As a child, the actor Krysta Rodriguez would mentally rearrange unfamiliar rooms as a way of soothing herself. The fixation followed her everywhere, from friends’ houses to historical sites. She remembers visiting a clothing store in Paris with her family when she was 11 and obsessing over where she would put a bed if she lived there. “As I’m thinking about it, it was probably a control issue,” she says. “I immediately try to figure out what a space wants to be. Is it a midcentury house that got renovated in the ’90s with all this incorrect architecture? I clear it away.”
Over the past two decades or so, Rodriguez, 39, has mostly channeled this aesthetic intensity into her character work, for roles on both the stage and screen (including a memorable turn as Liza Minnelli in the 2021 Netflix series “Halston”). In 2022, while appearing as Jean-Michel Basquiat’s fictional girlfriend in the Broadway play “The Collaboration,” she arranged her dressing room to look like a messy artist’s loft, filled with the kind of ratty ’70s furniture that her character would have grabbed from the streets of the East Village in the ’80s. She says the actor Nathan Lane, with whom she co-starred in “The Addams Family” musical in 2010, helped her realize dressing rooms could be taken seriously when he turned his into an extravagant lounge, complete with a full bar. She also credits the actor Michael Cerveris, who painted his walls blood red and brought in a vintage barber’s chair while starring in a 2006 revival of “Sweeney Todd.” “I try to use these spaces as a gateway,” Rodriguez says of her own dressing rooms. “I want to have some sense of the character, even if it’s not my personal style.”
In 2020, when acting work slowed during the pandemic, she turned her interest in interior design into a full-fledged business, renovating the homes of clients in her native Orange County, Calif., and beyond. But it wasn’t until this spring that Rodriguez decorated a dressing room for another actor. When her friend Jeremy Jordan was preparing for his leading role in the Broadway musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” he asked Rodriguez to lend her design expertise. She took inspiration from the subtle details of the character’s Jazz Age world rather than creating what she calls a “Party City Art Deco theme.” Jordan’s only request was that she make the windowless room, deep within the Broadway Theater, feel cozy. Rodriguez decided to reimagine the space as a sunroom in Jay Gatsby’s Long Island mansion, with a soothing watercolor wallpaper of a Japanese maple tree, to reflect the era’s affinity for Japonisme, and a marine blue love seat whose tropical plant print pillows match a nearby bird of paradise.
“We had differing priorities sometimes,” she says. “He wanted a comfortable space where he could play video games. I wanted something totally beautiful where you drink champagne and invite guests over. I’ve known him for so long, and he has a wife, so he knows how to defer.” Rodriguez added towels monogrammed with the initials J.G. and Prohibition-era photos; more personal touches include a vanity surrounded by mementos from Jordan’s previous roles, such as a “Newsies” cap and a miniature Venus flytrap toy commemorating his stints in the current Off Broadway revival of “Little Shop of Horrors.” Jordan had never seen any of Rodriguez’s dressing rooms or done much decorating of his own, but he felt that playing Gatsby called for some flair. “Peacock lamp? Why not? This crazy wallpaper with sconces? I would’ve never thought to do that, but great,” he says.
“My design and renovation work relates so much to my acting,” Rodriguez says. In both cases, “you want to figure out who this person is and what experiences have made them who they are.” Unlike a primary home, she adds, dressing rooms don’t have to be functional; they just need to provide respite. “They can be purely fun,” she says. “And even if no one sees the room” — as was the case during “Into the Woods” in 2022, when guests were not allowed backstage, and her enchanted forest-inspired space went largely unseen — “I still spend weeks putting wallpaper up, because it’s important to me.”
Read More: How Does a Dressing Room Get Into Character?
