Costuming a Show

The entire cast (myself 6th in from the right)

Hoo boy.

Myself as Bambi/Princess Kickapoo

For the past few weeks, I've been in a show.  Not only have I been in the show, but I choreographed half of it and have managed to throw together 16 costumes for our spring musical: Curtains.  The total inventory included 6 "Kansasland" dresses (pattern found here), 5 "Thataway" saloon girl dresses (here, C), 3 men's vests (here), 1 blue dress for "Tough Act to Follow" (here), 1 Madam Marian dress (here, A), and 1 Princess Kickapoo outfit.

"C'mon honey, we need to do Thataway, rightaway"

 I have to admit, I think the "Thataway" costumes (despite not being entirely finished) were my favorite.  I thoroughly enjoyed having an excuse to wear giant feathers

I'm sorry your costume doesn't fit right Niki, but in my defense, we're all "In the Same Boat."

If I have learned one thing from this experience, it's that when you find yourself with down time months ahead of the show, use it to do a lot of work.  After 3 consecutive all-nighters before opening night and still having dresses not hemmed, ruffles not getting sewn on skirts, and my own costumes not done until 3 hours before curtain, I wish I had spent a little more time earlier in the production doing bigger things instead of tiny building blocks.  It may not have been my best work, but at the end of the day, everyone had a costume, and none of them completely fell apart.

Chilling backstage

So one of my favorite things is foreshadowing in costumes.  As they say, hindsight is 20/20, and I didn't think to take pictures of most of the details before we put all the costumes away.  I put a green front panel on my prairie dress for when I was a very green Princess Kickapoo later, Niki got the same blue material front panel that matched her blue dress later, and Georgia had a red gingham front panel since she spent most of the show in her red dress.

Speaking of the red dress, I will admit, I did some genius work with it, even if it wasn't perfectly executed.  So a short summary of Curtains:  Jessica Cranshaw, who plays the leading lady Madam Marian in the less-than-great show of "Robbin' Hood" dies mysteriously onstage after the opening night finale, and is controversially replaced with the show's lyricist, Georgia Hendricks.  Since the two actresses playing Madam Marian had different dress sizes, in order to only make one dress, I didn't install a zipper, took the back in by three inches on either side, then sewed in ribbon loops to make a laced back.  This way, the different measurements of the actresses could be accommodated without having to make two separate dresses.  

Also, gingham printed fabric is very thin and does not handle the stress of movement well, so almost everyone had armpit holes in the prairie dresses by the end of the run, but those weren't visible to the audience, so I didn't worry about them so much, but it would've probably been a good idea to either add more fabric, or to reinforce a bunch of the seams with some iron-on interfacing.  I didn't line any of the costumes, since everyone would be wearing appropriate undergarments anyway.

I could go on for days about this project, what went right, what went wrong, what I would've done differently, etc., but at the end of the day I managed to, for the most part, costume a show.  And I'm probably never going to do it for free again.