Being Organized

So.  What do you do when you have 26 young actors wearing 56 costumes and different sets of parents helping out on different days?  You get organized.  You get super organized.  Organizing the dressing room became nearly as big a job for this show as creating the costumes themselves.

A Good Day's Work

We've got just one month left to get ready for Thin Ice Theater's production of The Phantom Tollbooth.  Costumes have been designed, sewing is in progress, with many moms lending their hands and sewing skills to the process.

Today was set aside for creating miners' hats for the workers in the numbers mine of Digitopolis.  My costume assistant Cheryl and I made our game plan, and in two hours, voilà, all done!  The idea grew bit by bit between us:  plastic hardhats plus cat food cans plus Mardi Gras beads.  Here's how our afternoon went.

The cat food can.

Phantom Tollbooth Costume Sketches

Step # Next in the costume process for The Phantom Tollbooth.  It's a real treat to do this show.  For several years now, when we've come across some outrageously silly costume item in the storage boxes, we'd smile and nod at one another and say, "Yep, we'll use that for Phantom."  And now, here we are!

Here are the current working sketches.  Because we have 26 actors and something like 56 costumes, it's, well, quite a project.  (See the costuming progress here and here.)

Phantom Tollbooth

My next big costuming project for Thin Ice Theater is The Phantom Tollbooth.

We're producing the play by Susan Nanus, based on the book written by Norton Juster and illustrated by Jules Feiffer.  The book was published in 1961.  When I was in fourth grade, and the book and I were still both pretty new, my teacher read it to us, chapter by chapter.  It's been one of my top favorite books ever since, and both my kids are big friends of all the characters, just as I am.  I can't recommend it highly enough, so I am delighted to be part of this production.