The art of tumbleweeding: Monica Viani shares lessons after 30 years of hat crafting for Stratford Festival

Monica Viani, a milliner with the Stratford Festival with 31 years experience, sits in her corner of the wardrobe department at the Festival Theatre, surrounded by past and present works she has designed.

CONNOR LUCZKA, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

In 1980, Dame Maggie Smith performed in a Stratford Festival production of Much Ado About Nothing. Monica Viani, a teenaged Stratford resident at the time, was in the audience, though it wasn’t until after that she fell in love with what the theatre could do.

“As a teen, a young person growing up here, going to the grocery store and seeing someone like Maggie Smith at the grocery store line up paying for her groceries in jeans and a t-shirt, and then coming to see her on stage, when she had full costume and full everything – to see the transformation in a person – that was really magic,” Viani told the Times. “It was the transformation, the manipulation of the textiles. It was the way textiles had been painted, had been treated. It was the lighting. It was the full transformation of a person into a character. That was really what blew my mind the most at that point in time.”

That performance started Viani on a path that eventually led to who she is today: a milliner at the festival with 31 years of experience.

Viani got her start in millinery, the design and construction of hats, at the festival in 1995. After launching her career in office administration and not feeling fulfilled, she decided to return to the place where she first fell in love with theatre, which also happened to be in her hometown. She apprenticed with Jane Shipway in the millinery department.

“I felt like I was coming home to myself,” Viani recalled about those early days. “It was really an interesting feeling walking through the hallways, because there was just the creativity. The vibe of the wardrobe was something that I had no idea even existed in a workplace. I knew I was looking for something in that world, but I didn't know where it would be or what it would feel like, so coming through the hallways at that time, I was immediately reassured that this is a path that I wanted to pursue.”

From there Viani went to Toronto and worked for The Nutcracker at the National Ballet of Canada and a number of live “mega musicals,” most notably being The Lion King with Mirvish Productions. She continued to work for the festival when the season picked back up, gigging across southwestern Ontario for many years. After SARS and 9/11, the theatre world took a big hit and Viani was laid off from many of her connections in Toronto.

Taking a one-year program through EI, Viani learned how to properly start her own business, which led to her branching out even further, crafting for countless productions remotely over the years. Notably, she prototyped and led the build of the bonnets for The Handmaid’s Tale season one and, coincidentally, prototyped many of the hats for the world premiere of Something Rotten! on Broadway in 2016

“And then I came full circle back to Stratford. I was living in Toronto. We were looking to maybe make a change. My folks were getting older. They needed a little bit of assistance, so we thought, let's go back home, and maybe I can help mom and dad and maybe set up shop here.

“... One thing led to another, and here we are,” Viani laughed.

As she explained, building hats for theatre is much different to hats for everyday use. Not only can the textiles and materials be quite different – and surprising – but for the stage every hat needs to be a perfect reflection of that character.

“It's almost like when you see someone about to play the piano who's been playing the piano for a very long time,” Viani explained. “And you see them sitting at the piano keys, at the keyboard, and they just take a second and then they get into what they're doing. I think we do that in a way with costumes.

"... We really try to tap into the character and tap into the look and feel of what we're trying to go towards. And I sometimes liken myself, maybe others, to tumbleweeds. We've been tumbleweeding through this for so many years. I've been in this for 30 years now. We have picked up all these skills and all these different ways of doing things, whether it be through experimentation, or from other people, or seeing other people's work, and it's almost like we build by braille now, if that makes sense. Sometimes you're not even thinking about what you're about to do. Your hands just go into it like a pianist.”

One example of how a character’s hat can define them and the world they are in is Ane Crabtree’s design for The Handmaid’s Tale. Set in a dystopian world where a theocratic, authoritarian government subjugates fertile women for childbearing, Crabtree designed them to subtly reflect the world itself, while also being suitable for filming so the actresses’ faces are visible.

“The outdoor bonnet is very much set up so that, as the girls are walking beside each other they don’t make eye-contact. They can’t. They can’t make plans ... they’re blinders.”

At the festival, each milliner is assigned three plays a season, and each production needs dozens, if not hundreds of hats. This year, Viani is returning to Something Rotten!, and working on The Hobbit and The Importance of Being Earnest.

While Viani has already cut her teeth on Something Rotten!, both for the original Broadway production and the festival’s 2024 production of the musical, the other two are big and starkly different visions. The Hobbit needs less pieces, but the pieces are larger and more fantastical. For The Importance of Being Earnest, costume designer Cory Sincennes has a specific vision.

“He's taking the approach of Victorian meets Coco Chanel,” Viani said. "So taking the era and combining modernism with the era. ... and making them a little bit sexy. So that's going to be interesting. So that's what I really love about the designs.

“... That’s what makes it really exciting,” she continued. “We're all working towards the same vision, which would be the vision of the creative team, of the director, costume designer and the creative team. So I really enjoy that. ... I really enjoy the variety of reinterpreting the character through the common goal, the commonality of all of us working together through that same goal.”

More than anything, Viani hopes her story and work can inspire the next generation of creatives – the next generation of milliners.

“I hope the story inspires young people – or anyone who (is interested), doesn't be a young person,” Viani concluded. “I hope this inspires anyone who is considering a career in the arts to realize that there is a place for them. They just have to find it.”