'Wicked' costume designer Paul Tazewell on the vision behind his Oscar-nominated work

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: The movie version of the hit musical “Wicked” soared at the box office this winter, and among its 10 nominations, one is for costume designer Paul Tazewell.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown starts our coverage of Oscar nominees this year with this report. It’s part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s a visually spectacular world, intended to feel both familiar and fresh.

Ariana Grande, Actress: The Wicked Witch of the West is dead.

(Cheering)

Jeffrey Brown: For costume designer Paul Tazewell, “Wicked” is an enormous canvas of characters and colors, materials in motion, and it’s the biggest thing he’s ever been involved in.

Paul Tazewell, Costume Designer: It’s a blast, one, and it is my life. It is the way that I communicate, I mean, as a painter would. It is my language, and it is my means of being creative.

Jeffrey Brown: We met recently at Steiner Studios, a film production complex in Brooklyn, New York. And he told us that, for all the huge scale, the key is still through his designs and working with director Jon Chu and actors, most of all Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda, to help create characters, not only their outer clothing, but their inner emotional life.

Paul Tazewell: My focus is who these characters are and how they dress themselves and how to create a world that makes sense within itself and provides a magical environment for this story to exist within.

I mean, so I’m stepping into their shoes. If I’m working adjacent to…

Jeffrey Brown: Actually, they’re stepping into your shoes.

Paul Tazewell: Well, there is that. Both.

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: When it comes to American cultural history, these are very big shoes to fill, beginning with the books, the first in 1900 by L. Frank Baum.

Judy Garland, Actress: But, if you please, what are Munchkins?

Jeffrey Brown: The classic 1939 film that’s taken generations over the rainbow.

Actress: OK, Dorothy and Toto, it seems like we’re going to have to find our own Yellow Brick Robe.

Jeffrey Brown: And “The Wiz,” a 1970s retelling on stage and film through the contemporary Black experience.

Starting in 1995, a new series of books by Gregory Maguire conjured a kind of backstory and revisionist history. It turns out we didn’t really know the Wicked Witch, or Elphaba, after all.

That spawned the amazingly successful Broadway musical running 21 years and counting and now the new film.

Paul Tazewell: I acknowledge all of those as I’m designing it, but with the intent of creating new images, new icons, new ways of seeing who these characters are, and a new way of telling the story. And I delight in it.

Jeffrey Brown: In fact, “The Wiz” was the first show Tazewell designed. He also acted in it as a high school student in Akron, Ohio, where his mother taught him to sew.

He went on to a hugely successful career in theater design, notably including “Hamilton,” for which he won a Tony and, most recently, “Suffs,” which brought another Tony nomination. He won a television Emmy for NBC’s 2015 “The Wiz Live” and the first Oscar nomination for Steven Spielberg’s 2021 film version of “West Side Story.”

So, you’re grabbing images just on the Internet, whatever?

Paul Tazewell: That’s right, that viscerally speak to me. They could be abstract. They could be random. But, collectively, they start to create a world.

Jeffrey Brown: For “Wicked,” Tazewell has taken past icons, the witch’s hat, for example, and made them his own. He created a mash-up of old and new fashions, looked to the art of one of history’s greatest graphic artists, M.C. Escher, and incorporated patterns in nature, including the swirl of the tornado or twister so indelible in the 1939 film.

He showed me an early plastic 3-D model of a crystal slipper made for one of the characters, the swirl pattern appearing throughout. It’s a detail that required weeks for Tazewell and his team to experiment with, design, and make.

I, as the viewer, seeing the film, I wouldn’t know all that, right?

Paul Tazewell: Right. And my hope is that — and that was for all of the details of Oz and what we were creating for “Wicked,” was that it becomes immersive, that you believe it so much that you’re drawn into this world. And there’s a suspension of disbelief.

Jeffrey Brown: Tazewell says he’s always bringing his own personal connections to the story and characters he’s working on.

He brought up the example of Elphaba, an outsider in Munchkinland, a different color from the rest, uncertain of her own place, and shunned by others.

Paul Tazewell: What I bring to the event is my own life experience and how I walk through life as well.

I have a direct emotional relationship to that, being a Black man walking through life in America. So, decisions…

Jeffrey Brown: So, you connect in that sense.

Paul Tazewell: Absolutely. So, decisions around how she emotionally presents herself, what her intention is, I have to build some kind of connection in order to have an honest take on what a character might wear.

Jeffrey Brown: There’s also another kind of history at stake in Tazewell’s Oscar nomination. In 2019, Ruth Carter became the first Black costume designer to win an Oscar for her work in “Black Panther.” Tazewell would be the first Black man to win.

Paul Tazewell: The number of people of color that I experienced coming up in this business, there were just…

Jeffrey Brown: Was minimal.

Paul Tazewell: There were just very few, and which is why it’s so important for me to be a face that is visible and out there for other people to see me doing it.

Jeffrey Brown: Tazewell is also seeking to make a case for the role of the costume designer more broadly, something he says is often not well understood and has implications for such things as pay equity within his industry.

Paul Tazewell: What has become more of a priority is to be expansive in a way that is not only identified as a costume designer, but is identified as a creative artist.

And I have tried to turn up the volume on indeed what it is that we do, and the power that we have as costume designers to create character. Our contribution is huge towards that.

Jeffrey Brown: Paul Tazewell vies for an Oscar, one of 10 nominations overall for “Wicked,” on March 2.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Brooklyn, New York.

Geoff Bennett: And Paul Tazewell is paying it forward. He established a scholarship at his alma mater for design students, the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

Amna Nawaz: It’s amazing, amazing work, and we wish him well at the Oscars.

(Laughter)

Geoff Bennett: That’s right.