La Bricoleuse

This post though is an overview of the crafts projects involved in the PlayMakers Repertory Company's current mainstage production, The Bluest Eye, running through the end of the weekend at the Paul Green Theatre in Chapel Hill, NC.

( Read more... )

For our current mainstage production, The Bluest Eye, i had a unique problem with millinery for the costume of the character Soaphead Church.

In the context of the play, Church is a mystic, a former holy man who has lost his faith, and implied former child molestor and possible convict. Our designer's imagery for him was steeped in itenerant tinker imagery, trickster imagery, and the iconic silhouette of the top-hatted voudoun loa Baron Samedi.

My problem became, how to make a brand-new top hat that looks wrecked and ancient, in a very particular fashion...


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Recall my post of a couple weeks back on a joint project between myself and wig maker Jaime Blinn-Bagley on lace-front wig making and 1830s coal-scuttle bonnet construction. Looks like what i thought was going to be a two-part series is going to actually extend to three parts, so here's the long-awaited Part Two.

In case you missed the first post, we chose some historical research from the 1830s and are building in-tandem a wig to be styled in the Apollo knot hairstyle and a bonnet to be worn over the hairstyle. We left off with the wig production at the stage just before ventilation: the headwrap and hairline tracing had happened, the wig to be refronted had been prepared for lace-fronting, and the wig lace had been cut to shape and attached to the wig.

Bonnet construction had left off on the cliffhanger of buckram shape approval--a wired paper mockup had been created, fitted, and the pattern altered to reflect changes that came from the mockup fitting.

( So what's next? )

This is the second part of a two-part series on the building of the macropuppet plant arms for the musical Little Shop of Horrors. Part one is here, in which i illustrate how we built the "skeletons" of the arms.

( Photos and explanation of how the arms got finished... )

I have a lot of complex projects in the works right now--shoes, hats, the wire crinolines from the last post--but by far my favorite is building the enormous girl-grabbing puppet arms of Audrey II, the carnivorous plant star of the musical Little Shop of Horrors.

If you are familiar with the show, you know that it's all about the plant puppets, and that because the plant grows exponentially larger in each scene, the show requires four different plant puppets--two handheld potted-plant-sized ones, a large walkaround-sized one (though since it's in a pot, the puppeteer doesn't actually walk around in it), and an enormous one that requires three and then five puppeteers to manipulate it due to its sprawling prehensile "arms".

The Drama department of Durham Academy, a prestigious private K-12 school in Durham, NC, is producing the show this semester with sets designed by Zach Hamm, who also is the ATD at my work. They are working with the licensing and production company Music Theatre International, from whom they are also renting the plants. The set of four puppets was originally built by Character Translations, Inc.. The rental package consists of the four plants and plans for building the two sets of grabbing arms. (Presumably the plans are offered instead of renting built versions of the arms themselves due to the need to accomodate varying stage sizes and different actor-faces for the victim-flowers.) Zach and his construction team were unable add building the arms on top of their work on the set itself, so he asked if i'd be interested in doing it, and i ask you: does the sun come up in the morning?

YES, i was definitely interested in doing it!

( Photographs, plans, and the first part of the plantbuilding process...show me the Audrey! )

One of the projects i've been working on lately has been these tiny straw hats for an upcoming piece premiered by Carolina Ballet in tandem with an exhibit of Monet paintings at the North Carolina Museum of Art, a ballet inspired by the works of Claude Monet called Monet Impressions.

This is one of the images we were given as research, Monet's Woman With Parasol. The costumes are all very much of this signature Monet color palette, and are romantic tutus and bodices cut in a style reminiscent of the period. Two of the ballerinas will have tiny straw hats--smaller than historical scale, due to the need to perform the range of ballet movement. They're sort of a take-off designwise on those smallish 1870s hats that sat at an angle toward the front of the head, usually slightly off-centered, anchored to a big piled-up coiffure in the back.

I put in a bid on them and got the gig, but then something happened budgetarily such that the materials line on headwear shrunk up, i gather? Whatever it was, i found myself figuring out how to do them on a shoestringy basis, when i'd been hoping to buy straw braid or a straw hood and sizing a shape, etc, fancy high-end fun stuff. In addition to the budget issue, i also had a time-turnaround issue--what had been a couple months' lead-time turned into "we need to fit this in two weeks." No time to order braid anyway! Yipes!

So, how'd that $1 materials-budget work out for me?

( Fine, thank you. Welcome to Millinery Makeover! )

First up: forthcoming posts will include the final two segments of my studio setup discussion, backstage at The Lion King, and an exhibit review of the current costume history gallery at the NC Museum of History.

This post though is an overview of the crafts projects involved in the PlayMakers Repertory Company's current mainstage production, The Underpants, running through the end of the month at the Paul Green Theatre in Chapel Hill, NC.

( photos and discussion )