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Wig party
Designer Melissa Veal helps cooler heads prevail.
Tucked away in a windowless cinder-block studio on Navy Pier, a woman from Ontario, Canada, called Maloo plays with yak hair imported from Asia. She trims and transforms the coarse gray fibers, applying skills most of us never consider for a second, all to convince a room full of people that they’ve been transported to 18th-century Vienna.
The artist is Chicago Shakespeare’s Melissa Veal (“Maloo” to her friends and coworkers). As resident wig and makeup designer, Veal, 47, keeps busy all year long on Chicago Shakes productions—but few shows demand the eye-popping powdered hairpieces of Amadeus.
Veal and her full-time apprentice wig maker, Mary Patchell, will fashion more than 30 wigs for Peter Shaffer’s classic “what if?” Mozart biography, set in the royal court of Emperor Joseph II. Veal started her research three or four months ago; fittings with the actors began in early July. Three weeks before the first performances, even as she’s transforming yak hair into high–Habsburg Empire style, she’s also busy with design meetings for Edward II, the next Chicago Shakes show.
While she clearly has a passion for playing with hair, something she loved to do even as a girl, she also embraces the bookish side of her job. “I love all the research stuff. I love it, I love it, I love it,” the amiable redhead enthuses from behind turquoise frames. “If my high-school history teacher ever knew that, he’d be shocked.”
Although shows set in more recent eras offer primary sources for hairstyles via photographs, a project like Amadeus requires other resources. Regular visits to the Art Institute to check out paintings are a must. An overstuffed shelf of reference books has amassed in her office. And, Veal admits somewhat sheepishly, she frequently relies on Google (the Canadian version: Google.ca—“I use it all the time,” says the Canuck).
Veal gave haircuts as she was growing up, but she didn’t catch the theater bug until taking a Shakespeare class in college. “In my high school, only weird people took theater,” she recalls, “and I thought, ‘I don’t want to be one of those weird people.’ Except I was one.”
She studied acting at Sheridan College in Oakville, but quickly decided “it wasn’t my thing.” After ten years as a stage manager, Veal decided to unite her two passions: She went to beauty school— Fanshaw College in London-—to apply what she learned about hair to the stage. Later, she worked for ten seasons in wig-making and makeup design for the Stratford Festival in Ontario. That job literally brought her to this one: Veal arrived at Chicago Shakes in the winter of 1999 when Stratford toured The School for Scandal. She liked Chicago so much, she stayed. (“People were complaining about the weather, but I loved it,” says the woman who thinks blizzards are “wonderful.”)
Carefully packed away in Veal’s wig room are more than 360 wigs the company has accumulated over the years. Sometimes she can reuse an extant wig—she’s doing that with Amadeus —but each one gets built to a particular actor’s head size and hairline.
When building a wig from scratch, she fits the performer’s head with a fine mesh fabric from Switzerland called “wig lace,” then threads it with hair. Known as “knotting,” it’s a painstaking process of pulling hair through the mesh using a fine barbed tool. Most of the wigs are made with human hair, although occasionally, if the show’s aesthetic demands it, Veal uses materials like horse or yak hair. (Amadeus is one such example. Yak-hair wigs were common during the period.) The actors’ comfort is always on her mind, she says, and “human hair breathes. It’s way, way cooler than synthetics.”
Veal’s enthusiasm for her craft makes her office a popular place to visit. But she blames that on her constant companion, a chocolate Lab, Minnie, who naps contentedly on a big pillow in the corner. Named after a roller-derby star from the ’70s, Minnie comes to work with Maloo every day. “Lots of people come to visit the wig room, and they’re not coming to visit me or Mary,” Veal says with a chuckle.
She extends that self-effacing attitude to her work: While the pompadoured fashion of the Austrian emperor’s court offers Veal an opportunity she rarely has and, typically, doesn’t seek—a flashy occasion to showcase her talents—she says, “If you see a good wig, you shouldn’t know. Other than this period in Amadeus, a century when people obviously wore wigs, if we don’t get any reviews, that’s wonderful. That means people don’t know they’re wearing wigs. That’s the ultimate pat on the back.”
Amadeus begins previews Saturday 6.
