MAKING MAGIC

One of the busiest and biggest departments at The Shaw these days is our Wardrobe Department. We spoke with Jason Bendig, Head of Wardrobe, to see what was on his mind as we launched the 2023 Season.

Thanks to one of those strange coincidences that can happen sometimes, two plays that were planned for our cancelled 2020 Season, are together again on the playbill for 2023: Gypsy and Prince Caspian, both designed by Cory Sincennes (another coincidence). That means the incubation period for these two productions was more than three years! Jason noted: “It’s going to be fantastic to get Gypsy on its feet. There is nothing like pressing pause on a major musical right in the middle of the process. We also had to switch costume designers on it, between 2020 and 2023, which complicates things for the Wardrobe Teams. Likewise, with Caspian – we got so close to getting it on its feet and then had to say, ‘Sorry everyone – go home.’ It’s nice to see that artistry complete. To me, it is sort of like a long love letter. You start writing and you keep writing because you really can’t sign off until it’s done.”

Gypsy and Prince Caspian are part of what Jason describes as the busiest year yet for the Wardrobe team. Officially, the 2022 Season – The Shaw’s 60th –was the largest ever in terms of number of productions and performances, but Jason says, “Actually – for Wardrobe at least – the 61st Season will be our biggest yet. Last year I ran with five cutting teams and approximately 50 people. I will be trying very hard

BY HEATHER SARGESON-

to get up to eight cutting teams and a staff of over 60. Partly this is about the pandemic – we are still catching up from the pandemic, that’s the sad truth of it – everybody is – and the things we learned from it in 2022. The main thing is that you need to have so much more coverage when cast members go out due to illness; and what you need today may be different tomorrow. Everybody has used the word pivot to a point where it’s nauseating, but we really mean it. In 2022, unlike any other year, we had understudies in every play, and many weren’t necessarily the first assigned understudy to go on. The responsiveness from my team, and their ability to pivot, was huge and amazingly quick. Sometimes, if we were lucky, we might have a day’s notice! And when these scenarios are happening, they’re happening on top of what is already scheduled.”

When asked about other challenges, Jason mentions his concern about the future and keeping the skills required for this work: “I started here six years ago, and I have an excellent staff. But our biggest challenge now is the fact that our senior staff – some of them have been here for 35 years – are retiring. We do have some younger people who are coming up, and we have been actively training them in the various skills needed, but we have very few people in the middle who are ready to take on those senior roles for the next 5 to 10 years. We are at a point where we are in danger of losing a large skill set. I’m not saying that these young people aren’t talented, but they don’t have the range of skills needed yet. That’s our biggest challenge.”

Part of this skill set has to do with the way costumes need to be designed for the realities of theatre, for example, the quick change. The Wardrobe Running Team is responsible for the costumes during the performance: they are busy behind the scenes, especially in a musical, where there are a lot of quick changes. They help the actors change clothes – sometimes unbelievably quickly! – and come back on stage as totally different people. Jason explains what’s involved in taking a costume from design to reality by the Wardrobe Team that builds the costumes – quick changes must be considered: “That’s about rigging. How does it come apart? How does it undo quickly? Sometimes we have to take other things into account when building a costume. There is magic in rigging a costume that melts, like in Damn Yankees: how does it just magically disappear and fall away? Another example from Damn Yankees is the floating baseball effect. The magic for that was, in part, in the creation of velvet suits to cover people entirely, including covering their shoes. You saw none of their skin. We had to make four people go away, in the best possible way, and we had to work with other departments to make this happen. It was the combined work from the Lighting Department, including some fog atmosphere, and the Props Department which built the baseball on a pole and the Wardrobe Department to create those velvet suits that allowed the actors to disappear. There were many questions as this effect evolved, and that process, which is cross-departmental, takes hours, days, sometimes weeks to figure out, but the effect was fantastic. We did have a special effects magic consultant on Damn Yankees, which helped drive how those effects were created. But ultimately, it was a kind of cross-departmental magic of our own which made it all happen.”

When asked what he is looking forward to for 2023, Jason says, “It’s such a fantastic mix of designers this year; including some people I’ve never worked with, which is always fun. And from the designers I’ve been talking to, I’m excited to hear where they want to take their designs, their approach to the plays this season. At the same time, we are working with designers who have been here before, of course, including Cory who is on both Gypsy and Caspian – two of the first plays in Wardrobe. He has more energy than anyone I’ve ever met. Ingenious is a great word to describe his designs, and I’m looking forward to some of the love for arts and crafts that is shown in Prince Caspian. I call it magic – magic in a different way, because it’s the magic of making people believe in creatures. It’s the magic that allows audiences to invest and enjoy our storytelling, which is why we are all here, right?”

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