Thanks to a new musical, Cher’s favorite designer may finally get the respect he deserves.
He has outfitted mannequins as diminutive as Barbie and as Amazonian as RuPaul, and, in between, beglitzed every brand of bombshell: Madonna, Tina Turner, Raquel Welch, Mama Cass, Ann-Margret, Bette Midler and many more.
But it is in Cher, as the singer, actress and emoji-loving Twitter warrior Cherilyn Sarkisian Bono Allman is more succinctly known, that Bob Mackie, 79, found his perfect muse.
Since the two met in 1967, when she appeared on “The Carol Burnett Show,” for which he served as costume designer, Cher and Mr. Mackie have over thousands of concert, movie, TV and award show appearances forged as formidable a fashion partnership as Audrey Hepburn and Hubert de Givenchy, Liza Minnelli and Halston, or Lady Gaga and her butcher.
In 1975 Cher wore one of Mr. Mackie’s creations — what Vogue these days calls a “naked dress” — on the cover of Time. “Glad Rags to Riches,” read the headline. Forty-three years later, a new jukebox musical called “The Cher Show” will open on Dec. 3 at the Neil Simon Theater, to the general hysteria of her fans.
The show has put the spotlight back on Mr. Mackie, who has won multiple Emmy Awards and is responsible for some of the most instantly recognizable costumes of all time. For it, he has designed a plethora of the kind of paillette-drenched ensembles for which he is known. He is also a character, embodied by the actor Michael Berresse.
“He can sing and dance, which has nothing to do with me,” Mr. Mackie said.
But a first-act costume cavalcade that everyone who works on “The Cher Show” refers to simply as “the Mackie number” has everything to do with him. As Jason Moore, the director, said, “You can’t really tell the Cher story without telling the Bob Mackie part of it.”
The sequined sequence, featuring the three women who play Cher at various stages of her life (Stephanie J. Block, Teal Wicks and Micaela Diamond), lets Mr. Mackie “turn back time,” to borrow a song lyric, and revisit Cher’s most infamous “get-ups,” as he calls them.
“When you stick them all together, it becomes this feast,” Mr. Moore said.
In quick succession, audiences will gorge on such memorable looks as the metallic handlebar headdress and sci-fi bikini from the cover of Cher’s 1979 “Take Me Home” album; the seatbelt, mesh and garters in which she straddled an aircraft-carrier cannon in the video for her 1989 hit, “If I Could Turn Back Time”; and the wittingly tacky tiger-striped unitard (with one black bra strap showing) that she wore as her most famous comic character, the launderette-lingering cutup Laverne Lashinsky, on her various TV variety shows in the 1970s.
“Her look didn’t always correspond with the rest of the world,” Mr. Mackie said in October at Tricorne, a garment district costume shop in Manhattan, “but she has always had a definite taste in how she likes to look.”
And how.
Nowhere has Cher style been more apparent than in her choice of attire for the Academy Awards. In “The Cher Show,” her renowned award show ensembles (including her most famous, the 1986 Mohawk-inspired costume and feather headdress in which she upstaged that year’s Best Supporting Actor winner, Don Ameche) appear in a swiftly paced number set to the 1967 Sonny & Cher hit “The Beat Goes On.”
“We copied them all exactly,” Mr. Mackie said.
Early reviews have hailed this painstaking accuracy, wrought by highly skilled artisans in workrooms in New York and Los Angeles. Variety went so far as to call Mr. Mackie’s creations “t he real star of the show. ”
Cher herself doesn’t mind sharing the spotlight with the man who has dressed her as everything from a Native American princess to Popeye’s main squeeze, Olive Oyl, and every “ vamp, scamp and a bit of tramp ” in between.
“When I saw the show in Chicago,” Cher wrote in an email from Las Vegas, where she was on a string of concert dates, “the audience gave his fashion show segment a standing ovation. They went crazy and deservedly so. Bob has taken Broadway costume design into the stratosphere.”
Whether creating for the lithe dancer Juliet Prowse (“the more naked she was, the better she looked,” Mr. Mackie once told me) or the more generously proportioned comedian Totie Fields, he has always reached for the outer limits. “A woman who wears my clothes is not afraid to be noticed,” he once said.
“When that curtain comes up, and the lights hit those sequins and you hear the audience’s intake of breath, there’s nothing like it,” said Mitzi Gaynor, the actress who played Ensign Nellie Forbush in the 1958 film version of “South Pacific.”
She and Mr. Mackie began working together in 1966, when she was putting together a splashy Las Vegas revue. “Bob has made everything I’ve worn on stage or in a TV special since then,” Ms. Gaynor said. “He revolutionized me. I love being his first ‘star lady.’”
It was Mr. Mackie’s second “star lady,” Carol Burnett, who made the designer a household name. She hired him for her new CBS variety show in 1967 after seeing the clothes he had done for Ms. Gaynor at the Riviera. Over 11 seasons, he designed upward of 17,000 costumes and wigs for cast members, dancers, singers and guest stars.
Mr. Mackie was particularly skilled at creating costumes for such film parody characters as Nora Desmond, Mildred Fierce and Shirley Dimple.
