Carrie Robbins, a meticulous and resourceful costume designer who labored on greater than 30 Broadway reveals from the Sixties to the 2000s, died on April 12 in Manhattan. She was 81.
Her dying, at a hospital, was confirmed by Daniel Neiden, a buddy, who mentioned her well being had declined after she fell and broke her hip in December.
In 1972, when she was simply 29 years previous, Ms. Robbins started “rising as one of many hottest costume designers in present enterprise,” because the syndicated trend columnist Patricia Shelton put it, because of her work that 12 months on the unique Broadway manufacturing of “Grease,” six years earlier than it was changed into a success film.
Ms. Robbins was given a finances of solely $4,000 (the equal of about $30,000 at the moment). For the character Frenchy, she dyed a wig vibrant pink utilizing a Magic Marker and customary a pink poodle skirt out of her personal tub mat and furry rest room seat cowl.
The poodle skirt virtually grew to become a compulsory characteristic of “Grease” reveals. And when, years later, Ms. Robbins visited a manufacturing of “Grease” backstage, she noticed a person taking a pink Magic Marker to a wig. Baffled, she advised him that the wardrobe division certainly might afford a high-end customized hairpiece. He replied that solely a Magic Marker can be genuine.
In a CUNY TV interview with Ms. Robbins within the mid-2000s, the Newsday theater critic Linda Winer commented, “She outlined perpetually our reminiscences of the ’50s.” She additionally praised Ms. Robbins for her “artistic obsession with element and interval accuracy.”
Critics hailed Ms. Robbins’s costumes over time for transporting audiences to the Spain of Don Quixote, the underworld of early-18th-century London and the ruined South throughout the Civil Warfare. 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’re underwear-y colours,” Ms. Robbins advised The New York Occasions concerning the robes in 1992, “softer, muted, far more alluring than at the moment.”
Describing Ms. Robbins’s work on a 1985 Broadway manufacturing of “The Octette Bridge Membership,” a play by P.J. Barry set within the Nineteen Thirties, The Reporter Dispatch of White Plains mentioned she appeared “to have raided each thrift store on the town.”
Her devotion to interval costume, Ms. Robbins advised the journal Theatre Design & Expertise in 1987, was not a completely inventive matter.
The sphere allowed her to keep away from, she mentioned, “all the metropolis telling me what it ought to appear to be.”
Ms. Robbins gained 4 Drama Desk Awards for costume design — for “Grease,” “The Iceman Cometh” (1974), “The Beggar’s Opera” (1972) and “Over Right here!” (1974). She was additionally nominated for Tony Awards for her work on “Grease” and “Over Right here!”
Over the course of her profession, she made costumes for Meryl Streep, Lauren Bacall and Anthony Hopkins. In 1985, because the employees costume designer for “Saturday Night time Stay,” she turned Madonna into Marilyn Monroe. She additionally designed the outfits for the staffs of the Rainbow Room and Home windows on the World, the restaurant on the prime of the World Commerce Middle.
Ms. Robbins was additionally admired as a draftsman. She studied the tips of grasp illustrators like Maxfield Parrish, and he or she would often spend eight hours on a single costume sketch. “I imagine that drawing is considering,” she advised the web theater journal HowlRound in 2014.
“Nobody drew a dressing up extra superbly than Miss Robbins,” mentioned 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 advised them to enroll her in artwork lessons. As a teen, she discovered work singing and faucet dancing at a hofbrau in New Haven, Conn.
She studied artwork and drama at Pennsylvania State College, the place she earned a bachelor’s diploma in 1964, and he or she acquired a Grasp of Positive Arts diploma from the Yale Faculty of Drama in 1967. She married Richard D. Robbins, a surgeon, in 1969.
She taught costume design at New York College from 1972 to 2004; plenty of her college students went on to win main awards for costume and set design, together with Tonys.
Lately, 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 lower quick after just a few years by his dying in 2003.
Ms. Robbins leaves no rapid survivors.
Her largest thrill in designing costumes, Ms. Robbins advised Ms. Shelton, was watching actors rework.
“The fellows in ‘Grease’ have been at least a little bit reluctant to have their hair lower,” she mentioned. “However after we lower it, put them in tapered pants and a jacket with the collar turned up, there they have been — swaggering across the stage and flipping grease off their combs.”