Competition is fierce, burnout is common, budgets are limited and deadlines are pressing.
But for decades A. Christina Giannini has stayed in the theater.
She's not on the marquee, or the stage. Never in the toe shoes.
She's a costume designer of the old tradition, working in the wardrobe rooms, stitching costumes and ironing fabric.
She's designed costumes for ballet, opera, avant-garde productions, Broadway and off-off-off Broadway.
Her age? She won't tell you.
But she's been around long enough to work with late choreographer Alvin Ailey in the early 1960s, a collaboration that continued through the 1980s.
"A lot of people work 10 years and then they're done," Giannini said, while moving around the cutting table in the dressing room at Nevada Ballet Theatre. "I'm puffing along in a very youth-driven industry."
This week Giannini is in Las Vegas working on the costumes for Nevada Ballet Theatre's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," a score for the regional theater company.
This is her second trip to Las Vegas. Bruce Steivel, artistic director of Nevada Ballet Theatre, brought in Giannini earlier this year to pair her with choreographer Peter Anastos for his new work "Les Gems," premiered by Nevada Ballet Theatre.
"She made it look like we spent a lot of money," Steivel said, referring to the costumes. "They were gorgeous."
Steivel says Giannini is "of the old school where she just gets on and does it, brings things in budget or under budget."
"She's worked with some of the biggest names out there," said Steivel, who met Giannini years ago in her first production of "The Nutcracker." "She's very traditional and she knows how to make a costume work.
"There was a time when she kept the ballets going."
Joffrey Ballet's founding member Gerald Arpino once credited her for "saving" the Joffrey in its early days. She built a reputation by working at or under budget from her home when costume houses were charging a fortune.
Working on its own tight budget, Nevada Ballet Theatre bought the "Midsummer" costumes and the scenery Giannini originally made for Hong Kong Ballet.
"It would cost an earth to make this ballet here," Giannini said.
Giannini's passion for the theater began at a young age.
She was 9 when her mother first took her to the ballet "Peter and the Wolf." Through her binoculars she paid more attention to the set and costumes, counting each frill on the tutu of the character, the duck, than to the dancing.
"I told my mother, 'That's what I want to do,' " Giannini said. "My mother said, 'You'd better get some more ideas. There's no way you could possibly make a living doing this.' "
After Las Vegas, Giannini is off to New York to do a drag ballet production with Anastos, then hopefully, she said, "Casablanca," with a company in Australia.
Has she turned anything down?
"Never," she said, then paused and shook her finger. "Well, I won't do these really hideous feminist pieces. All that angry feminist stuff. Hate it."
Opera's not her main game either. She finds it to be "boring," the singers to be "overweight" and "crabby."
Dancers, she said, "They're beautiful. They're just delicious to work with."
Giannini's many collaborations with Ailey included a dance about a jazz musician in South Africa during apartheid and a Bartok piece about the freedom of the soul in Czechoslovakia.
Over the years she'd break from tradition. She designed outfits for a breakdance musical at a kibbutz in Israel, created costumes for a ballet about Charles Manson and a wardrobe for an opera about the Hells Angels.
But then she returns to the classical, as she did earlier this year for Washington Ballet's "Romeo and Juliet."
Mostly, Giannini said, "I like new material, new ballet, new choreography. We're in huge competition today with television, DVD, music. "It's just too much. There were times when I've said, 'Look guys, we've got to get our socks up. This is not a highly intellectual audience here. We've got to wow them.' "
Working 12 to 14 productions a year, Giannini, a New Yorker, says she's constantly looking for work.
"You have to stay out there all the time," she said. "It's a lot of work I'm telling you. To do anything in the arts you have to do it with passion or get out.
"There's no money in ballet. But, as you get older you can say, 'I did what I wanted to do.' A lot of women my age are cranky. I've had a fun ride. It was awfully hard, but a fun ride."
Performances begin Friday at UNLV's Judy Bayley Theatre. For more information call 895-2787.
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