4 minute read
Story By Keith Loria
Milagros Medina-Cerdeira. Photo by Sam Fine MAKING FACES
Makeup artist Milagros Medina-Cerdeira helped create the look of some of Broadway’s biggest recent shows
STORY BY
Keith Loria
WAs one of the most renowned makeup designers on Broadway, Milagros Medina-Cerdeira has created the looks for everyone from The Prom’s lovebirds, Emma and Alyssa, to Aladdin’s Genie of the Lamp, to the head mean girl of Mean Girls, Regina George.
Medina-Cerdeira, who was born and raised in Jackson Heights, Queens, NY, and graduated from Cathedral High School in Manhattan, first set foot on a Broadway stage back in 1994 when a friend asked her to cover for her one night on the show, Kiss of the Spider Woman, despite her never having worked theatrical makeup before.
“I got the theatre bug-bite and was hooked,” she said. Prior to that opportune night, Medina-Cerdeira worked for some of the biggest cosmetic companies—including M.A.C., Shiseido and Clinique—and envisioned a career as a fashion makeup artist.
“In high school I had always done makeup at the counters, and never really thought of it as a career,” she said. “But by college, I started assisting makeup artists within the industry and started getting the phone calls when someone needed help.
I eventually started taking classes for the basics of bruising and all the other specialty side things you need to know. But I wasn’t focused on theatre.”
But after earning raves from the Kiss cast, and enjoying her night immensely, Medina-Cerdeira was hooked and soon found herself as a go-to theatrical makeup artist.
She was charged with doing Donna Murphy’s makeup for The King and I, went on the tour with The Wizard of Oz handling makeup for Eartha Kitt, and came back to Broadway for Little Me. Then she was offered her first chance to design a whole show, as makeup lead for the 2000 revival of The Rocky Horror Show.
“Growing up, I was a huge fan of the movie and was one of the crazy people who would go a couple of times a month, so I knew the show well,” Medina-Cerdeira said. “I went in and talked with the actors about their ideas for their characters and worked the design from the conversations we had. It was a lot of fun.”
Other productions followed, including The Lion King, Into the Woods, Bells Are Ringing and Mean Girls. And thanks to the award-winning looks, she is one of the most in-demand makeup artists around.
Medina-Cerdeira preparing Enrico De Pieri to play the Genie in the Hamburg, Germany production of Aladdin. Photo by Cheryl Thomas
Diamond in the Rough
When Disney decided to bring its hit musical Aladdin to the stage, MedinaCerdeira was hired to bring the Genie out of his bottle and create a look fitting for Broadway—with a caveat from the producers that they didn’t want him to be “just blue” as in the animated film.
Designing a look for a title that was best known as an animated hit had its challenges. For one, Medina-Cerdeira wasn’t sure if she should be going for a cartoon look or something more life-like.
“That was a concern early on,” she said. “But then I met with the team and heard their ideas about what they were looking for. I saw Gregg Barnes’ gorgeous costumes, and his interpretation was it was going to be more multi-cultural and global, and my idea was just to bring out the inner beauty of everyone and complement the costumes.”
Anything Can Happen
Her most recent theatrical design was for The Prom, which had its world premiere at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in Atlanta in 2016. She said she thoroughly enjoyed creating the look for a show that meant so much to so many.
“With this show, they are high school students, and I didn’t want to do anything too over-the-top,” Medina-Cerdeira said. “It was about making things look natural. I went to my daughter’s high school and just looked at kids in the lunchroom and
I incorporated the different looks I saw into the show.” When designing makeup for a show, she said, lighting plays a huge part, as do the costumes and hair design. “You never want one thing to overtake from the overall character, so you need a cohesive design from all parties, so it looks great as a whole,” Medina-Cerdeira said. With any show, her process starts by getting the Milagros Medina-Cerdeira at work on Ilfenesh Hadera drawings of the costumes so from the Epix series “Godfather of Harlem.” Photo by Jodi King she can match the color scheme with what the wardrobe will be. She’ll meet with the other designers, read the script and develop a better understanding of each character. “Broadway is such a great community and a great group of people,” she said.
