Solid D
12-30-2006, 09:52 AM
Oneword. Thankyou. Thisforumisselfcorrecting.
This was the first time I'd seen any version of Dreamgirls, other than a snippet from the Broadway production.
Sapphire
12-30-2006, 11:20 AM
Thankyou. Thisforumisselfcorrecting.
This was the first time I'd seen any version of Dreamgirls, other than a snippet from the Broadway production.
Then how come the Pursuit of Happyness thread hasn't self-corrected? :lol
boutons_
12-30-2006, 11:26 AM
Which is better?
The Supremes of 40 years ago?
or the Hollywood-ized Supremes of today?
==============================
December 17, 2006
Dare To Be Supreme
By RUTH LA FERLA
MARY WILSON was 13 and an aspiring pop diva with little cash to spare and even fewer role models. But she had a notion of what a star should look like.
''I used to think I was Doris Day,'' Ms. Wilson said. ''She was cute and perky and that was me. For a while in our group, I was the blonde.''
Her group, the Supremes, and its rags-to-riches story from the streets of Detroit in the 1960s to the top of the Billboard charts, was the inspiration for ''Dreamgirls,'' the hit 1981 Broadway musical and a film, which opened Friday in New York.
Ms. Wilson's gilded coif predated the bottle-blonde hairstyles adopted by modern performers like Mary J. Blige. For a young black woman in those days, the choice was audacious. And that was the point.
''In those days rock 'n' roll singers were not really glamorous,'' she said. ''We were totally into glamour and we did it all ourselves.''
Long before fashion stylists commandeered the red carpet, the Primettes, as the Supremes were then known, routinely foraged at the five and dime for jewelry and spiky false eyelashes, and stitched up their fancy gowns at home. The aim, radical in its day, was to inject a little sophistication into the raw world of rhythm and blues, Ms. Wilson said. That standard of sophistication, she added pointedly, was defined by white society.
The group's evolution, as mimicked in ''Dreamgirls,'' may make audiences ooh and ahh when it opens nationally on Christmas Day. But the transformation narrative is real: Ambitious girls from the projects, tricked out in bad wigs and decorously tatty dresses, turn into soignée birds of paradise, eclipsing most of their white female counterparts on the concert stage.
''We definitely started that trend of glamour, of girl groups getting dressed up,'' Ms. Wilson said. ''Just like in the 'Dreamgirls' movie, when they were trying to make us into a classier kind of group that could play the clubs,'' she said. ''We did that.''
Ms. Wilson, 62, who still performs in a solo act and who lives in Las Vegas, said the group's style was the amalgam of self-will, lofty visions and the well-meaning advice of hairdressers, friends and television advisers. But much of it was strictly their own.
Under the dictatorial watch of Berry Gordy, the legendary hitmaker and chief of Motown Records, the group polished its image, setting a standard for sophistication and dazzle that still holds up, even among all the overly handled, hyper-invented stars of today. To this day, it is rarely rivaled on the concert stage.
Gordy's objective ''was to transcend what every other previous girl group had been,'' by conceiving a signature style for the group, said Howard Kramer, the curatorial director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, which did a retrospective of Supremes costumes two years ago.
''Before the Supremes, the look was smart and simple, like the Shirelles; sassy and sexy like the Ronettes, or tomboyish and provocative like the Shangri-Las,'' Mr. Kramer said. ''But no one had ever done cocktail classy or set out to utilize certain visual signifiers that made them palatable to a white audience.''
At the time there were few models a young African-American woman could emulate. ''A lot of times black faces couldn't be on album covers, and you didn't know who was in a group,'' said Sharen Davis, the costume designer for the movie version of ''Dreamgirls,'' and herself a member of a girl group in the 1970s. Apart from Lena Horne or Diahann Carroll, ''there were few black women on TV. There were no African-American role models really.''
Ms. Wilson said her style icons included Sophia Loren and the McGuire Sisters.
Some have suggested that Martha and the Vandellas, another highly successful black girl group in the '60s, was an early fashion influence. Not so, Ms. Wilson insisted.
''They had the hit records first,'' she said. ''We would have loved to be as soulful. But they would have loved to have our glamour.''
André Leon Talley, the Vogue editor at large, said a young African-American woman in the '60s aspiring to chic could look to only two icons: Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy of the White House years. Until the Supremes.
''Those shimmery dresses -- for the first time I think people saw women of color looking affluent on TV,'' said Mr. Talley, an ardent fan as a youth. ''The Supremes were living the dream, looking impeccable and flawless to a fault.'' For many young fans, black or white, he said, they represented a new fashionable ideal.
Patrick O'Connell, the publicity director for Vogue, recalled his first reaction. ''I remember as kid of 8 or 9 growing up in rural Wisconsin, looking at my mother's album covers and being so mystified, being just awestruck,'' he said. ''They had great style. The broke the mold. They set the example.''
Yet the Supremes were not the first black singers in spangled gowns. Ms. Davis, who also was the costume designer for the movie ''Ray,'' said Ray Charles told her that he was the first musician to have three backup girls.
''He was fixated on their wardrobes,'' Ms. Davis said. ''It was amazing because he couldn't see. But the ladies behind him always had to be elegant.''
Acquiring a high-bred signature look was a calculated appeal to younger audiences and essential to the group's mainstream success. ''In the late 1950s and '60s, that visual element became so important,'' Ms. Davis said. Before that, it was strictly about the music. ''People used to buy an album -- they were into the sound. But when TV came along, these kids were into a look.''
Ms. Wilson said the Supremes, who were just teenagers when they first performed professionally, acquired their look on a schoolgirl budget.
''We would go to Woolworth's and buy our pearls,'' Ms. Wilson recalled. ''We'd buy Butterick patterns and make our own dresses.''
Ms. Wilson still owns most of the gowns, earrings and corsets she wore playing clubs like the Copacabana in New York and the Eden Roc in Miami. She treasures the crystal-spattered white satin mermaid showstopper she wore at the Palladium in London at a command performance for the Queen Mother. When they are not on exhibit at museums like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Metropolitan in New York, the dresses are kept sealed inside a steamer trunk, she said.
Among the most memorable, she said, are the orange and beige balloon-shaped cocktail dresses the group wore early in its career.
''Diana and I made them ourselves,'' she recalled, referring to Diana Ross, the lead singer. Ms. Wilson said they clearly were inspirations for a few of the Dreamettes' looks.
They may even have inspired the orange sherbet-colored cocktail dresses the Dreamettes wore at their Detroit debut, an early scene in ''Dreamgirls'' when they perform ''Move'' in pert-looking frocks with box pleats and genteelly scooped necklines.
''The idea at the beginning was that they had to look like their mothers made their dresses,'' Ms. Davis said. ''The concept is, it's almost a church dress. Their parents would not have been into spending money on something they could wear just to perform.''
By the mid-1960s, the Supremes had traded up, shopping at Hudson's, then the top department store in Detroit. With early hits like ''Where Did Our Love Go,'' and ''Baby Love,'' ''we could afford to buy really high end gowns,'' Ms. Wilson said. ''Saks Fifth Avenue was the shop we put all our money in. I put all my moneyon clothes.''
From club dates, the group moved to television, on shows like ''Hullabaloo'' and ''The Ed Sullivan Show,'' their costumes designed by Michael Travis, a former apprentice of Bob Mackie. The array of colors and the beading in those days were spectacular, Ms. Wilson recalled. ''Some of those gown weighed 35 pounds.''
''As Diane used to say,'' she said, using Ms. Ross's original first name, ''and a lot of people got angry -- 'I know a lot of little old ladies went blind beading those dresses.' ''
In designing for the Dreamettes, Ms. Davis also looked to Diana Ross and Cher, she said. ''Those women were always very sexy, very sleek and never trashy,'' she said. ''Cher's beautiful long hair and eyelashes just mesmerized me.''
For the film, the hair and makeup team scoured a handful of discount stores in Los Angeles to try to replicate the fantastically sculptured wigs that became a Supremes hallmark.
''That was literally what those girl groups would do,'' said Tym Buacharern, the chief makeup artist for ''Dreamgirls.'' ''They went to the 'hood and picked out their wigs.''
The makeup -- triple rows of false eyelashes, feline liner, searing coral-tone lips -- was trickier. Mr. Buacharern leafed through countless old issues of Ebony, Jet and Playboy, and viewed grainy footage of ''The Sonny and Cher Show,'' only to learn that, by contemporary standards, ''the colors were off.''
''The cosmetic industry didn't really cater to women of color,'' he said. ''In making the movie, we could actually correct that, finding just the right orange to match the skin tone of African-American women.''
Match or not, Ms. Wilson is sticking with her trademark orange lipstick, Cleopatra green eye shadow and artificial sunburst lashes. ''I never stopped putting them in.''
''I'm still basically stuck in the '60s,'' Ms. Wilson added unabashedly. As for her curve-hugging mermaid-shaped gowns, ''I've got great legs and I like to show them,'' she said. She still treasures but does not wear ''our first long gown, a black sheath like Audrey Hepburn wore. I think we bought it at Saks.''
Missing from her panoply is a sumptuous white fur stole that Florence Ballard used to wear. (Ballard, the model for Effie, the Dreamettes lead singer, was replaced by Cindy Birdsong in 1967 and died of a heart attack in 1976 at 32.)
''I used to tell Florence, if you ever die, girl, you got to will me that coat,'' Ms. Wilson said wistfully. ''Wish someone could tell me what happened to that coat.''
=================
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F50C14F839550C748DDDAB0994DE404482
ShoogarBear
12-30-2006, 12:41 PM
Thankyou. Thisforumisselfcorrecting.
This was the first time I'd seen any version of Dreamgirls, other than a snippet from the Broadway production.I got to see the original Broadway production, with Jennfier Holliday singing AITYING. It was wild: some of the audience started the standing ovation at the first notes of the song, and the ovation at the end lasted a good 3-4 minutes.
See, there are some advantages to being old.
CuckingFunt
12-30-2006, 12:45 PM
I've seen several small productions of the show, and am somewhat curious to see the movie, but I've always been slightly bothered that the songs don't sound at all authentic to the 1960's girl group sound. I realize it's a Broadway show and that's why it has that sound, but still... just a nit to pick.
MaNuMaNiAc
12-30-2006, 03:18 PM
I make it a rule of thumb not to watch ANY movie with Beyonce in it, since she's terrible at acting, but since this is a musical it might fit her better. Still, I'm not really into musicals either so...
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