High on the list of things most people never worry about is "what happens to the costumes when a show is over?". Glad you asked! After the last show, everything gets sorted into bags and boxes and carted off home for washing. I wonder what the neighbors think when they see 30 pair of women's bloomers hanging on my line. Anyway, after washing, pretty much everything gets stored away in our costume room - a black hole of boxes, cartons, and bags collected over 30+ years - upstairs of our rehearsal space in the Beer Sheva Mental Health Center. Yes, a psychiatric hospital, but we'll talk about that some other day.
Anyway, budget constraints being what they are this year, it was decided that we'd go through all (!!!) the old costumes to see what could be 'recycled' for this year's show. So Monday night, a couple dozen LOGON volunteers hauled a ton of stuff down from the storage area, unpacked it, and sorted it out. In the process we discovered that at some point, there had been a leak.... someone picked up a cardboard box full of elegant black top hats (Oliver!) and black gooey water came streaming out..... yuck! And you thought that show business was so glamorous.
Some of those top hats, in better days.
We waded through that mess and kept on hauling; pretty soon the large rehearsal space was full of piles, and three entire tables were just holding hats (which Mike, one of the producers this year, kept trying on as we worked. I think he looked best in the pink cowboy hat [Annie Get Your Gun]).
The white toga brought things to a crashing halt. It's about knee length, and was worn - with a long blonde wig - by a skinny cross-dressed geezer with hairy legs and knobby knees, in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum". His romantic pas de deux ("Lovely") with the hunky male lead reduced us to tears almost every rehearsal; knowing what a proper, dignified and reserved person Ed really is only made it funnier. "Forum" was not our biggest hit, but it was one of the shows that the cast enjoyed the most.
Here's the happy couple, but in a different scene.
We work with a professional costume designer, Melanie, and she prowled the hall all evening snatching up bits and pieces that will be transformed into costumes for "Man of La Mancha". She left with several huge bags and a gleam in her eye; the night we first get our costumes always stands out as one of the more exciting moments of the rehearsal period.
We still have a long way to go before we get there this year! Next stop: the dreaded auditions. More about that next time; meanwhile, you can find photos of previous shows on the LOGON Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/NegevLightOpera or on our website: http://www.negevlightopera.com/past-shows/
Happy Sukkot, and don't worry if you hear a bunch of really strange noises coming from my sukkah.... the kids won't let me practice my audition piece in the house, and what's a girl to do?
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