially the songs, despite the now standard interpolations and deletions, are so strong they continue to tell the story their way even as the director tries to tell it his.At first the tension is useful. When Miller, Rose and Marbutt sing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” in tender harmony while removing their Kit Kat costumes or combing their wigs, we are willing to accept it as a song of hope for a genderqueer future instead of the sinister Nazi anthem Kander and Ebb actually wrote. Yet later, when the song recurs, we are asked to take it as a mortal threat to the same characters. You can argue about multiplicities of meanings, but the ear won’t have it both ways.From left: James Rose, Ryland Marbutt and Charles Mayhew Miller as three members of the Kit Kat Ensemble, singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”Daniel RaderThe same fight between the authors’ and the director’s intentions undermines many of the book scenes as well. Sally’s relationship with Clifford Bradshaw (Dan Amboyer), an American writer visiting Berlin for inspiration, has become less and less credible as his sexuality, altered repeatedly in different versions of the story, has become more and more obvious. Now even Nazis rub up against him, advancing the inadvertent but no less troubling idea that National Socialism was in part a queer phenomenon.I suppose you could explore that idea, but to do so you’d need a much larger conceptual intervention than even this production offers. With just one word of the text altered — a character formerly introduced as “he” is now introduced as “they” — there’s only so much a little nontraditional casting can do. Maybe a lot more would work better.Because “Cabaret” as written is not about personal identity at all. It’s about mass complacency: a society’s failure to awaken in time to injustice and disaster. In 1966, when the Holocaust was still recent history, Prince didn’t need a contemporary lens to portray that danger or make it relevant; the period lens did just fine. So did Boris Aronson’s set, which featured an enormous mirror tipping ominously toward the audience to reflect and implicate it in the story.A mirror features in Wilson Chin’s handsome set for the Barrington production, too, but instead of reflecting the audience, it reflects the stage. After seeing so many versions of “Cabaret” that strip the original bare and rebuild it inside out, I’m beginning to think that’s the real problem. It is no longer a comment on our history but its own.CabaretThrough July 8 at the Barrington Stage Company, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      in Television

      Krysta With a Y Plays Liza With a Z

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      For Krysta Rodriguez, who stars as Liza Minnelli in the new Netflix series ‘Halston,’ acting and decorating aren’t that far apart.Krysta Rodriguez got her first look at New York City through the windows of the motor home that was ferrying her family around the country on an extended road trip. Along the way, there was a stop to take in a show — the 1990 Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof.”“And that set me on the path to where I am today,” said Ms. Rodriguez, now 36, whose CV includes the musicals “Spring Awakening” and “The Addams Family,” as well as a number of television series, among them “Smash” and “Quantico,” and Netflix productions like the post-apocalyptic comedy-drama “Daybreak” and the five-episode bio-drama “Halston,” which debuts on May 14.Ewan McGregor stars as the fashion designer whose minimalist cashmere and Ultrasuede women’s wear became synonymous with 1970s elegance, and whose hard-partying ways became synonymous with ’70s decadence. Krysta with a Y plays Liza with a Z, one of Halton’s best friends.Ms. Rodriguez, who lives in a two-bedroom condominium in Harlem, has designer chops of her own. “My mom is a realtor in California, and I’m her decorator,” she said. “When I was growing up, we would buy and renovate houses and sell them, which I didn’t love because it always meant that you were moving into the worst house in the neighborhood, and then leaving the best house. It wasn’t great for status at school.”She added: “But then I found myself decorating everywhere I went.”Krysta Rodriguez, one of the stars of the new Neflix series “Halston,” recently redid her condo in Harlem, in a homage to the 1970s designer. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKrysta Rodriguez, 36Occupation: ActorNew stages: “I’m launching an interior design business. I’ll always be an actor — I love acting — but I think there are parallels with the two professions: You inhabit a character the way you inhabit a space.”Whenever Ms. Rodriguez is in a Broadway show, for example, she paints and furnishes her dressing room, then leaves it all behind for the next presumably grateful trouper. During the “Daybreak” shoot in Albuquerque, while some of her castmates opted for luxury apartments, she went for an adobe house, moved all the furniture into one room and outfitted the rest of the rental to her own taste. “I have a passion for beautifying,” she said.Ms. Rodriguez was cast in her first Broadway musical, the short-lived “Good Vibrations,” in 2005, while she was an undergrad at New York University. The roles that followed enabled her to buy a tiny studio apartment in Chelsea. She held onto it for seven years before selling in 2017 and buying the sunny, high-ceilinged condo in Harlem, and moving there with her boyfriend. (The relationship has since ended.)The space, almost 900 square feet, put an end to ever so carefully maneuvering around this object or that piece of furniture, so much a part of life in Chelsea.“Things fit, and that’s been a big upgrade for me,” said Ms. Rodriguez, who has renovated the bathroom, adding a Japanese toilet (“it is so civilized,” she said), and replaced several bifold doors. The washer and dryer are now concealed by an old sliding door from a piano factory. “I love that it’s a little stained and has a patina,” she said. The front closet has a carved Moroccan door.“The dressing room is very not neutral,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “I want it to feel very glamorous.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOf course, now that Ms. Rodriguez is the apartment’s sole occupant, her needs are the only ones that must be addressed, her sense of style the only one that must be accommodated. “I can explore the space in a new way,” she said.Inspiration for the do-over came during the “Halston” shoot. She had always thought of the 1970s as the Dark Ages of design: shag carpeting and a baffling celebration of orange. But while on set she discovered a more chic aspect of the decade, an aesthetic that was glamorous and tactile, tidy and streamlined, monochrome and luxe.“I remember thinking, ‘This is my style,’” said Ms. Rodriguez, who committed fully, even buying into the discrete charms of fluffy rugs.“My apartment is an homage to Halston and Liza,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “I wanted it to feel like the place you go after the party where you danced all night long. That was Halston’s townhouse — the swinging place to be.”At Chez Rodriguez, revelers at some post-pandemic, wee-small-hours gathering will disport themselves on the tufted, off-white-velvet sofa, lie on the off-white shag-wool area rug or lean against the sculptural, camel-colored Ultrasuede poufs. Paintings by Keren Toledano hew to the room’s limited color palette. Overhead lighting and sconces were recently installed; they have been outfitted with Philips Hue bulbs, “so I can choose different colors to set different moods,” she said.The floating white-lacquer wood shelf in the living room displays the building blocks of an artsy jet-set life: a reproduction vintage record player, retro barware, a functional vintage Polaroid camera, a bowl of foreign currency and an ashtray complete with a “Halston” prop cigarette.“I’d rather have fewer things, and have them in the space where they belong, rather than storing shoes in the oven because there isn’t enough room elsewhere,” Ms. Rodriguez said. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe apartment’s second bedroom embodies the more glam, anything-but-neutral side of the ’70s. She painted the walls plaster-pink, and there’s a vanity table, a rust-colored velvet bench and — hello, Studio 54 — a rust-colored disco ball.The space has been carefully thought out, from the entryway — vintage metal chair slung with a shag cushion; mirror with white-plaster frame — to the corners of the room, “where people can sit and hang, and feel fabulous,” Ms. Rodriguez said.“I want everything to feel very much of a piece. I am curated. I am meticulous,” she added firmly. “I am not eclectic.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More