(Photo by Emilio Madrid-Kuser/Illustrations by Ryan Casey for Broadway.com)
The Hair’s the Thing! Get to Know Prolific Broadway Wig Designer Charles G. LaPointe
at the 2019 Drama Desk Awards (Photo by Emilio Madrid-Kuser for Broadway.com)
Wig and hair designer Charles G. LaPointe has nearly 70 Broadway credits to his name. He crafted Carole King’s cascading waves in Beautiful, Alex Brightman’s ghoulish green tresses in Beetlejuice and the whopping 80 wigs in The Cher Show, for which he earned a 2019 Drama Desk Award. LaPointe fell in love with theater before he fell in love with creating looks. “I came to New York on a high school trip. We saw A Chorus Line,” he says. “I just remember thinking, ‘Wow, look at that. I want to be that.’”
Pursuing a life in the theater as a performer was ultimately what led LaPointe to his true calling—one that he avoided for some time. “When I was younger, I used to dress my two sisters up and do their hair. My mother constantly said to me, ‘You should be a hairdresser.’ I'm like, ‘The last thing this homo needs is to be a hairdresser.’ It was the ‘80s, so it was a different time,” he says. “A lot of people go to school. Some people learn on the job. I'm one of the on-the-job kind of guys. My story's a little sordid: I slept with my boss. We were on the road together and started a relationship. He traveled all the time, so I had to follow along with him. I needed a job, and he said, ‘Why don't you try it?’ That's how it began.” Flash forward, and LaPointe has designed the wigs and hair for over 100 different shows in the past 16 years.
LaPointe’s Great White Way journey began with his role as an associate hair designer for Wicked. An introduction to Tony-winning costume designer Paul Tazewell led to his first big break in the 2004 revival of A Raisin in the Sun and many more collaborations with Tazewell, including In the Heights, Hamilton and the original production of The Color Purple.
LaChanze in The Color Purple
(Photo: Paul Kolnik)
“The Color Purple really cemented it. I really had to spend a lot of time literally getting caught in the subway staring at people's hair to see how it grew out of their heads and trying to figure out texture and things like that,” he says. “At the time, it was very intimidating. LaChanze and I did a wig fitting, and we talked through it. We put the wig on her for the first tech day. She had a big smile on her face. There's a moment when you just know it's going to work, when you put the wig on and you hear this swoosh, and it just sits exactly where it needs to sit. I thought, ‘I’ve found my place.’”
LaPointe’s design process goes like so: “I talk to the costume designer, look at the sketches and then kind of throw it all out the window. I don't think about it too much,” LaPointe says. “With Beautiful, Jessie Mueller isn't Carole King. Carole King isn't Jessie Mueller. Actors want to get to the essence of what this character is, and the hair finalizes that for them. The costumes, the hair, that's the topping, that's the icing on all of it.”
Beautiful is scheduled to end its run at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on October 27. "I think when you've worked on a show that's this big, you develop an emotional relationship with it that never really leaves," he says. LaPointe has a slew of new projects coming up: some are in New York, some are out of town and some are even overseas. “It's the fear, really, that makes me excited. There is not a show I do that I do not go into it thinking, ‘I have no idea what the hell I'm doing. They're finally going to catch me.’ And then it suddenly just comes through,” he says. “In some way, it happens.”
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