There’s no business like show business for OCE graduate

Too much of a good thing? Believe it or not, costume designer David Kay Mickelsen toned down the colorful Whos to spare theatre patrons overstimulation. Mickelsen is a 1980 graduate of Oregon College of Education, now Western Oregon University. Photo by Glen Stubbe.

Few people know more about the anatomical structure of the Whos of Whoville than David Kay Mickelsen.

“You know, a Who’s body is not shaped like a human body. Their legs are very short. So their crotches are very low, and they’re bulbous at the bottom and skinny in the shoulders,” Mickelsen said of the whimsical characters from “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

Mickelsen, a 1980 Oregon College of Education graduate of the Fine Arts program, knows this because he is one of the country’s leading costume designers in theater. As such, he is quite familiar with the Seuss classic, having costumed “The Grinch” for the stage numerous times over the past 30 years.

The play concluded its 11th run at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis earlier this year. Costume designs used in this latest production were designed by Mickelsen for the original run in 1994.

Turns out, bulbous bottoms and low crotches aren’t the only characteristics taken into account when capturing the essence of a Who.

“We have to create special makeup. (The Whos) have a particular kind of nose, and they have particular eyebrows, and all of that,” Mickelsen said. 

They also have shocks of hair that could only come from the fertile imagination of the good doctor himself.

“Their hair, it’s not regular hair. So wigs are made out of dyed yak’s hair, fake fur, pipe cleaners and other things to get that kind of wavy texture you see in Seuss’s illustrations,” he said.

David Kay Mickelsen, a 1980 graduate of the Oregon College of Education, is one of the country’s leading costume designers. His most recent production, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” recently concluded its 11th run in Minneapolis. Photo submitted.

The key word here is “illustrations,” as in plural, since Mickelsen and company didn’t limit their design choices to the one book. Instead, planning for “The Grinch” began with the team studying other Seuss classics, such as “The Butter Battle Book” and “Green Eggs and Ham.”

“We looked at colors and all those kinds of things. We then tried to decide on what it was that defined the Seussian look,” Mickelsen said.

Their decision was to stay true to the canon of Seuss’s work.

“(The Grinch) is not monochrome, but it’s nearly monochrome. It’s pink, green, grey and black, I think. There’s got to be some reds in there, too. So it’s very monochrome,” he explained. “But we wanted to go with all those, sort of, pastel colors that Seuss is known for in all of his books. So we went that path and created our own Whoville based on visuals of his whole body of work.”

Steps were then taken to assure theater patrons weren’t overstimulated with visuals. Given that, at times, 30 actors in vibrant costumes appear on stage at the same time.

“The first set of designs that we did, which I’d totally forgotten about until someone brought it up to me, had a lot of horizontal striped stockings and big swirls on the body bellies. Things like that. Because they existed in a variety of the Seuss books. We sort of trimmed down some of that extra stuff and went for more solids. So I guess one of the pitfalls we were trying to avoid was doing too much.

“When you’re doing something like all of the Whos down in Whoville, you’re doing a lot already. You have to make choices. You have to make it into something that isn’t too much to look at,” Mickelsen said.

It’s this attention to detail, along with his talent, tenacity and willingness to listen to characters, that made Mickelsen one of the leading costume designers in the country, a distinction he’s held for decades. His designs have appeared in roughly 500 theater productions over the last 40 years. “Cabaret,” “Death of a Salesman” and “A Christmas Story” are but three of these productions.

He doesn’t have to travel far to find testament to his life’s work.

“I have 12 big boxes of nothing but drawings in my garage. There are thousands of them. I’ve been selling them off and giving them away … because they’re not doing me any good in the garage,” he said. “It’s sort of one of those things, that when you reach a certain point, it’s like what am I going to do with these?”

Mickelsen’s career took root some 45 years ago as a freshman at OCE, now Western Oregon University. Dr. Richard Davis and Davis’s wife Beverly were his mentors.

To say he plunged into his studies is an understatement.

“I auditioned for the first play my freshman year…. Richard was directing the show and designing the costumes, and I thought, well, that’s the person who’s at the heart of it,” he said. “I knew how to sew. So I was like, well, that’s what I’m going to do, cause I’ll be around the director and they might be able to teach me something about what we’re doing.”

In this first play, Mickelsen was cast as The Messenger and had one line. Off-stage, he performed a more important role.

“I went in and made my costume, and maybe two other people’s costumes. Then I got my work study shifted, and worked in the costume shop for the next four years,” he said. “And, boy, Richard, Beverly and I, and others, would spend all our weekends there, all our evenings, working together. So there were great bonds there.”

That enthusiasm, that thirst to soak in as many art classes as possible, remained with him throughout his years at OCE, almost to the point of excess. 

“They wanted me gone,” Mickelsen joked. “I had so many credit hours in four years. They were, like, he needs to graduate; he’s costing use money now. So I took every class I could, and as many classes as I could, to learn as much as I could.”

Mickelsen appreciated hard work, having grown up on the family nursery in Canby.

“I always say thank goodness that I was raised in a small town in Oregon. It gave me roots and a kind of work ethic. We fished, we hunted, we grew our own vegetables. Mom and dad would trade for eggs and milk. It’s just the way it was,” he said. “I’m still in daily contact, granted via Facebook, with people that I went to kindergarten with, and we’re 65 years old now. A hometown doesn’t leave you, if you’ve been raised in a good hometown.”

Post-graduate study took Mickelsen on a full-scholarship to the California Institute of the Arts, which was founded by another giant in creating cartoonish characters, Walt Disney.

“That really set me on my way. I mean, the work that I did at Monmouth gave me the foundation. But when I went in and met with people at Cal Arts, they went, yeah, you should go to school here,” he said.

Mickelsen’s career trajectory quickly exceeded his expectations.

“When people would say what’s your goal and what do you hope to do? It was always like, well, I’m so far beyond anything that I ever expected would happen that I don’t know what my goal is,” he said. “Opportunities were given to me so rapidly, so my goal’s just keep getting higher and higher.”

One such opportunity included a temporary assignment at Cal Arts as its principal costume design instructor (while the instructor was on sabbatical). Mickelsen also filled in as creative director of the costume design program at the Fashion Institute of Design and Marketing in Los Angeles.

These experiences provided him with greater appreciation for the education he received at OCE.

“I was teaching undergraduates. I thought, oh, these kids really needed to go to a liberal arts college, grow up, understand the world, and learn something about themselves before trying to jump into being an artist. You know, an artist has to grow,” he said. “The advantages of going to a liberal arts school, and being in that big mixing pot and not hitting a specialty when you’re 19 or 18, seems to be a great idea to me. And that’s what I got at Western.”