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Carrie Robbins, a meticulous and resourceful costume designer who labored on greater than 30 Broadway reveals from the Nineteen Sixties to the 2000s, died on April 12 in Manhattan. She was 81.
Her demise, at a hospital, was confirmed by Daniel Neiden, a pal, who stated her well being had declined after she fell and broke her hip in December.
In 1972, when she was simply 29 years outdated, Ms. Robbins started “rising as one of many hottest costume designers in present enterprise,” because the syndicated trend columnist Patricia Shelton put it, due to her work that 12 months on the unique Broadway manufacturing of “Grease,” six years earlier than it was was successful film.
Ms. Robbins was given a funds of solely $4,000 (the equal of about $30,000 right this moment). For the character Frenchy, she dyed a wig brilliant purple utilizing a Magic Marker and common a pink poodle skirt out of her personal bathtub mat and furry bathroom seat cowl.
The poodle skirt virtually turned a compulsory function of “Grease” reveals. And when, years later, Ms. Robbins visited a manufacturing of “Grease” backstage, she noticed a person taking a purple Magic Marker to a wig. Baffled, she informed him that the wardrobe division certainly might afford a high-end customized hairpiece. He replied that solely a Magic Marker could be genuine.
In a CUNY TV interview with Ms. Robbins within the mid-2000s, the Newsday theater critic Linda Winer commented, “She outlined endlessly our recollections of the ’50s.” She additionally praised Ms. Robbins for her “inventive obsession with element and interval accuracy.”
Critics hailed Ms. Robbins’s costumes through the years for transporting audiences to the Spain of Don Quixote, the underworld of early-18th-century London and the ruined South through the Civil War. For “Grease,” she studied highschool yearbooks from the Fifties. For a 1992 musical model of “Anna Karenina,” she discovered ball robes from the flip of the twentieth century.
“They are underwear-y colours,” Ms. Robbins informed The New York Times in regards to the robes in 1992, “softer, muted, far more alluring than right this moment.”
Describing Ms. Robbins’s work on a 1985 Broadway manufacturing of “The Octette Bridge Club,” a play by P.J. Barry set within the Nineteen Thirties, The Reporter Dispatch of White Plains stated she appeared “to have raided each thrift store on the town.”
Her devotion to interval costume, Ms. Robbins informed the journal Theatre Design & Technology in 1987, was not a wholly creative matter.
The subject allowed her to keep away from, she stated, “the whole metropolis telling me what it ought to appear like.”
Ms. Robbins gained 4 Drama Desk Awards for costume design — for “Grease,” “The Iceman Cometh” (1974), “The Beggar’s Opera” (1972) and “Over Here!” (1974). She was additionally nominated for Tony Awards for her work on “Grease” and “Over Here!”
Over the course of her profession, she made costumes for Meryl Streep, Lauren Bacall and Anthony Hopkins. In 1985, because the workers costume designer for “Saturday Night Live,” she turned Madonna into Marilyn Monroe. She additionally designed the outfits for the staffs of the Rainbow Room and Windows on the World, the restaurant on the prime of the World Trade Center.
Ms. Robbins was additionally admired as a draftsman. She studied the tips of grasp illustrators like Maxfield Parrish, and she or he would frequently spend eight hours on a single costume sketch. “I imagine that drawing is considering,” she informed the web theater journal HowlRound in 2014.
“No one drew a dressing up extra fantastically than Miss Robbins,” stated Ann Roth, the revered costume designer.
Carolyn Mae Fishbein was born on Feb. 7, 1943, in Baltimore, the place she grew up. Her father, Sidney, taught historical past in Baltimore public faculties, and her mom, Bettye (Berman) Fishbein, had labored as a seamstress earlier than marriage.
When she was 3, her mother and father, involved that she was drawing on the partitions of her nursery, despatched her to a therapist, who informed them to enroll her in artwork lessons. As a youngster, she discovered work singing and faucet dancing at a hofbrau in New Haven, Conn.
She studied artwork and drama at Pennsylvania State University, the place she earned a bachelor’s diploma in 1964, and she or he acquired a Master of Fine Arts diploma from the Yale School of Drama in 1967. She married Richard D. Robbins, a surgeon, in 1969.
She taught costume design at New York University from 1972 to 2004; quite a lot of her college students went on to win main awards for costume and set design, together with Tonys.
In current years, Ms. Robbins targeted on writing performs of her personal, together with a number of tailored from quick tales her husband had written throughout his retirement, which was minimize quick after just a few years by his demise in 2003.
Ms. Robbins leaves no rapid survivors.
Her greatest thrill in designing costumes, Ms. Robbins informed Ms. Shelton, was watching actors rework.
“The guys in ‘Grease’ had been a minimum of somewhat reluctant to have their hair minimize,” she stated. “But after we minimize it, put them in tapered pants and a jacket with the collar turned up, there they had been — swaggering across the stage and flipping grease off their combs.”
