There aren’t many great broads left on Broadway — wise cracking gals with strong opinions and well-aimed zingers.
Elaine Stritch reigns supreme, of course, as does producer Elizabeth I. McCann.
And then there’s Ann Roth. Now 79, she’s created the costumes for 76 Broadway shows and is up for a Tony Award for her hilarious work on “The Book of Mormon.” It’s her fifth nomination, though she’s yet to win the award.
Under orders from her producer, Scott Rudin, she’s been making the rounds at Tony lunches and cocktail parties, where nominees are supposed to charm the voters.
But schmoozing isn’t high on her list of fun things to do.
“What is this?” she said upon arriving at the New Dramatists luncheon Monday. “Where’s the booze?”
At a brunch for Tony nominees, she turned to a press agent and said: “Where’s Rudin? He told me I had to come to this thing, and if he’s here I want him to get me some coffee.”
Rudin, who’s worked with her on the films “The Hours” and “Julie & Julia,” says: “Ann’s a brilliant troublemaker. She will have her nose in everything, in every aspect of the show — the hair, the makeup, the set. And your show will start to be good as soon as you realize that any idea she has is better than any idea you have.”
Roth, who won an Oscar for “The English Patient,” gets her ideas from mountains of research. She travels, reads widely and pores over photographs, magazines and newspaper articles.
For “Mormon,” she went to Palmyra, NY, near where Joseph Smith is said to have found the golden plates, to check out the Hill Cumorah Pageant, produced by the Church of Latter Day Saints.
“You couldn’t get a friggin’ teabag in the hotel up there, but the pageant was great,” she says. “We ended up copying the costumes, they were so good.”
Designing an orange prison jumpsuit for Jeffrey Dahmer, who appears in the song “Scary Mormon Hell Dream,” she added a necklace of (plastic) penises.
“That’s what he kept in the freezer,” she says.
The necklace was too much even for “Mormon” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who
vetoed it.
“I think it was too witty for them,” says Roth with a wave of her hand. “They like to be the witty guys. They don’t want me to dilute their wit.”
Roth works out of a loft called the Costume Depot in Chelsea. Right now it’s crammed with costumes for Stephen Daldry‘s new movie “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.”
It’s midafternoon, and the wine is flowing.
“Is this the red I had yesterday?” she asks an assistant.
“Yes, Ann.”
“Did they lower the price?”
Roth, who apprenticed with the legendary Irene Sharaff, has dressed many great stars — Dustin Hoffman (“Midnight Cowboy”), Jane Fonda (“Klute”), Harrison Ford (“Working Girl”), Meryl Streep (“The Hours”).
She invites them to the Costume Depot for a glass of wine, and then “we play for a bit” with clothes and accessories until a character emerges.
She brought a basketball to a fitting with Nathan Lane, who was playing sportswriter Oscar Madison in “The Odd Couple.”
“She threw it at him,” says one of her assistants. “It hit him in the stomach and just fell to the floor.”
Says Roth: “Let me tell you how it works. What you do is get them to try on a dress. Maybe you shorten it. Then maybe you add a scarf. Try on some gloves. Throw on some blue glasses. Give them a fan. And what happens is that they start to disappear, and a new person emerges.
“And that’s when you’ve hit it. You’ve found the character, and you’ve found the costume.”
Of all the stars she’s dressed, she says there’s only one — she won’t let me print the name — she’ll never work with again.
After Roth spent weeks designing a costume, the star called and said, “Oh, Ann, can you bring some black pants to the set on Monday? I think I’ll just wear those.”
Roth replied: “If you want black pants, bring them yourself. What I’m bringing is something called your costume.”