A preview of FIU Theatre’s ‘Rent,’ Part II

The show’s costume designer Angelina Esposito gives us a tour of the FIU Theatre costume shop, as well as a sneak peek at the wardrobe for the upcoming staging of the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning rock opera at MMC. The show will run for three weeks beginning Nov. 4 in the Main Stage of the Wertheim Performing Arts Center.

The cast and crew of the FIU Theatre production of Rent is hard at work preparing for the show’s upcoming debut Homecoming week (the show opens Nov. 4).

This week, we shine a spotlight on 24-year-old Angelina “Angie” Esposito, a senior theatre student and Rent’s costume designer.

Esposito was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and has lived in Miami for the past decade. She chose FIU because it was close to home and affordable and because she really connected with blue-and-gold life. She initially declared art as her major, but switched majors before her junior year. “Theatre’s a different world,” she said. “It’s a different approach to art…and I love working with fabrics.

“I’d been coming to theatre shows here since my senior year in high school. I saw Cabaret here,” she said. “The campus is beautiful and I really liked it. And I didn’t want to go back to New York or go anywhere else in Miami.”

To date, she has worked on more than 10 FIU Theatre productions, including Blithe Spirit (as a student designer), Electricidad (as a tattoo designer) and Lie of the Mind (as a make-up designer).

For inspiration, she says, she turns to people in general. “I’d say I’m inspired by people and cultures because I see every character as an individual personality with their own style and history.”

Meet Rent’s musical director, Emmanuel Schvartzman ’09.

Esposito is an outgoing girl who likes to laugh and dye her hair (current color: violet). As you soon will see in the video below, she also is – and this is a contradiction true of many an artist – a bit shy.

“I am so not an actress,” she said as she gave us a tour of the FIU Theatre costume shop, a room that is full of hundreds if not thousands of costumes and Esposito’s favorite spot, its “great wall of shoes.”

She also is quite confident in her work. The theatre faculty assign students to positions such as the one she holds in Rent and she knows she was ready to meet the challenge. She also hopes that the entire FIU family will buy tickets and come see the work that she and her peers have put into the show, especially because she has prepared something different and special for one of the characters’ signature costume (we were not allowed to show you that, of course).

“The director [Andy Señor Jr. ’97] and I discussed a way to take Angel out of the convention of him in the Santa Claus costume, so we decided on something that’s still very holiday and very fun,” she said. “So come see the show and see what we did!”

Stay tuned to news.FIU.edu as we continue giving you an inside look at what it takes to stage a production like Rent at FIU.