The Goodbye Girl's Toughest Costumes!

Greetings Tibbit's Fans!
This is Melissa Swanson, costume designer for Room Service and The Bop She Bops. Today I wanted to share with you the toughest challenge we costumers had while constructing for our current show, The Goodbye Girl. This challege was, of course, the Giant Food Costumes! For those of you who have seen our production, I am referring to the dancing rib-eye steak, french fries, and ice cream cone.

Em Rossi, the designer for The Goodbye Girl, developed a strategy to construct these mascots out of ordinary foam mattress pads, headliner foam, a bit of wire, and lots and lots of hot melt glue.
Pictured here is the inside of the ice cream. I built a wire skeleton for the ice cream scoop in order to keep its shape while Katie Lemos was dancing in it.








This process kept us stuck inside these costumes for many hours while gluing each piece together.

After gluing everything together we spent a day in a mist of spray paint behind the opera house.










Lastly, we added the finishing details with some acrylic paints, and lots of glitter.

All three of us built one. Em Rossi made the fries, while Kat Reid (popcorn designer) built the rib-eye, and I tackled the delicious ice cream cone.

So far in the season these costumes were the toughest to build, and yet the most fun. But perhaps not for our diets, considering they caused many ice cream and french fry cravings (not so-much for raw meat).

If you have not seen these costumes in action there are still three more performances; tonight, Friday and Saturday at 8:00 pm.

The next show will be The Bop She Bops, designed by me. Here is a sneak peak of the costumes for Tibbits last summer performance.

A Behind-The-Scenes look at Goodbye Girl - Making The Lights on Broadway

Hello! My name is Kat Lanphear, and this season I'm serving as the Mainstage Lighting Designer for Tibbits Opera House. I just wanted to give our readers a quick look at the magic behind some of the effects in our shows, particularly The Goodbye Girl.

For those of you who have seen the show, you probably noticed Broadway posters that flew in and out during certain scenes. One of my jobs as lighting designer was not only to make sure that the audience could see the set, but also add a little bit of "lighting magic" to the signs. Working in collaboration with Lex van Blommestien (the scenic designer), we were able to make the Majestic Theatre sign light up, as well as create chasing lights around the 42nd Street sign.

The original concept for how to light the Majestic sign was to drill a series of holes in the middle of the sign to spell out the letters, and then use a lighting instrument directly behind the sign to shine light through the holes. However, this idea had to be scrapped because the look of the sign was being comprimised - it just didn't look as crisp and clean as Lex wanted it to. After a talk about other options, the two of us decided our best bet would be to use rope light to spell out the letters. Not only did using rope light achieve a better look than drilling holes in the sign, but it was also a cheap alternative - we had an abundance of rope light from a production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas a few years ago (if you happened to see that production three years ago, you may remember the rope light-surrounded runway - yes, we recycle!).

After deciding on a solution, the Master Electrician (Ben Paciorkowski) set to work installing the rope light. The picture on the left is the final product. It took about two hours of drilling small holes to feed rope light through, and installing clips to help create and shape the letters. Pretty simple, but a good look for the show.

While Ben worked on that sign, I was working across the scene shop on the 42nd Street sign. Early on in the process, I'd expressed to Director Brian Sage that I'd like to be able to do a chasing light effect on one on the signs. Most people have seen a chasing effect before - think about theatre marquee signs where the lights seem to "chase" each other around in a circle. A chase effect is easy to create, as it's really just a simple trick of the eye; what you really see in a chase effect is one light turning on, then the one next to it, then the one after it, over and over again in a loop of three. While it looks like the lights "chase" around a sign, it's really just every third light being turned on in a sequence.

To do this, I needed to wire 3 sets of 8 lamp bases to the sign - a total of 24 lights. This way, I could turn on one set of lights at a time. I also needed to be able to "hide" the wires so that the sign looked clean. To complete this project took me over three hours. Not only did I need to attach and wire bases to the sign, but I also needed to make sure I didn't get "lost" in my wiring. One wrong end of a wire attached to the wrong base could have cost me a lot of extra time to go back and fix everything. In the picture, you can see band-aids on my fingers; wiring the sign caused a lot of blisters that day! However, in the end all of the lights worked, and I was able to program multiple chase sequences for musical numbers in The Goodbye Girl. Check out the finished product below!



If you haven't had the opportunity yet, make sure to check out our production of The Goodbye Girl before it closes on Saturday, August 2nd! I promise you that it will be a great time, and you will be able to tell all of your friends how they made the lights on Broadway. =)