EIGHT times a week, Idina Menzel, who plays the witch Elphaba in the Broadway musical ”Wicked” at the Gershwin Theater, covers her face, hands and neck with green makeup, then puts on a matching bodysuit so that she is the color of a snow pea from head to toe. Some days, she forgets to grab a meal before making up. Her dresser, Joby Horrigan, has learned to ask, ”Idina, did you remember to eat?” If the answer is no, Ms. Horrigan peels an orange for her, or unwraps a Power Bar. ”Eating is awkward when you have green fingers,” Ms. Menzel observes.<\/p>\n
The verdant look is the vision of her makeup artist, Joe Dulude II, a spiky-haired blond whose arms are tattooed with emblems of female power: Eve, Foxy Brown and Medusa (none of Elphaba, so far). In the show, based on Gregory Maguire’s feminist prequel to L. Frank Baum’s classic, ”The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” Glinda (played by Kristin Chenoweth) and Elphaba meet at boarding school. Glinda — shallow, popular and pink as a puff of cotton candy — loves herself; Elphaba — green because of a birth defect, in a dark skirt and patch-pocket jacket that make her look like a Depression-era American Girl doll — is a brilliant, insecure pariah. Somehow, the two strike up a friendship.<\/p>\n
For Elphaba’s self-conscious teenage witch phase, in the first act, Mr. Dulude came up with an understated look. ”I use MAC’s ‘Landscape Green’ Chroma Cake,” he says. ”We didn’t have to custom-order it; they make it, for some reason.” Working together, the actress and Mr. Dulude dip brushes into a dish of water, then into the condensed Chroma Cake and daub the color onto her skin. ”It goes on streaky, see?” Ms. Menzel says, before a show in mid-May, as she and Mr. Dulude greenified her (to use the show’s term for it) at lightning speed. (”It used to take us 45 minutes, but we’ve got it down to 15 or 20 by now,” Mr. Dulude says.) After the first coat of green goes on, they buff it, apply Krylon waterproof powder to set the color, then a patina of ”Golden Olive” pigment from MAC. ”This makes it look like skin,” Mr. Dulude explained, as he flicked the brush. ”It makes her greenness come alive.” A touch of ”Purple Haze” eye shadow on her cheeks and in the contours of her eyes and nose, and voil\u00e0: one green star, good to go.<\/p>\n
In the second act, Elphaba ”comes into her witchness,” as Mr. Dulude puts it. Backstage, he and Ms. Menzel vamp up Elphaba — like a noir version of Frenchy dolling up Sandy in ”Grease.” ”When she becomes that iconic full-grown witch, she gets dark, shiny lipstick and we emphasize the brows,” Mr. Dulude says. A sketch of the before-and-after look is taped to the mirror in Ms. Menzel’s dressing room as a guide — something you might see in Glamour, except nobody could call that complexion peaches and cream. <\/p>\n
4:30-6 P.M. — Ms. Menzel takes a Bikram yoga class — in which the exercise room is kept at 110 degrees Fahrenheit — before performances, even on matinee days, when she has to squeeze in the workout between two shows: ”At first, I thought it might exhaust me, but it gives me energy. There’s a relief in focusing on nothing but how to balance on one leg. And when I sweat so much, it warms up my voice.”<\/p>\n
7:42 P.M. — An hour before the curtain, Ms. Menzel performs 40 minutes of vocal exercises in a cloud of steam in her dressing room shower. She has 20 minutes to transform into Elphaba with the help of the show’s makeup designer, Joe Dulude II; the hair supervisor, Al Annotto; and MAC Chroma Cake, in ”Landscape Green,” which she and Mr. Dulude apply with brushes dipped in water. ”I’m a lefty, Joe’s a righty, so we kind of alternate.”<\/p>\n
7:50 P.M. — ”Every day, putting on the makeup, I look in the mirror and say, ‘Wow!’ Some days I think, ‘This character is a beautiful, exotic and fierce woman.’ Other days I look at myself and I’m, like: ‘Ugh! I have to go out there with this green face, and I wish I could wear the pretty pink dress with the glitter instead.’ I think that’s what the character feels, too.”<\/p>\n
10 P.M. — Ms. Menzel wears one microphone in her pointed black hat, which dips onto her forehead, and two in her costume, but they are not easy to see because they are skin-colored — in her case, green. Thanks to the considerable amount of skin that her witch-wear conceals (as opposed to Ms. Chenoweth’s frothy d\u00e9colletage), Ms. Menzel does not have to greenify her arms or legs, just the areas that emerge from her long black sleeves and high collars.<\/p>\n
11:15 P.M. — Some fans — starstruck young girls, relatives and celebrities –are taken to meet Ms. Menzel backstage while she is still green. But those who wait for her by the stage door find a woman free of any trace of ”Landscape Green.” ”The key to getting it off,” Ms. Menzel says, ”is a hot shower with Neutrogena, a wash rag and a lot of scrubbing.” But she can’t get it out of her ears. ”I’ve tried everything,” she says. ”A Q-Tip is not enough.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
EIGHT times a week, Idina Menzel, who plays the witch Elphaba in the Broadway musical ”Wicked” at the Gershwin Theater, covers her face, hands and neck with green makeup, then puts on a matching bodysuit so that she is the color of a snow pea from head to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[86,5],"class_list":["post-1323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews","tag-86","tag-wicked"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Srnq-ll","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1323"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1324,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323\/revisions\/1324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}