He's got Broadway covered

Long is no stranger to transformations himself. Working on his doctoral thesis in history on Medician wedding festivals, he had a change of heart. "I realized I wanted to design those Medician wedding festivals," he says. "What hubris!"

While Long had never designed an official set or drawn official costume sketches, theater was always an avocation; his parents had both worked in the field. So he went to the library, checked out a book on stage design, and applied to Yale. He was accepted - and had the good fortune of rooming with Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver.

But the transition for this "little farm boy from North Carolina," as he describes himself, to New Haven wasn't seamless. His first night at the university, he recalls Weaver took him to the Yale Cabaret. That night, he saw two male playwrights dressed in women's dresses. One played Mother Superior. "I was not prepared for this," he says, his eyes growing wide with disbelief. It was "total culture shock," he says, and he felt, "I don't belong here." He still gets embarrassed recalling his naiveté, although he's quick to say, "I'm not saying I know anything now."

The Broadway veteran still distinctly remembers the first costume he ever designed: "an Elizabethan ruff for my dog, who stood very still." Long was 6 at the time. "I remember sewing and I remember figuring out, if you sew big stitches, it pleats."

When asked about his ideal show to design, Long says he's a pragmatist. "I take whatever I'm given and that becomes my dream show." His job is to "support the story of the characters, who they are, what they feel, where they're going, and where they've been," he says. He particularly loves "helping a performer become someone else."

Katherine Marshall, co-owner of Tricorne, a Manhattan costume shop, agrees that Long does a good job of catering his designs to the actors. "He's not married to a concept. He does what really works well for each individual actor or actress. He'll have a sketch, an idea, a concept, but he's open to anything," she says.

In addition to being an open-minded colleague, Long demonstrates "great dignity and humor," says John Waters, writer and director of the 1988 film "Hairspray," on which the Broadway musical is based.

Mr. Waters is particularly fond of the gaudy suits Long designed for the character of Corny Collins, the dance show host of the fictional "Corny Collins Show." But Waters's favorite items on the set are Collins's "puke green shoes." Waters even has a matching pair. "I liked them so much I do wear them," he says. "Not to the show, though. I don't want to upstage Corny."

Costume designers also enhance the character and help the actors with the characterization, says Ms. Stroman. In "The Producers," for example, Long helps Ulla, one of the leading female characters, become "sexy and strong." Ulla, a Swede, has a very feminine wardrobe (primarily in the blue and yellow colors of the Swedish flag), yet still commands a great deal of power and strength, Stroman says.

Certainly one of the more memorable costumes Long has designed includes the "Chrysler Building" dress in "The Producers" - a hand-beaded silver, black, and white extravaganza, which cost more than $10,000. "I call that a costume with a capital K," Long says, laughing. And then there's the play's costume designer, who is dressed in "the biggest cliché" Long could think of: a lavender suit and scarf. But don't expect to find Long in lavender. He is, he says, "a blue blazer kind of guy."

Despite his conservative dress, "Mr. Hairspray," as one of his friends calls him, is anything but a conservative designer. In the costume shop's office for "The Boy from Oz," surrounded by bolts of fabric, boxes of shoes, sketches, photographs, and files, Long says he feels particularly fortunate to have worked with Mel Brooks and Waters. They are "two of the greatest American satirists," he says. "The way they have vanquished PC is sublime."

In one of the shop's two fitting rooms down the hall, the actress who plays Prudy Pingleton, the evil mother from "Hairspray," is being fitted for her finale. Long can't help peeking in.

"You can show outrage and go back to being glamorous," Long says of her outfit, approvingly. He claps, and she claps.

"You know where this came from?" he asks of her Jackie Kennedy-inspired dress. "It's a bedspread from Garnet Hill." And now, "it's on Broadway."

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