Mac Aids Fund Lends Its Support to Some of the Most Beautiful Moments in Angels in America
Early on in Angels in America, Prior Walter, a young man dying of AIDS, sits in front of a mirror dressed head to toe in drag, sparkling beneath the stage lights. Harper Pitt, a Mormon housewife with a pill addiction, arrives in this fantasy to incredulously ask him why he is wearing makeup. “I was in the process of applying the face, trying to make myself feel better,” he says. “I swiped the new fall colors off the Clinique counter at Macy’s . . . it was an emotional emergency.”
This surface-level solution to his sorrow is so simple and sympathetic. “When Andrew [Garfield] appears in full drag, it’s this really magical moment—he looks fantastic and he’s trying to cheer himself up from what he considers to be his death sentence,” Tim Levy, the show’s producer and director of the National Theatre America, told Vanity Fair. This underlying theme of beauty weaves its way throughout Tony Kushner’s two-part play, from the devastating but beautiful angel with dark makeup and unruly hair to Pitt’s Mormon mother-in-law.
MAC Cosmetics is the makeup partner of the show, providing products backstage in addition to a $50,000 donation toward the production. MAC founders Frank Angelo and Frank Toskan created the MAC AIDS Fund in 1994, just three years after the premiere of the original performance of Angels in America, and have since raised more the $480 million for the cause. The brand works with Giuseppe Cannas, who manages the makeup and wig teams at the National Theatre, and who helped to create the final looks for the show...