Walking on Broken Glass...

In seventeen days, dress rehearsals start for The Glass Menagerie at Utah State. I spent the first week back at school pulling items from our stock and making decisions about what we will build for the show. Before I go any further, "pulling" just means I went down to our storage room and chose items that will hopefully fit the actors. "Build" sort of means what it usually means except we apply the word towards costumes instead of houses or buildings. (What else do you build? Honestly, I can't think of anything else. I must be tired.)

Anywhoo, I thought I would give an update on my first two weeks of school. And what better way to update people than with pictures? The first picture is of the rack of costumes for The Glass Menagerie. It's a small show with four actors and time for hardly any costume changes. We are going to build three dresses, two for the actress playing Laura and one for the actress playing Amanda. It always makes me excited to see costumes go from sketches to actual costumes, even when it is someone else's design.
Here is another view of the costume rack: Amanda's dress before:

And after, with the addition of gold lace and a belt. I think it looks much better.
It is terribly exciting.

School has been very different from last semester. I only have two classes with meeting times so I've been spending a lot of time in the costume shop. We had costume fittings on Tuesday and we had our publicity photos this afternoon. I was pretty nervous to see how it would all turn out because this is my first grad school show. I was also worried about how Aubrey's hair would turn out because the wig isn't ready yet. I styled it and it looked okay. Most of all I was relieved that she wore a hat for most of the pictures. Those two events by themselves aren't that stressful (especially when the photos involved only three people) but it was compounded by the fact that the musical, Sweeney Todd, was cast this week. We spent most of today measuring actors and singers for the show. There are over forty people. It's like West Side Story all over again! I'm glad that I'm an assistant to the designer and not the designer, it's a big job.

I'll post some more pictures when I remember to take them. I had planned on taking some of my own pictures during publicity photos but my camera was being used in the fittings in the shop. We don't know a lot of the cast so as we get their measurement, we take their picture! It's all very handy.