Martin Izquierdo, 83, Dies; Costume Designer Who Specialized in Wings

New York Times

5 hours ago

Martin Izquierdo, a theatrical costume designer whose career took off after he designed the feathery wings that gave phantasmic flight to the spiritual messenger in 'Angels in America,' Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1991 play, both onstage and in the 2003 HBO version directed by Mike Nichols, died on June 25 at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.
The cause was cardiovascular disease, his partner, the costume designer John Glaser, said.
At the conclusion of 'Angels in America: Millennium Approaches,' the first part of the two-part play, the angel of the title makes an impressive entrance, crashing through the ceiling of an AIDS-stricken gay man's New York apartment and proclaiming, 'The great work begins.'
It was Mr. Izquierdo's ingenuity, and his flamboyant imagination — assisted by a certain amount of technical wizardry — that allowed Ellen McLaughlin, who played the angel on Broadway, and Emma Thompson, the angel in the HBO version, to hover convincingly some 30 feet overhead, framed by prodigious wings that were illuminated from behind. Those wings became a symbol of the production itself, an indelible part of its 'astonishing theatrical landscape,' as Frank Rich of The New York Times described the show in a 1993 review.
Their creator arrived in the United States in the 1940s, a young undocumented immigrant from Mexico who had been recruited to do agricultural work in California.
Mr. Izquierdo (pronounced IZZ-key-AIR-doe), who never became a citizen, eventually gravitated to a career as an artist, painting scenery for the theater before becoming a costume designer. In 1978, he left California for New York, where he opened his own studio and spent nearly four decades making costumes and props for film, theater, and the music and fashion industries.
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