PASADENA, California –“I started out in college in pre-med, but I couldn’t hack the chemistry. Then I switched to pre-law, but I found it boring. Then I went to see a production of Georges Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear, and it hit me like a ton of bricks — ‘That’s what I want to do!’”
And that’s how Kate Bergh, who had been designing clothes for her dolls since she was four, became a costume designer.
“My father almost had a heart attack,” she adds with a laugh.
Now fast forward to Sunday, September 25, at the Pasadena Playhouse. It’s the opening of a new musical comedy, South Street, with music and lyrics by Richard Addrisi, book by Craig Carlisle, direction by Roger Castellano, and costume design by Bergh.
“South Street is an actual street in Philadelphia,” Bergh explains. “It’s a little like Melrose Avenue here.” The play takes place in a bar that used to be a firehouse, then a strip joint, and is now owned by a young couple struggling to keep it going.
“The sets (by Andy Walmsley) are just wonderful, and so is the music,” Bergh says. And the best part, she adds, is that “there are huge resources here in L.A. for pulling together costumes.”
Bergh has a very distinct philosophy for the costumes she designs. “I believe first impressions should tell their own story, and clothing should explain the character and advance the story. The first time you see the character, you should be able to tell if he’s light or dark, old or young, rich or poor. Does he buy his clothes at Sears or Neiman Marcus? Does he care about his appearance? Does his wife dress him?
“I see the costumes as clothing for the play as a whole,” she adds. “Costumes are tools for everyone, and they help the actors discover their characters. Then, with time, the actors come to inhabit their characters and the costumes help them to ripen and develop their roles.”
Bergh confesses that she makes up her own back-story about the characters before she meets the actors, “and then they can confirm or deny if I’ve got it right. But I can’t dress them if I don’t have a back-story.”
She admits that she “wasn’t into musical theater,” so when she started designing for the prestigious Reprise Theatre Company at UCLA, she hadn’t seen the shows. “I didn’t want to repeat what other designers had done,” she says, “and so I started from scratch.”
For Reprise’s recent production of Cabaret she began research in June in preparation for its September opening. “The story is set in Berlin in 1930, and I read interviews from the people of that time, and with (author) Christopher Isherwood, and looked at hundreds of photographs. There’s a marvelous old documentary on YouTube that records a day in the life of pre-war Berlin. It’s called Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and it’s set in five acts, and I watched every second of it.”
Cabaret is a “timely and insightful cautionary tale,” she continues. “It opens your eyes to a very volatile political climate—much like today.” Gilles Chiasson, the producing director of Reprise, tries to be politically relevant, she adds. “It’s why we did Cabaret.”
Bergh, who was born in Chicago, has a long history of living with brilliant colors. When her family moved to Springfield, Illinois, her father painted their house a bright orange. “We often got mail addressed to ‘Orange House, Springfield, Illinois,’” she recalls. (Her current home in Glendale was also painted by her father. It’s a dazzling golden yellow with royal blue trim. When I told her those were UCLA’s colors, she said she didn’t know that because she had attended the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.)
“When I graduated, everyone had a job but me,” she says. “I had worked at the university’s Krannert Center for the Performing Arts while I was in school, so I rashly applied for a job to design for the theater at Syracuse University and they hired me just from my resume.
“There were only a few of us, and we were working 20-hour days while the lady who ran the place went off to the theater every night. Fortunately, she was fired, and I was promoted to running the entire costume shop at the age of 22.”
From there she went on to Indiana Rep in Indianapolis and then a stint in summer stock in Louisville, Kentucky. “Louisville had a Shakespeare in the Park program that was kind of a Podunk version of Shakespeare in the Park,” she says. “It was for disadvantaged inner city kids, and teenagers would come with their babies. But they knew everything about Shakespeare: the plays, the characters, the dialogue… I was so impressed that the theater could have that kind of an impact on them. It was very moving.”
The decade of 1979-89 saw her in Chicago at the time when big theater was thriving. Steppenwolf had started, and the Chicago Opera Theater, and the Lookingglass, and so many others, “and I worked for all of them,” she says. Her credits there include The Good Soldier Schweik, The Italian Girl in Algiers, Summer and Smoke, and The Mother of Us All for the Chicago Opera Theater, and The Diary of Anne Frank for the Steppenwolf. The Summer and Smoke production was broadcast on PBS in 1980.
“Nobody made any money,” she says, and so she supplemented her income by designing sets and wardrobe for commercials and print advertising for such clients as AT&T, Marlboro, Toyota, Disney, Target and Coca Cola, among others. Her work has been featured in Vanity Fair, People, Elle, Life, and Esquire magazines.
But even though her paycheck took a leap from $200 a month as a designer to $200 a day as a stylist, she is still devoted to her first love, the stage. Her next project is Next Fall at the Geffen Playhouse, opening Nov 2. Her design credits include six other Reprise productions, Prisoner of Second Avenue with Jason Alexander at the El Portal, Open Heart at the Falcon, and The Baker’s Wife, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, A Winter’s Tale, and Richard II in Chicago.
If you should look her up on IMDb, you’ll find her credit for dressing all the characters in Disney’s animated film, Hercules. And even though that film had a stellar cast (Danny DeVito, James Woods, Tate Donovan, Samantha Eggar, Hal Holbrook, Rip Torn, et al) they were all invisible; only their voices took part, while Kate Bergh’s costumes were totally visible throughout.
South Street, produced by Kathleen Johnson, opens Sept. 25; plays Tues.-Fri., 8 pm; Sat. at 4 and 8 pm; and Sun. at 2 and 7 pm; through October 16. Tickets: $39-69. Premium tickets $100. The Pasadena Playhouse, 39 South El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Call 626-356-7529 or visit www.PasadenaPlayhouse.org for tickets.
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Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief of San Diego Jewish World. She may be contacted at cynthia.citron@sdjewishworld.com This article previously appeared in LA Stage Times