Summer Progress

It seems like every blog posts opens with some variation of "Wait, it's been HOW long?"

Ah well.

Pictures of our Latest and greatest projects!
As usual, when you think something is going to be easy it inevitably turns out to be a nightmare.
In our case, we thought we had enough costumes for all of these lovely ladies:

 The lovely ladies of UK's Pirates of Penzance (with Mabel 1)

But exactly 3 of these costumes needed no alterations - everything else needed new trim, a bunch needed a new apron, hems (hemming circle skirts sucks by the way) lots of fichus (the fluffy lace thingies that cover the chest) and in one case we had to make an entirely new dress since the original simply looked weird on stage.  Also unfortunate is that after all that hard work, no one got a decent picture of it.

 Stanley the Major General with Mabel A

Not a great picture, but one of the few costumes we really had to make from scratch was the Pirate Kings - these boys are Opera-sized!

The day after Pirates ended, I packed up the car with both dogs and drove across the country to visit my parents in Oregon - we had a great trip for the most part.  Winston loved it

Dog is my co-pilot!

Eva, not so much.  The reason Winston got the front seat is because Eva the Diva is a very nervous traveller.  She shakes, she pants, and generally makes everyone miserable.  Had the camera been pointing the other way, you would have seen me, with Eva in my lap in the back seat, covered in drifts of corgi hair from her nervous shedding.  We finally had to put her in the pop-up crate and drug her so that we could drive without her freaking out. We did manage to get one picture of her in the car.

But, granted this is BEFORE we tried to drive anywhere.

Once I got back, I went straight into rehearsals for "It's a Grand Night for Singing" which opened this past weekend.  This is the annual UK Broadway show that generally covers our budget for the year while being done with NO budget costume-wise. 

The show has been running for 19 years, and for 16 of those years, no one really cared about the costumes, as the show was mostly a "park and bark" show in formal gowns  (meaning that people walked on stage, stood there and sang - so a musical fashion show without the walking) and occasional "costumes" which were generally sloppy and put together at the last minute.

Three years ago, Susan 1 came on staff and she and I tried to pull this show together a bit.

Moderate degree of success.

This year was probably our most successful year of costuming yet. 

Here's our Addams family - (Notice Thing peeking out on Lurch's shoulder)  Unfortunately, you can't see our Pugsley as the gentleman playing Gomez is standing in front of him.

Many of the costumes were still scavenged from Goodwill or out of our shop, but because I was able to start telling people about costumes the very first week, we had a lot more time to get things together and were able to pull off some really great looks.  Grand Night Closes on June 19th.  Then there shall be laundry and the dreaded

MOVING DAY!!!

Once again.  we have to move all our stock.  The first move we did was to get our costumes out of a really awful warehouse and into a space with more protection (a decommissioned dorm).  Unfortunately, the dorm is being torn down, or completely renovated, depending on who you talk to.  Either way, we've been given our notice to move our things out.

As you do when you move, we've been sorting through stuff and trying to get rid of things we don't need.  We still have a mess on our hands.

We shall see what our new space allows us to do.  Unlike our current space, we'll have water, heat, A/C and access to a washer and dryer so we can quit beating up our home machines with shop laundry.

So here, we go.



Long time no see!

Trying to blog and work, and go to school and get everything done is rough.
But two shows and a recital have blown by without so much as a peep on this blog!

Porgy and Bess was a HUGE hit - it was a massive production and for as little budget as we had, we made those folks look good.

This show was a challenge, not only because there were over 80 people in the cast, many of whom were double cast, but primarily because we had a chorus of 40 singers from KSU.  Most of these students had never sung outside of a choir so they were dealing with a lot of new things, but even with that disclaimer, some of these kids were just so BADLY behaved it made our heads spin! Food everywhere, sloppy personal habits, people LEAVING in the middle of a show just because they felt like it - all the bad habits you pray a cast doesn't have, this group had in droves, though a handful of them were wonderfully behaved.

The next project was my DMA Lecture recital!!
Yeah, about as exciting as it sounds.  It went well, my teacher was pleased and it is over.  One more step towards finalizing this degree!

Then we had Brundibár - a wonderful show about children triumphing over the evil organ grinder with the help of their animal friends.  Done by children, for children, to sold out houses for all four performances.  But, 50 children.....  Thank heavens no one changed costumes!!
This was a great show for me - I'm not the best or the fastest seamstress around but I do have one skill that surpasses everyone in the shop.  I knit.  So for this show, Susan D-W wanted the costumes, particularly those of the Cat, Dog and Sparrow to have a very homemade look and she thought it would be great if I could knit them!  We talked about how we wanted the animal costumes to look, and then I got to go off and create them, along with pieces for the Ice Cream seller and a knitted mustache for Brundibár himself. 

One of our cats and the original Brundibar Cat, Holocaust survivor Ella Weissberger.

As great as the animals turned out (look at those EARS!!) my biggest accomplishment was creating a pattern for the Ice Cream sellers hat that looked like two scoops of ice cream with whipped cream and a cherry!

It got rave reviews and one friend squee'ed over it so much I made a second one for her niece!


Now I'm on break, preparing for auditions, NATS and a fundraising recital, plus my long-awaited roadtrip to Oregon with the dogs.  Dogs plural you say?  Why yes!  A few weeks ago after much begging and pleading plus some dumb luck, my husband and I adopted a second corgi from a rescue group in Tennessee. 
Meet Sir Winston Piccolo!

He and Eva the Diva are getting along fairly well.  He's not as happy about being photographed as Eva, but he tolerates a lot for daily meals, snuggles and peanut butter.

The next project through the shop is Pirates of Penzance for the UK Undergraduate Opera - which should be a hilarious and only slightly stressful show (most of the costumes are borrowed or already made, thank goodness).  More updates to come as we move on!