Jen Madison, Costume Designer, Opera Orlando
HOW LONG WITH OPERA ORLANDO: 3 seasons.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES OF HER ROLE: Visually interpreting a character’s personality, plus the opera’s mood and time period, through clothing. Making sketches of pieces for a show, and constructing those pieces.
HOW SHE GOT INVOLVED IN HER FIELD: After visiting a community college show, Madison was drawn to working backstage, which morphed into a natural interest in history and clothing. She later switched her major to theater.
Jen Madison loves to dig into the details.
“Costume design is an adventure,” she says. “I love to get to the specifics of who these people are, how we relate to them—or don’t—by helping to tell the story [through clothing].”
The proper costuming, says Madison, helps to give audiences an idea of the time and the period the opera is set in. It also helps the actors enhance their performances.
“I think it probably gives them a feeling of what it’s like to live in that time and place,” she says.
Take, for example, “Lucia di Lammermoor,” a tragic Italian opera written in 1835 by Gaetano Donizetti. Opera Orlando staged its “Game of Thrones”-inspired production in April 2024. The costumes Madison and her team produced had a lot of weight and layers to them, in addition to a lot of grit.
“There’s a lot of textural work that sometimes goes into costumes that people don’t necessarily notice,” says Madison. “I think we spent almost a week just distressing and painting to get them looking like they had been worn on the edge of civilization for years.”
At the opposite end of the spectrum, “Cendrillon,” Jules Massenet’s French tale based on the story of “Cinderella,” called for ball gowns and glamorous accessories.
“I loved working on Cinderella’s ball gown,” says Madison. “It was also fun to put together the stepsisters, who became all about layering on silly accessories.”
Madison jumps into planning each opera’s design 6-12 months in advance, first reading the script and libretto, as well as fiction books to get other people’s takes on the stories of the time. She then listens to the opera, and begins gathering images, building an overall feel and world the costumes need to exist in. Next, she digs into the opera line by line for specific references to be aware of. After she whittles down her core images, she runs them past the director and design team and begins sketching.
While the cast varies by opera, Madison says an average opera features about 35 performers, although she’s costumed operas with up to 120.
“I feel like a lot of costuming is just determining how to take this big idea and then translate it into individual characters and the arc of their story,” says Madison. “So much of opera is about the individuals, and I’m here to support how each person fits into this big, dynamic, scenic look and to make sure things fit and feel good.”
