La Bricoleuse

Here's the third in the series of posts on my stint as a long-distance milliner for the Williamstown Theatre Festival's currently-running production of The Torch-Bearers. (Part one and part two at these links.)

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And, thus ends the chapter of my summer entitled "WTF Millinery." The play is now open up in Williamstown and apparently the reviewers either love it or hate it, though i suppose whether it's good or not has no bearing on the fact that the hats are indisputably STUNNING. Ha!

But on a serious note, there's a lot of great stuff on the horizon both near and far, for future post topics. On Wednesday, i head out for the 2009 USITT Costume Commission's Summer Symposium, hosted this year by the excellent folks at Ohio U. The topic of focus is creature costumes and full-head/bighead/walkaround style masks, and i will be hopefully posting from the conference each night.

The topic for the fall crafts seminar is Decorative Arts, and we've got a whole new class of incoming grads whose work i'm looking forward to showcasing--lots of parasols and gloves and footwear and that sort of cool stuff, plus PlayMakers shows on the docket like Opus and, of course, the looming nicknickleby...

"WTF" as in Williamstown Theatre Festival, that is, not the more familiar expression.

WTF is a regional summer theatre in the Berkshires, and a frequent summer destination for Broadway performers and film stars who want to tread the boards in a regional company for a show or two. They won the Tony for a regional company in 2002, and they tend to strike a balance in their programming between classics and new premieres. (Incidentally, their Artistic Director is Nicholas Martin, who took over artistic direction at Boston's Huntington Theatre when i worked there ten years ago, small world.) WTF draws a lot of well-known costume designers, as well, so in a production context, working at WTF for a summer is a good way to get some prominent names on your resume, and have an opportunity to work with some top-rung talent and innovative creative teams.

One of my former grad students (M. Spencer Henderson, whose millinery work was featured in this blog a couple years back) is their shop manager this summer, and when a set of designs crossed his desk with some prominently-featured millinery, he called me for a bid. (WTF doesn't have a staff milliner.) I explained bid jobs in this earlier post, but basically, it's a name-your-flat-price sort of situation: you give me this much to make those items.

The show in question is George Kelly's The Torch-Bearers, a 1920s farce about amateur theatricals--like a flapper version of Waiting for Guffman...or something. I have permission from costume designer Ilona Somogyi to share some of her renderings, so that's exciting, because we can consider her designs as a jumping-off point to discuss the collaborative process of designer and production artist in the context of a distance bid like this one.

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