This is the first Alice in Wonderland that Maddie was in. I was asked to costume the play and it was my first real foray into costuming. In college I was an actress and technical theater was very much secondary to performing. This play was the start of the technical phase of my life.. Maddie got the job of the caterpillar and I made her a shiny multi-legged costume. She had to become a butterfly at the end which presented a problem. I put a zipper in the costume and she wore a leotard to which I attached gossamer wings.
I strung the legs together so that when she moved her arms all the legs would move. It was pretty cool. I designed all the costumes and gave sheets to the parents so they could find costumes for the kids.
It also was the first time I worked on makeup for kids. I bought a book on makeup to refresh my memory. They were used to just putting lipstick, blue eyeshadow and thick pencil crows feet. I remember thinking that the crows feet were horribly heavy, but to my astonishment once the kids got on stage the lights that they were using totally obliterated the garish makeup. I learned a valuable lesson about a trial run of makeup. They were using scoop lights placed on the floor and the glare was very strong. I had a great deal of fun with Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the flowers were also fun.
It took a while to figure out how to do the cards since all the chorus which was made up of about 40 kids were cards. We ended up using poster board and drawing the suits on them. I gave each kid a suit and number to be so we didn't have any repeats.
All in all it came out quite well.
The last thing I did was make name plates for the walls. I used the Disney Cheshire Cat since that was the musical we were doing and then used word art to insert the name of each child. You can see them in the background. Each child got a memento of the play that way and I learned a great deal about word art.
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