The costumes in Bard on the Beach's The Two Gentlemen of Verona are a full-on 1980s nostalgia trip

Designer Carmen Alatorre draws on old photos, film stills, and her own pastel-hued memories for Shakespearean comedy’s retro setting

By Janet Smith

Bard on the Beach’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, with Tess Degenstein and Jacob Leonard. Photo by Tim Matheson

Bard on the Beach presents The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the BMO Mainstage in Vanier Park to September 19

QUARTER-BACK-ISSUE SHOULDER pads. Pretty in Pink pastels. And beyond-big hair.

Costume designer Carmen Alatorre has been having a lot of fun playing with those retro styles and more, as she creates the costumes for Bard on the Beach’s nostalgic ’80s-set Shakespearean comedy Two Gentlemen of Verona. And the artist known for her love of colour is finding rich territory in her first production set in the decade that contained everything from New Romantics to Madonna wannabes to Flashdance.

“The ’80s were a time where music videos came out, and they were really playful and artistic,” she tells Stir on a break from putting last-minute touches on the costumes. “It’s also a decade where there’s a lot of music styles and fashion styles that are eclectic—that are kind of clashing against each other.”

Alatorre was an obvious choice for bringing the era of sartorial excess to life onstage. The celebrated, longtime Bard costume designer is known for creatively charged shows—look no further than the striped bell bottoms, paisley tunics, and go-go dresses of her Beatles-driven hit As You Like It a couple of years ago.

When Two Gentlemen director Dean Paul Gibson first approached Alatorre with his idea of setting the romantic comedy amid a world of 1980s nostalgia, complete with a soundtrack filled with its pop songs, she was game. The story about two besties, Proteus and Valentine, who travel to Milan and fall in love with the same woman, Silvia, offers a lot of fun potential; the play is full of disguises and there’s even a dog named Crab—the only canine character in the Bard’s canon.   

Tess Degenstein in Bard on the Beach’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Photo by Tim Matheson

Alatorre immediately got to work, collecting stills from everything from The Breakfast Club to Miami Vice for a digital moodboard before creating sketches for her team. The costume designer, who was a young teen in Mexico during the ’80s, drew on her own nostalgia, too.

“I found myself a lot of times trying to reproduce things that I used to wear when I was 13 or 14,” she says. “I would say, ‘I remember I had a pair of earrings like these,’ or ‘I remember exactly the shape of these shoes and the colour of these skirts.’

“But more than that,” she continues, “I would look at photos of real people or real teenagers—young people going partying in the ’80s. And it seemed like it was a really exaggerated era, especially for haircuts and colour. It almost feels like our modern eye is just not used to that anymore!”

The challenge was that many of the looks could not be sourced via thrifting—and not just because a new generation of retro-obsessed kids has been scooping up the best finds.

“It’s really hard to find pieces that are in good shape, that will fit our actors, that will have exactly the right colour that we’re looking for, or that will also make it through a three-month-long run with the show,” Alatorre explains. “It’s not like you walk into a vintage store and you have all of these possibilities. So the challenge for me was that we assumed that we could find many of these things, and in the end, we had to build them from scratch.”

Thanks to the decade when people bought Aqua Net Super Hold Professional Hairspray in bulk, Alatorre’s team also ended up using a lot more wigs than she might have initially predicted.

“It really is not fair to the actors to make them tease and spray their hair every night in the way that we used to do it in the ’80s,” she says with a laugh.

Carmen Alatorre.

“Sometimes it suddenly feels like it’s excessive, like this is too much for our times. But then you compare it with photos, and that’s what it was—a wild time for fashion!”

As usual for her process, Alatorre worked closely with director Gibson to talk about character motivations and which references and styles would best suit them. In this rendition, the original’s servants have become a friend group for Proteus and Valentine.

And that means Valentine’s buddy Speed (Angus Yam) will bear some resemblance to Jon Cryer’s creeper-clad thrift-store nerd Duckie in Pretty in Pink. For Agnes Tong’s Silvia, there are two versions of a stunning two-piece suit with a bolero jacket that has oversized shoulder pads.

“The first one is black and white with pops of yellow, and then the second one is an acid wash,” Alatorre reveals.

The designer loves the creative freedom Bard on the Beach allows—not to mention working with Gibson, whose adaptation of The Two Gentlemen of Verona indulges his authentic ’80s nostalgia. 

“He’s so much into fashion that almost every day he’s in the costume shop,” she says. “Our conversations are like, ‘Oh, I just had this idea. What do you think about adding this to that?’ Or he’ll just be in awe about some fabric that we just shopped yesterday.

“It’s almost like this is his baby, right?” she adds. “It’s also his generation, from when he was young and into all of this music.”

Still, no matter how much Alatorre works with these costumes, the fashion extremes of the 1980s are still taking some getting used to.

“Sometimes it suddenly feels like it’s excessive, like this is too much for our times,” she says. “But then you compare it with photos, and that’s what it was—a wild time for fashion! So in a way, it’s almost like I’m negotiating between the reality of that past and what our eye can actually handle.”  

The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Photo-illustration by Emily Cooper

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