How Linda Cho Created Almost 300 Costumes for Broadway’s The Great Gatsby

Linda Cho loves a big show. Or rather, she’s made it something of her specialty. She just won her second Tony Award for The Great Gatsby, a project that required close to 300 costumes. Her previous Tony was for A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, another period piece which had a cast of 12, but Jefferson Mays had over eight costume changes.

“I tend to do a lot of giant shows,” Cho exclaims, chuckling. “Actually, I find giant shows sometimes easier than small shows, because when there's three costumes on stage, that's all people are seeing. And so everything is this micro, precious thing. Whereas when you have 25 people on stage and they're all moving, you can do these sort of big, big gestures anyway. And I have amazing people. None of this is possible without an amazing team.”

On Gatsby, that team includes associate costume designer Patrick Bevilacqua (who is also the show’s wardrobe supervisor) and assistants Elivia Bovenzi Blitz and Michael Schaffner. The directive for the look of this new iteration of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel came from director Marc Bruni. “In our early conversations, there were discussions: ‘Do you want to do an abstracted Gatsby? Should we do a sort of contemporary take? How do you want to do it?’ And Marc Bruni's direction was, ‘Let's do the Gatsby of people's imagination.’ For me, that imagination is something that is going to be decadent and beautiful.”

Cho and her team have created close to 300 costumes for Gatsby, which include the individual costumes for swings and understudies. Those costumes span from slinky 1920s flapper party dresses, to opulent head pieces, to sinister trench coats, and dapper suits befitting a millionaire. And the most awe-inspiring thing: every performer of that 42-member cast has their own look—aside from some suits, there are no repeat outfits.

That’s been the thing that Cho has been particularly proud of in this show: designing for the ensemble and making sure that every member looks cohesive with the whole group while maintaining their own individuality.

“Each ensemble number [in the show], I sort of consider as a whole,” she explains. “When I'm sketching and then painting and then swatching, I do it all at once—I’ll have, like, 10 costume sketches in front of me at the same time. Because I have to think of them as a stage picture.”

Cho likes to use color to tell the story—the colors the ensemble are wearing overall sets the mood of the scene and the song, and the ensemble colors can then be used to complement or contrast what the principal characters are wearing in the scene.

Lindo Cho's costume design for the "Partygoers" in *The Great Gatsby* on Broadway Sketches by Linda Cho/Photography by MurphyMade

In the opening number “Roaring On,” which takes place at a lavish party, the ensemble wears black and gold. It sets up the theme of opulence, of a party that keeps going on. But those colors are also intentionally picked. “In my mind, that black and gold sets up the elegance and the expectation, but I also wanted to make sure we had somewhere to go [color wise],” explains Cho. “And you see Gatsby in his white suit, so he'll pop in front of the black. Everything is very purposefully picked. It's not just about picking things that are pretty or that are fun.”

Then in “New Money,” set at another party where the audience is introduced to Gatsby, the stage explodes with various hues. Cho wanted "the colors of a peacock"—blues, greens, silvers—a whirlwind of color to stun the show’s narrator, Nick, who is new to this upper-class world.

Those rich colors also provide contrast to the lower-class characters in the show. The factory workers who are forced to toil in the Valley of Ashes wear warm colors of brown and yellow, while the mobster characters who are trying to get ahead wear grays. “Everything is kind of dirty. And as the name suggests, Valley of Ashes, it has a city quality,” says Cho. “And another big ensemble number was the ‘Shady’ number, with all the trench coats—that was meant to look like colors of smoke and ash, like bats almost—so that there's sort of a sinister quality about it.”

Linda Cho's costume design for *The Great Gatsby* on Broadway Linda Cho

It’s not just colors. A clear prerogative with this Gatsby musical was opulence: Everyone playing a rich character needs to look very rich. But the costumes also needed to be practical for performance, and the rigors of an eight-shows-a-week schedule. Cho admitted she had to employ some “cheats.”

First, she had to modify the 1920s drop waist to allow for Dominique Kelley’s vigorous, contemporary flavored choreography. Instead of straight flapper dresses, the actors were given dresses with form-fitting waists and a drop skirt. “I gave everybody a snatched waist,” says Cho. “It facilitates the contemporary movement, which is a lot of partnering. So when you have a slippery midsection, you can't do the partnering [dances]. The dancing also informed the skirt shapes. Normally in the ’20s, you'd have just a straight skirt. But you can't do a big kick-you-in-the-face kick, so you’ve got to cheat. There's all kinds of cheats that you see in the show.”

The beaded and embroidered fabrics for the ensemble costumes were also relatively inexpensive, just $3 a yard, so if they need to be replaced, it won't blow a dent in the budget. There’s also a “bead call” everyday where seamstresses come in to fix any beads or threads that have come loose.

Lindo Cho's costume design for the "Gilda Gray" in *The Great Gatsby* on Broadway Sketches by Linda Cho/Photography by MurphyMade

Though Cho made sure her design fit with the demands of the choreography, she did put her foot down in one key moment in the show. In the “New Money” sequence, Cho advocated for “a costume parade” to show off Gatsby’s ultra-wealthy guests. “I was indulged,” Cho says proudly. “I wanted the biggest headpieces and the longest sleeves and the biggest trains for that first, initial entry. And then [the ensemble would] lose them, and then they come back in dance-ful dresses. So that was just trying to fill the space and to really feel the decadence of the period and still be able to make it practical for the show.”

The headdresses may be opulent looking, but they’re actually quite light, says Cho. They’re actually made with millinery wire and lightweight jewels, so they only weigh a few ounces (as opposed to a few pounds like a traditional headpiece).

“I have designed shows using a real jeweler [for headdresses], and those can get really heavy,” says Cho. “That eight shows a week, for a year-long run, can really start giving people headaches. So we made [the Gatsby headdresses] in more of a millinery style, as opposed to a jewelry-manufacturing method.”

Cho may have designed close to 300 costumes, but she's not done yet. “There's new second covers and understudies that need whole new designs to get inserted in. So I just designed five more the other day!” exclaims Cho. For her, it’s important to make sure everyone has their own unique look that is cohesive with the stage picture. At the same time, the actors have to love what they're wearing. “I always want to hear how they're feeling about a costume, because they're ultimately the ones that have to wear it. If they hate it, I'm going to ruin their performance. So I'm happy to listen to their feedback and what they feel looks good on them.”

This diversity of looks, of making sure individuality is honored, it’s something that Cho is particularly passionate about. She’s only the second Asian American costume designer to win a Tony Award, after Willa Kim (who Cho assisted early in her career). And on June 16, when Cho accepted her second Tony, she dedicated her win to her mother, Min Soon Cho, who was a Korean immigrant. “When I was a teenager, she said, ‘You’re a woman, you’re a minority, you will never succeed in anything artistic.' It was out of love, it was out of protection. I think she’d be pretty amazed to know that tonight I share this nomination with 16 others who are similar to me.”

Her mother had been an accomplished painter in Korea before immigrating to Canada and earning her MFA, explains Cho to Playbill. “She tried to make a go of graphic design and fine art and wedding gown design, but it was tough. It was the ’70s, it was the ’80s, it was not an easy landscape." But, when Cho realized that costume design was her passion, her mom didn’t stop her. “She became my biggest fan. She didn't see any of my work, but she was so supportive, so delighted for me.” Cho was born in Seoul and raised in Toronto; it was her mother who taught her how to sew. Her mother passed away when Cho was 30, so Min Soon never saw her daughter receive the accolades from her peers.

The designer has also been an advocate for diversity behind the scenes, so that other artists from marginalized backgrounds will be welcomed—they won't be excluded like her mother was.

“Balanced teams on stage and backstage is very important to the entire culture of theatre,” says Cho passionately. “We're trying to tell this universal story, right? Like every show that we do in theatre, you hope touches a broad audience…And what better way of creating a universal story than to have a universal team that comes from different places? That, again, is not just reflected in the actors and the faces you see on stage, but the storytellers behind it…All of that is, I think, really important to making a diamond shine. A diamond shines because it's faceted and polished in many small angles. And the only way to shine is to have lots of different angles.”