5 Shows, 94 Actors, 450 Costumes: Emilio Sosa Dresses Broadway

During the pre-Broadway performance of “Good Night, Oscar” at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, actress Emily Bergl was known to the staff as “the lady in the dress”.

As June, the wife of troubled narrator-pianist Oscar Levant, Bergl wears a floral dress and matching chartreuse coat. The dress exudes the energy of a Jackson Pollock canvas — black and daffodil yellow on shimmering silver brocade, hand-painted to generate the perfect glow for the stage. It stands out in that show’s sea of ​​impeccable suits.

Bergl calls it the dress.

“I’m not discrediting my performance in ‘Good Night, Oscar’ when I say the dress does half the job,” she said.

When Bergl first met the man behind the dress, the costume designer Emilio Sosa, he told her, “June Levant’s clothes are armor.”

“I knew right away that he completely understood the character and that I was in good hands,” she said.

In a recent phone interview, Sosa said, “Listening to actors is 95 percent of my design. You have to actively involve your actors in the costume they are going to wear.”

This season, Sosa has dressed 94 actors for five Broadway productions in 450 costumes. He has earned two Tony nominations for his costume design, for “Good Night, Oscar” and “Ain’t No Mo,” a satire on contemporary black America. He also designed costumes for the Neil Diamond bio-musical “A Beautiful Noise” and the revivals of “1776” and “Sweeney Todd”.

It’s been a dizzying blur of looks, from sensible suits to sequins, from American Colonial-era clothing to Crayola-colored camp.

At his busiest, Sosa found himself working on three shows at once, averaging three hours of sleep a night. He follows a maxim he picked up early on from his mentor, Geoffrey Holder, ‘The Wiz’ director and versatile cultural figure: ”Say ‘yes’ to everything – then figure out how to make it work.”

Sosa, 57, describes himself – tongue firmly in cheek, he wants to be clear – as an overnight sensation 30 years in the making. Sosa made his Broadway debut in 2002 with Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog. His second Broadway show, for which he earned his first Tony nomination, was “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” in 2012.

Sosa also participated in the reality TV competition ‘Project Runway’ in 2010 and 2012, an experience he says built the confidence that allowed him to present himself and his designs.

In between there is a lot of “rushing, struggling and trying to make a living”, including a lot of work in the regional theatre. “I was a broken child with a hard upbringing,” Sosa said. “But I found out that in the arts no one could beat me. So I developed that. That’s where the drive comes from.”

If there’s one thing Sosa’s diverse projects have in common, it might be his enthusiastic embrace of color. “In my culture, as Latinos, we’re not afraid of color,” he said.

One of his earliest memories is of the color blue. Sosa and his family emigrated to New York City from the Dominican Republic when he was 3 years old, flying Pan Am from Santo Domingo; Sosa liked the blue of the airline’s logo.

“Blue was the first color to which I connected an emotion or memory. I remember the logo, the color of the carpet, the taste of the food, the flight attendants’ uniforms. That color has always stayed with me.”

Growing up in the Fort Apache section of the Bronx in the 1970s, Sosa was fascinated — amidst the “chaos and destruction” — by glimpses of color in burnt-out apartment buildings. “You could see the interior walls,” he said, “since half the building was gone.”

His father worked as a super and handyman; his mother worked in a plastics factory. He stuttered, couldn’t play baseball, and had trouble adjusting.

“I never felt like I belonged, I never felt like I looked good, I never felt like there was anything right about me,” he said. “But then a teacher of mine used art to try to get me out of my shell. She put a colored pencil in my hand and I never let go.”

He designed his first piece of clothing when he was 15: a blouse for his mother. He can still picture the print—in gold, brown, emerald, mustard—bought at a fabric store near Union Square that he had once dreaded going into. (His aunt, a seamstress, sewed the garment; Sosa wouldn’t dare sew around his father.)

Initially, theater was not on Sosa’s radar. That changed when, while studying fashion design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, he took a summer job at Grace Costumes, founded by stage client Grace Miceli. At the end of the day, he volunteered to sweep and lingered to watch Miceli and her artisans at work.

“It gave me an appreciation for the artisans — the makers,” he said. “It was better than graduating from some tony-ass school. It was, ‘We have to have this costume ready by 12.’”

After graduation, Sosa worked as an assistant wardrobe supervisor for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and styled music videos for SpikeDDB, the advertising agency founded by director Spike Lee. By designing commercials, some just 15 seconds long, Sosa learned the importance of having an instant visual impact. “Spike told me, ‘The audience needs to know who this person is the moment they step in front of the camera.'”

But Sosa was especially drawn to Broadway, intrigued by the way a single costume could speak volumes.

“He’s a natural storyteller,” says Stevie Walker-Webb, the director of “Ain’t No Mo.” “He uses textiles instead of words, silhouettes instead of sentences.”

A memorable moment in “Ain’t No Mo'” involved a character named Black – an incarnation of Blackness who storms onto the stage wearing a quilt. The idea for the costume came from a Zoom conversation with Walker-Webb. Sosa saw something behind the director; it was a photograph of a 150-year-old family quilt, sewn by the director’s great-great-great-grandmother and passed down through many generations. With that image as the seed, the character became, according to Walker-Webb, “a living, breathing pastiche of black history and culture.”

“It’s that sensitivity and curiosity that make Emilio an invaluable collaborator,” he said.

There is another project that Sosa takes very seriously: improving diversity backstage. In 2021, he was elected president of the American Theater Wing, a non-profit organization that provides professional development opportunities for emerging theater performers. He closely follows the Springboard to Design program, which encourages and mentors students from communities that are underrepresented in the theater design industry. “They meet fellow costume designers who look like them,” he said. “We need more set designers of color, more lighting designers of color. I always try to push young kids to get into those departments.

As busy as Sosa has been, this was also a learning year for him. “I really had to dig deep, really concentrate and improve my game to survive my schedule,” he said. If an intense schedule is the new norm, he’s willing to make it work.

“Planes, trains and cars. Buses, benches in the park. I could sketch in the middle of Times Square if I had to.”