Singer and actress Nicole Scherzinger kicked off the TDF’s Costumes & Cocktails Spring gala at Tao Downtown in Manhattan on April 7. The 2024 Laurence Olivier Award winner mentioned the significance of costumes.
“Making my Broadway debut this season in Sundown Boulevard has been one of many biggest experiences of my complete life, and each evening as I slip into Norma Desmond’s world, pun supposed, it’s my costume that helps me really turn out to be her,” she shared.
“Only a easy slip, and I’m reworked. However that’s what nice costume design is: storytelling via a garment, constructing a personality with material and thread. Like Norma, the slip is robust, it’s susceptible, it’s a contact harmful, and spoiler alert, it’s fully soaked in blood by the top of the present. I’m so honored to be right here with all of you tonight, celebrating 50 years of the TDF Costume Assortment.”
The occasion began with a cocktail hour and handed hors d’oeuvres in a well-dressed room crammed with Broadway’s greatest behind-the-scenes and off-the-stage. Dancers livened up the occasion, displaying off their greatest disco strikes to songs like “The Hustle.”
Three-time Tony Award-winning costume designer Gregg Barnes was honored with the TDF/Irene Sharaff Award for Sustained Excellence in Costume Design and costumes and textile designer Wilberth Gonzalez obtained the TDF/Kitty Leech Ascending Artist Award, an award gained by Barnes 31 years in the past. Milliner and artisan Arnold S. Levine, Inc. obtained the TDF/Irene Sharaff Artisan Award and scenic designer Robert Israel obtained the Robert L. B. Tobin Award for Sustained Excellence in Theatrical Design.
The night continued with a buffet dinner and dancing for the remainder of the evening, with some performers spontaneously taking the stage to carry out.
“For 50 years, the TDF Costume Assortment has been offering leases to teams everywhere in the nation,” Director of the TDF Costume Assortment Stephen Cabral stated in a press release earlier than the occasion. “From a neighborhood theatre in South Carolina to a highschool in Pennsylvania, from an Fairness theatre in Seattle to ‘Saturday Night time Dwell’ at 30 Rock, we’re all the time right here that will help you gown your imaginative and prescient. As a proud member of the Assortment workers for over 30 years, it’s such a profound pleasure to honor this 12 months’s extraordinary group of theatre artists with our annual custom of the Irene Sharaff Awards whereas additionally celebrating the historical past of the TDF Costume Assortment and its enduring mission.”
TDF (Theatre Improvement Fund) is a not-for-profit group devoted to sharing the ability of the performing arts with everybody.