Makeup mechanic Second career brings former grease monkey to Rainbow Stage's Beauty and the Beast By: Randall King Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Wednesday, Aug. 15, 2018 Last Modified: 10:47 AM CDT Friday, Aug. 17, 2018

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/08/2018 (2283 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s not exactly a tale as old as time.

About 20 years ago, Christian Hadley was an auto mechanic dissatisfied with the grind of machining auto parts and deflated at the prospect of repairing another tire.

He needed a change, and not the kind involving 5W30 motor oil.

His career pivot was, quite literally, dramatic. At the age of 25, he went to the University of Winnipeg to study theatre arts. He emerged with skills in both set-building and makeup design. And he brings those skills to fruition in the Rainbow Stage production of Beauty and the Beast.

“My normal job with Rainbow Stage is I’m the assistant master carpenter,” he says during a break in his home workshop in the garage of his St. James home. “I’m the second in the shop and we build the sets.”

In the buildup to the show’s opening this week, Hadley has worked days on the sets, only to come home at night to create select makeup projects. Specifically in his capacity as a makeup artist, Hadley, 43, is the guy tasked with transmogrifying actor Timothy Gledhill into the hairy horned Beast, a once-human princeling cursed with a monstrous countenance. (For the two or three people who haven’t seen either the 1991 Disney animated feature or the 2017 live-action remake, the Beast’s entire household staff is likewise cursed to assume the form of otherwise inanimate objects.)

At the centre of Hadley’s workshop is the result of all that toil, a two-piece, horned mask that allows Gledhill room for some facial expression and, crucially, the ability to take the headpiece off during performance breaks (an important consideration for an outdoor theatre in the latter weeks of August, when temperatures can climb into the 30s). Hadley’s duties involve special prosthetic makeup for characters such as the sentient candle Lumiere (Kevin Klassen), whose head comes to a flat and luminous candle-top.

Hadley emphasizes that, even in the case of extreme makeup, his job is to enhance the raw materials the actors bring to the production.

“The casting for this show is brilliant,” he says. “They’re all very talented and the look of them fits the characters so well, so they don’t really need a lot.

“Even with the objects of the Beast’s house, we want them to be able to do a quick change, but we also want them to be recognizable as humans.”

Seeking a template for the character of the Beast, Hadley was instructed by director Rob Herriot to “think Disney.” But since the character was animated in the 1991 film and was largely computer-generated in the 2017 version, he had to expand his parameters.

“I went back and looked at the (1987) TV series, which a lot of people have forgotten, understandably,” he says of the cult hit that starred Linda Hamilton as a contemporary “Beauty” and Ron Perlman as a leonine ‘Beast.”

“I looked at that and looked at the CG one, the eyes and nose area, and I found that I was looking at the profile of the cartoon,” he says. “Tim’s got the stature of the Beast, I just need the profile.”

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Hadley has always been fascinated by the area where makeup intersects with special effects, and can rattle off the names of all the movie makeup game-changers, such as Dick Smith (The Exorcist), Ve Neill (Beetlejuice) and Rick Baker (An American Werewolf in London). Hadley himself got a taste of that work at U of W when Winnipeg makeup ace Doug Morrow (Cult of Chucky, Todd and the Book of Pure Evil) offered a course in prosthetic makeup. He found himself entranced, and started his own production company, Post Mortem Productions, which allows him to do “prosthetics and special makeup, and special effects in general, but still reachable for theatres and (film) productions that are doing independent stuff.”

Hadley says his own fascination is a byproduct of being an admitted “Halloween freak.” Evidence of his obsession is in the garage adjoining his workshop, where the toys of his five-year-old son share space with two coffins, a “bone throne” and miscellaneous other terror props.

“Since I was a kid, I’ve been obsessed with Halloween,” he says. “Every Nov. 1, I would just start doing my planning: What kind of costume? How am I going to decorate the yard?

“That’s really how I went from being an auto mechanic to a makeup artist,” he says. “I went to the University of Winnipeg, enrolled in the production program there with the film and theatre department for the sole purpose of just doing the makeup course. I talked to one of the production people there who deals with set carpentry and lighting and everything and I thought: ‘This would be great for building my yard attractions.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing

Randall King
Reporter

In a way, Randall King was born into the entertainment beat.

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