With the presentation of the Tony Awards on June 11th, another Broadway season comes to a close. While the awards are a chance to recognise achievements on Broadway each year, every day a group of professionals behind the scenes is making sure everything that goes on onstage is perfect. One of these is Jamie Amadio, Wig and Hair Department Head at Six Degrees of Separation. The Tony Awards honors a range of designers, including scenic, lighting, sound, and costume; artisans who create wigs, hats and shoes get little recognition. Then there are people such as Amadio who are tasked with maintaining these hand crafted creations, making sure every curl is perfectly in place.
Amadio got her first taste of the theatre onstage in community theatre productions in Rochester, Minnesota, with encouragement from her mother. ‘I got cast because I was cute I guess. And I found it fairly easy to memorise the lines. And she continued to push me and encourage me to do more and more. I had an agent at one point to audition for bigger things. Nothing came of it. But that was part of the journey.’ However in high school she would develop stage fright and transitioned to working backstage instead. In college she began working in wardrobe where she began to explore it as a potential career. ‘I didn’t know that it was an option before, and I really took to it. That led me to Chicago to work at Steppenwolf at the Goodman. Often times in regional theatre wardrobe and wigs go together as one thing. So if you’re doing wardrobe, you’ll also be responsible for styling and maintaining whatever wigs there are in the show. At the Goodman there is a different and distinct wig department that I became more and more involved with and I started to really enjoy those aspects more so than wardrobe.’
While in Chicago she took it upon herself to learn not just how to maintain wigs, but to build them. ‘DePaul University offers over a summer an incredible wig and hair school where within the course of one week you learn how to ventilate, which is the act of putting hair into lace to build a wig. So one week I learnt how to style and maintain wigs throughout different periods of history. And then the next week I learnt how to ventilate.’ Rick Jarvie, former Wig Master at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and teacher at DePaul recognised Jamie’s enthusiasm. ‘He saw that I picked up ventilating right away, so he started to give me a lot of wig building projects once the course was over. That kind of really helped to kick start my career. After that I started to try and pick up more and more hair work and kind of slowly do less and less wardrobe work.’ Now based in New York City, Jamie has recently worked on The Color Purple, The Elephant Man and The Rockettes’ Spring Spectacular. Her skills as a wig builder have not all been for solely theatrical purposes, she has also built wigs for women with cancer and alopecia.