Size matters. At least it does on city stages, home to a 600-pound man, a nose that dwarfs Jimmy Durante’s and the biggest knockers outside of Las Vegas.
Unlike “The Elephant Man,” in which a lithe actor like Billy Crudup suggested gross deformity with merely a grimace, you don’t need your imagination in these productions: There’s a prosthetic for that.
In Shuler Hensley’s case, it’s an entire body.
As the 600-pound man in Samuel Hunter’s comedy-drama “The Whale,” opening off-Broadway tomorrow, he’s having an out-of-body experience shuffling around in the extra-extra-wide shoes of a gentle, gay, heart-broken Mormon who’s literally eating himself to death.
“I’ve always been drawn to outsider roles,” says Hensley, who won a Tony as the miscreant Jud of “Oklahoma!” and clomped around as Frankenstein’s Monster, both in Broadway’s “Young Frankenstein” and the film “Van Helsing.” He wore a pair of prosthetic legs for that one and fake foreheads for both, and while he’s hardly svelte — at 6-foot-3, the former linebacker’s weight hovers around 245 pounds — he’s never been this big.
Luckily, he’s had help. “I thought they’d tell me I could just eat anything I wanted,” he laughs. Instead, costumer designer Jessica Pabst and fabricator Sam Hill created Charlie’s body out of foam, padding, weighted beads and spandex, after scrupulously taking Hensley’s own measurements.
“It was like making a cake or a seven-layer taco dip,” Pabst says of draping “flab pieces” over Hensley’s body.
She says the fat suit weighs about 50 pounds, but the man inside says it feels more like 80, especially when he sweats. “It’s like a nice little sauna I put on,” Hensley says. “I’ve lost a good 15 pounds doing this role. I highly recommend it as a weight-loss strategy: Get into a fat suit!”
One night he felt a sharp pain in one oversized leg — only to find a box of baking soda tucked in there, to keep him from smelling funky.
“Great,” he remembers thinking. “Now I know I can keep groceries in there. Maybe a wet bar!”
There were no such surprises for Douglas Hodge, the man with endless panache — and nose to match — in Broadway’s “Cyrano.” That’s because he oversaw the creation of his schnozz from the start. He even picked his own nose-maker: Barry Gower, who gave Naomi Watts a Princess Di job for the upcoming film “Diana” (Hodge plays the princess’ butler).
While Steve Martin made do with a cute Pinocchio-like number in “Roxanne,” Hodge was bent on getting something really ugly — a nose no woman could ever love. The result? A bulbous, warty number that’s truly repulsive. It’s made of foam and Hodge uses a fresh one for every performance. It’s so big that every time he chugs some Pedialite in the wings, he has to use a straw.
The nose takes about 20 minutes to peel off. Hodge’s biggest fear is that it will fall off — something that nearly happened recently when he leapt into the audience and, as scripted, sniffed a theatergoer. “She yelled and grabbed my nose,” he recalls. “I stood very still and she let go.” The nose stayed put.
Over at “The Performers,” David West Read’s comedy about the adult-entertainment industry, now in previews, Sundown LeMay’s boobs are a work in progress.
“We started small and went really big and now we’re trying for the middle. It’s like ‘Goldilocks!’ ” says costume designer Jessica Wegener Shay. She and prosthetics designer Adam Daily modeled them on actual porn stars — “sorry, adult performers!” — like Lisa Ann and Stormy Daniels “and Heidi something, from a reality show on TV. You know, real people with fake boobs!”
It’s a look that’s taken a lot of rehearsal time to get right.
“When you have boobs that big, they get to places five minutes before you do,” Shay says. “Jenni’s been a real trouper!”
Jenni Barber, the woman who wears them, concedes it’s been quite an adjustment. “It does change my balance for sure,” says Barber, who’s 5-foot-2 with a chest she describes as “very proportional.”
“Between the boobs and the high heels, it’s as if I have two centers of gravity! What’s really amazing is how little they define who she really is on the inside.”
Tell that to the 600-pound man.