At PlayMakers, we are well into production on our first mainstage show of the season, Shakespeare's As You Like It. Our costume designer, Anne Kennedy, found a hat that she loved for the character of Rosalind, but it was a completely unacceptable color. It fell to me to make a reproduction.

Here's how i did it!

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The key to making vacuform armor look good onstage and not like "OMG plastik kostoom arm0r LOL" is covering it before painting it ( Read more... )

One of our productions this season is Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, set in a "Turkish fantasy land," according to the costume designer, so the crafts include a lot of various shapes of turbans draped in bright fabrics.

Here's a series of photos illustrating how I took a turban from mockup to final headdress:

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Our Costume Crafts Supervisor, Julia Powell, is an expert moldmaker and caster. During the regular season, she works in the Props shop of the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre (Milwaukee, WI), where she has been called upon to cast any number of bizarre things--including entire sets of "human" bones ( Read more... )

In the course of making a hat, helmet, glove, boot, breastplate, what-have-you, the making of a mockup is an essential step in the process. A mockup allows you to see a three-dimensional shape of the piece and fit it to an actor; it gives you a "canvas" onto which the designer can manipulate scale of aesthetic elements. I try to make mockups from ( Read more... )

One of the exciting things we are doing this year is vacuforming a new batch of armor for this summer's production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus. Today we went over to one the Festival's two scenery shops where the larger of their two vacuform machines is housed. (The smaller machine being over in the Props shop, apparently; i've never seen it so i ( Read more... )

I've just finished up a cross-country drive from North Carolina to Utah!

The PlayMakers Repertory Company season has come to a close (reopening in the fall) and we professional production artisans on staff at traditional seasonal theatres often travel to work at one of the many summer theatre or opera companies during the break ( Read more... )

This project overview is the first in the category of "Haberdashery," a term whose meaning varies widely--in the US, it typically refers to men's accessories, whereas in the UK it's synonymous with notions and trimmings ( Read more... )

Dress Up Your Shakespeare: Utah's festival costume demands keep couture crew in stitches, by Ellen Fagg

Welcome to another undramatic morning behind the scenes at the festival, where a variety of houses, tents and backstage wings serve as busy costume and set shops for what's thought to be the only theater repertory company in the world to launch ( Read more... )

[Reviews of performances are written from the particular perspective of a costume crafts artisan, and thus focus largely on technical and aesthetic aspects of costume craft items and properties.]

John Murray's and Allen Boretz's play Room Service, written in 1937, is what's typically referred to as either a "screwball comedy" or a "zany farce"-- ( Read more... )