Hair-raising decisions: Asolo Rep wig designer connects with actors through hair

When she enrolled in cosmetology school, Michelle Hart was interested in getting into the world of fantasy, but she wasn’t sure how to get there. She found a way, if not quite how she expected.

For the last 21 years, Hart has been the makeup and wig designer for Asolo Repertory Theatre, making or designing thousands of wigs and helping actors find the right look with their makeup for characters that might range from 17th-century villains to modern-day heroes.

She was working as a paraoptometric assistant, helping patients pick out eyeglass frames, when she started thinking about a career shift.

Arts Newsletter: Sign up to receive the latest news on the Sarasota area arts scene every Monday

Theater, concerts, dance, art and more 35-plus arts events to experience in May in Sarasota-Manatee area

Building a new season: See what's coming to Sarasota's Asolo Rep with its 2023-24 lineup

“I was thinking of people’s faces and shapes and colors and talking to them about picking out the right frame,” she said during an interview in an empty dressing room at Asolo Rep during a recent matinee performance. “I’d say, ‘Tell me about yourself,’ and that would help me make sure the frame complements them. I started getting into that world without realizing. I wanted to transform people, wanted to enter the world of fantasy, transforming an everyday person into someone completely different.”

She had music videos in mind. “I loved seeing the theatrical version in music videos of a fantasy world, of hairstyles you wouldn’t see in the everyday world in public. You only saw it in theaters and movies. I loved the artistic and out-of-the-box that world was,” she said.

Moving away from the math and sciences that she loved, Hart enrolled in cosmetology school in Fort Collins, Colorado, where she learned about hair, nails, wigs, haircuts, hair colors, perms, and how lighting affects makeup.

A local theater needed a volunteer to help design wigs for an upcoming production and Hart signed up. It was at the theater where she met the late actress Devora Millman, the daughter of Howard Millman, who was then the producing artistic director of Asolo Rep.

“I designed a wig for her, and she asked if I would be interested in coming to Florida if they needed someone. I said absolutely. Devora came down here and found out they needed an assistant and Hart began her long tenure in Sarasota.

Some dreams are possible: A glorious ‘Man of La Mancha’ closes Asolo Rep season

Peter Rothstein: Asolo Rep turns to a familiar artist to be new producing artistic director

Recovering from Hurricane Ian: Venice Theatre rebuilding progress will take more time and delay mainstage reopening

Creative challenges

Every show since then has created its own challenges. If she doesn’t already have the wig she needs in the right color, texture or style, she will order hair and start creating a net or mesh “so I can hand dye the hair into a wig and actually build the wig,” she said.

The process can take up to two weeks. “Sometimes I’ll scalp the wig. I’ll have a wig and then take the top part off and create or stitch in the netting or mesh,” she said.

Hart works with human hair, synthetic hair, and yak hair, and the length and color of the wig (and the price) will determine what material she uses. “If it’s long hair, I’m going human, but we’re talking $300-to-$500. You can get the same color in a synthetic for about $100. Gray hair will most likely be synthetic because it’s rare for a human to donate long gray hair.”

Yak hair may be seen in more stylized period wigs because of the braiding and tightness of how it is used.

Hart says she reads the scripts several times before starting work.

“The first time is for the general gist of the story. The second time I’m looking at the character, breaking down the different characters, their personalities, their quirks and what’s in the description the author has written,” she said. “The third time, I am fine-tuning and visualizing the actor with the different styles. Facial hair is also taken into consideration.”

When she learns which actors are playing roles in upcoming productions, she can start figuring out what might work best. It can be easier with actors who have appeared before at Asolo Rep. “Their face shape is already memorized and I know the actors and what they like and what they don’t like,” she said.

Egan Ross: Asolo Rep names managing director to work with new artistic leader

‘Clowns Like Me’: Actor finds catharsis sharing life with mental illness in one-man play at Cook Theatre

Laughs for the summer: ‘Shear Madness’ returns to FST in a comedy-focused summer season

What makes a successful wig?

For Hart, there’s always a moment when the wig is 80 to 90 percent styled and the actors get to try it on for the first time.

“When the actors see themselves with the wig on and they connect, that to me is success,’ she says. “The most magical beautiful moment is when I see them connect, the dilation of the pupils. They want to move around and show it off.”

Some wigs are meant to look as realistic and right for the period of the play as possible, but Hart loves when she gets back to her original thinking about entering a fantasy world.

“I loved doing ‘The Learned Ladies’ for the Asolo Conservatory. That was a bit avant-garde. It is fun to make things look as natural as possible, but I love when I don’t have to. I can be an artist with color and creativity and put different ornaments in the wigs.” The characters wore high wigs made of bright colors with lots of ornaments added.

More frequently, wigs have to inform the audience (and the actor) about the characters, the kind of life they lead, and the time period of the play.

Tree Fort Productions Projects: Actress and teacher Katherine Tanner launches new theater company in Sarasota

A future home: Players Centre may get to turn Payne Park auditorium into a theater

Comedy in July: Sarasota Improv Festival brings laughs back to FST after four-year pandemic break

In the recent “Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” actress Erin O’Connor played a pregnant 19-year-old girl named Linda in an Irish Catholic family in 1973. Her mother, Jo, played by Lise Bruneau, frequently tells her to “fix your hair.”

“When I first started off with her hair, the hairstyle was a little too clear,” Hart said. “It was freshly styled, but I needed to create a look where the mother would need to say, ‘Fix your hair.’ She’s kind of needing to do something to it. So I created kinky waves. From braiding a person’s hair and unbraiding it, it becomes kind of kinky.”

For Bruneau, Hart set a style that was more mid to late 1960s. "It is about understanding the character and her not being a mod woman of the ’70s. I wanted to have something more stylized, more controlled,” she said.

For the villainous M’Lady in “The Three Musketeers,” Hart played around with the hair color of actress Traci Lane.

“We started with a softer red, a more subtle natural red. I wanted her in the world of red, but when we got her up on stage, it wasn’t bold enough, strong enough for her character,” Hart said. “We also were working with different hairstyles as well, trying to find something that made a very strong statement. That went through quite some transformation while we were in tech rehearsals.”

Hart doesn’t mind if the audience isn’t always aware that the actors are wearing wigs or if they’re using their own hair.

In “The Three Musketeers,” some of the men wore wigs but others didn’t.

“If we were asking the actors to use their own hair, for male presenters, I’d ask them to grow it out to fit that time period during the first fitting for costumes and hair. We have to ask if they feel comfortable growing out their own hair,” she said.

Actors at Asolo Rep often appear in more than one show at the same time, so hair decisions become crucial. Dean Linnard wore a long-haired wig in “The Three Musketeers,” but was seen “with a nice clear haircut” for his role in “Chicken & Biscuit.”

Everything she creates is coordinated with the director and the other designers. “The costumer can give me guidelines. Is this in the red family or blonde family, mid-length or some curl to it.”

By the time of the first costume fitting, Hart has swatches of material that the costumer plans to use “and I can determine much more accurately the shades of blonde or red or brunette, and when I’m looking at the actor, it gives me a much better idea. This is where visualization of how long it can be and the texture that will work for their face.”

And then, just like with the eyeglass frames she used to fit, she begins crafting a way to transform that actor into someone new.

Follow Jay Handelman on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Contact him at jay.handelman@heraldtribune.com. And please support local journalism by subscribing to the Herald-Tribune.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Asolo Rep wig designer helps actors find characters through hair