How Tattoos Invite Audiences to Look Closer

Clyde’s, Firm, and different Broadway reveals are using “tattoo designers” to create customized ink for characters.

One of many hidden easter eggs within the Katrina Lenk-led manufacturing of Company is on Bobby Conte’s forearm. PJ, the equal of the unique character Marta within the gender-changed revival, has an XXXV tattoo. (Within the musical, Bobbie is celebrating her XXXV birthday.) Look carefully at Hades in Hadestown, too, particularly within the second act. He has bricks etched onto his left arm. Characters with tattoos have gotten more and more frequent on Broadway; this season, each Clyde’s and Firm employed tattoo designers to generate the ink artwork displayed on actors.  

“You possibly can create an individual’s historical past with tattoos,” says Kyle Krueger, a particular results make-up artist and the assistant tattoo designer for Clyde’s. “A personality walks onstage, they usually have a particular tattoo, that’s a persona. They might come into the following scene with a totally completely different wig or wardrobe as a result of their character is evolving, however that tattoo stays constant as a result of that’s sort of the historical past of the character.” 

Krueger labored with Jessie Mojica, Clyde’s head tattoo designer, to create the white supremacist tattoos on ex-convict Jason, performed by Edmund Donovan. 

“When he places the tattoos on, he seems like a totally completely different individual,” says Krueger. “You are taking a personality and also you throw these tattoos on them, even the small ones that don’t learn previous the primary 4 rows, and it fully adjustments the sensation of that character.”  

“Once you see a tattoo, you begin to ask extra questions on an individual.” Make-up artist and Company tattoo designer Andrew Sotomayor provides. “The theater is meant to make us interested in people who find themselves not us.” Easy tattoos—numbers, arrows, the tattoos on Donovan’s knuckles—Krueger hand painted each night time. Extra sophisticated tattoos, together with giant textual content on Donovan’s biceps and a canine with purple eyes on his proper forearm, have been stencils designed digitally after which airbrushed with alcohol-based make-up. 

PJ’s XXXV tattoo and the opposite items Sotomayor designed for Company trace on the character’s previous. PJ is a musician; his tattoos deliberately have worldwide influences as a method of conveying how well-traveled he’s. Sotomayor additionally needed the character to really feel “up-to-date.”  

“I feel placing tattoos on these characters in these older reveals is the quickest option to join these characters to a contemporary viewers,” says Sotomayor. He beforehand labored because the tattoo designer for the Ivo van Hove revival of West Side Story, the place he and affiliate tattoo designer Michael Clifton made greater than 100 designs for roughly 30 completely different actors.  

The items they crafted had which means alongside a number of completely different axes. Imagery repeated throughout characters so the 2 rival gangs every felt like a household. Lots of the Sharks had tattoos of skulls or the phrase tiburón (shark in Spanish), whereas the Jets had eagles and the phrase “Jets for all times.” The tattoo design crew additionally created a visible hierarchy amongst gang members. Youthful gang members had easier, extra cartoony ink items, akin to the designs one may get from a good friend. Older members had bigger tattoos in additional elaborate kinds. Child John had no tattoos; Riff had an enormous chest piece.  

Tattoos onstage—like tattoos offstage—are a type of self-expression, an try at externalizing present motifs and character beliefs and wishes. They invite viewers members to look nearer. A query a couple of character’s ink can result in a greater understanding of a personality or an exploration of the present’s bigger themes. 

“West Side Story is about how the American dream typically performs out completely different for various individuals.” Sotomayor says. “Kevin Csolak [a Jet] has the Statue of Liberty drawn by Michael Clifton as an attractive Nineteen Forties-style pinup. It’s celebratory and enjoyable and exquisite. And Roman Cruz, who is among the Sharks, has one I drew. I overlaid her face with a fence that I drew from {a photograph} of a fence in El Paso, Texas, which is the place my mom’s household is from, and the place there are kids being held by ICE. To get to inform, simply with these completely different tattoos, the way in which that the American dream can play out for some and fail for others, and to know that it’s due to my grandfather and my mother and father that I get to dwell my dream, that was actually stunning.”