A Brief Musical Interlude

As some of you might have noticed, things have been a bit quiet round these parts recently. That’s due to the pretty huge workload that studying German comes with and that I’ve been working a show for the last God knows how long. We’ve been working up to it since before Christmas and it’s finally done.

The Sound of Music is now officially over, and I’ve loathed every second of it. The musical that is, don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge Sweeny Todd fan, but Sound of Music just does not float my boat musically. However the cast, crew and everyone involved have been no less than bloody marvelous, this has genuinely been the finest couple of months, despite the soundtrack.

And the production was no less, than superb. 

So, since I’ve got relatively little to show in terms of serious prop work and huge stuff, I thought I’d give a run down of what we’ve been working on at the costume department for SoM. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff had to be hired due to time constraints, so not nearly enough making for my liking, however we found ourselves making a lot of Nazi gear oddly enough, because it’s not exactly easy or cheap to come by.

Coats in production.

The director had the idea of making the show a bit more audience oriented, so it was decided that the theatre that the audience was in would be the theatre for the Salzburg festival. Due to Austria being occupied at the time, we had soldiers patrolling at the interval and as the audience were walking around.

For that, we converted some Russian greatcoats and made armbands to go with them. Red cotton was used to make the actual band, and felt for the swastika, as we could cut and glue it pretty easily, the main theme of these costumes was budget and time; making over twenty of the buggers was pretty time consuming.

Zellers Costume

Zellers costume was a bit of a last minute affair. We were told, about a day before the actual show night that he needed a leather coat instead of the greatcoat we'd had him in, so we had to run to Manchester in the break between dress rehearsals and pick up a leather coat... with a nice fur collar. After ripping that apart and sewing the lining back onto the leather, it was ready to go.

The Banners and Uncle Max.

The ending scene included soldiers searching the audience with torches for the Von Trapps, and for the festival scene we had two large banners that fell during the scene and had to be winched up afterwards. The flags were made from cotton entirely; the swastikas glued onto the fabric and eyelets punched into their length. We ran some cord up the eyelets to actually enable them to be dropped and then pulled up again, in essence, venetian blinds. 

For the running away scene, we had to make some travelling cloaks for the children. They were pretty simple to whip up, using pleather we cut large circles with a hole for the head and sewed a clasp to each cloaks, flowery for the girls and knotted navy themed for the boys with a tiny little one for Gretl, the youngest.

The Captain's Jacket

The Captain’s navy jacket also had some serious alteration work done to it by Sophie, who was working the prop table for the production. She did some fantastic work, altering it to include brocade up the sleeves and made some very nice epaulets from the velvet left over from the curtains.

We also had to make some curtains for the evening scene earlier in the play, they were pretty easy to make, just stitching velvet to match the military theme of the house either side of the iconic curtain fabric.

The Wedding Dress

Final Curtain Call

Wedding Procession

The Von Trapp Children

Uncle Max, The Captain and Elsa.

The Costume Room

In addition to all this stuff, there was the usual altering of a few costumes and fixing some costumes when they broke on the night. I’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone involved, particularly wardrobe; Alex and Ariana for doing an absolutely stellar job on the night and with making the flags and everything else!

Thanks also go to Bell Costumes for providing a stunning wedding dress amongst other costumes, to PADOS for the loan of some tailcoats and a very nice tweed suit for the Captain and to St Monica’s High School for the loan of the curtain costumes.

I’m also working on RENT at the moment, so expect a write up for that coming soon, and also some pictures of some smaller things I’ve been working on in the meantime, until then, cheers for reading and auf Wiedersehen!

*I’d like to add a wee note to this, just to clarify, I, nor anyone involved in the production endorses Nazism in any way, we’ve made these simply for the show and they hold no sentiment for us in any way.