For 14 years, Tom Watson’s made wigs for the Met and productions on and off Broadway. Above, he holds a wig for “Maria Stuarda.” Below, his work for Natalie Dessay in “La Fille du Régiment” and Luca Pisaroni in “The Enchanted Island.” (
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Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” packs up its brushes next week. Happily, the Met’s own barber — wig master Tom Watson — is staying put.
For the past 14 years, Watson’s molded, made, tweaked, rinsed and readied the heads of Met Opera royalty: Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, Renée Fleming, Anna Netrebko and Susan Graham among them.
“He’s the Energizer bunny!” cries Graham, no slacker herself — she’s currently singing the lead in “Les Troyens.” The soprano and the wig maker met in 1988 in St. Louis and bonded over a mammoth hairpiece he made her for “Werther,” whose Italian director kept insisting on something “beeger, beeger!”
Left to his own devices, Graham says, Watson does his best to make everyone look good.
“Wig makers have to be able to create a hairstyle and wig that’s flattering to the person onstage, and I, for a person nearly 6 feet tall, have a small head and ample hairline — we used to call me Cro-Magnon Girl,” she says. “Tommy has to create a wig that doesn’t overpower my little face, and he always manages beautifully.”
Backstage at the Met the other day, the 59-year-old high priest of hair brushed out the long, auburn tresses Joyce DiDonato will wear next week in “Maria Stuarda.” (“He’s the best!” DiDonato says. “He knows us even better than we know ourselves!”)
It’s been a busy year. Not only are Watson and his staff of six responsible for 3,500 wigs per season — 500 of them new, the rest prepped or refurbished — but he also moonlights on and off Broadway. This year alone, he did the hair designs for “Annie,” “A Christmas Story,” “The Golden Age” and “Golden Child.” His track record is golden, period.
“If Kristin Chenoweth has a wig on Broadway, I’m probably gonna do it,” Watson says. He’s still getting residuals from “Wicked” — enough, he says, that he’s named his beach house on Long Island’s North Fork “Wicked Weekends.”
But he seems happier about the starry company he keeps than the checks he gets: “I was getting into a cab one day, and someone was calling my name, and it was Chita Rivera, and I thought, ‘I’ve arrived!’ ”
Pretty heady stuff for a Belfast, Ireland, native and former hairdresser. It was while working at a posh salon in San Francisco in the ’70s that he got a glimpse of his future, when a client — Lois De Domenico, a k a Mrs. Rice-A-Roni — invited him to join her at the San Francisco Opera. Watson had never been to the opera before.
“It was ‘Elektra,’ which is pretty intense,” he recalls. “I’m amazed I didn’t go screaming out of the opera house!” But he loved Strauss’ music and the drama, and the elegance of sitting in dress circle.
“Someone said, ‘You know, they have hairdressers backstage,’ ” and soon he began assisting at regional theaters. The more his reputation grew, the more wigs he tended.
He starts with human hair, most of it from India, “because it’s thicker and stands up to dyeing.” Plastic is laid over a performer’s head, and Watson draws on the hairline before making a mold for the wig, which takes about 40 hours to create.
Some assignments are hairier than others. Watson recalls a time when Pavarotti was in Philadelphia, performing with winners of his young artists’ competition. The great tenor liked to wear his wigs — they were his own — even after he left the stage and greeted his public, Watson says. The next day, Pavarotti’s assistants showed up with six wigs in plastic bags, all of them in pretty rough shape.
“I didn’t know which one he liked, so I did all six,” Watson says. He washed them and brushed them and then lined them all up on the piano, where Pavarotti found them.
“When he saw every one of his wigs on the piano, he burst out laughing,” he recalls. “He was a lovely, generous, humorous man.”
While Broadway beckons him time and again, Watson says he’s happiest here, at the Met.
“Some days I’m listening to ‘The Ring’ — not a bad way to spend your morning,” he says, eyes twinkling. “Especially if everybody in it likes their wig!”