A night at the theater has the power to conjure up a special kind of enchantment, changing adults into children and children into true believers.
Using the right props and costumes, theater productions can send audiences on spellbinding journeys to new places in time or around the world.
With its production of “Cinderella,” Cape Fear Regional Theatre brought its own brand of magic to the local stage last February. “Cinderella” is a beloved tale of transformation, the story of an abused young girl who encounters a magical fairy godmother who transports her to a glamorous ball in a carriage made from a pumpkin.
Backstage is David Louder, the costume shop manager and the genius behind Cape Fear Regional Theatre’s interpretation of the fairy godmother’s magic spell. But instead of a wand, David wields a mighty sewing machine, and using snaps, Velcro, and magnets, he constructed an enchanting costume for Cinderella that transforms from a mundane pink house dress into a golden ball gown right on stage.
“I basically combined two dresses into one, with a little pocket underneath to hide the ballgown,” he said.
On a hot day last August, a mannequin was wearing the top half of Cinderella’s house dress in the Cape Fear Regional Theatre offices on Hay Street.
Artistic director Mary Kate Burke helped David demonstrate how a little stage magic goes a long way. With Mary Kate anchoring the mannequin, David grabbed the bodice, gave it a tug, and opened it to unfurl Cinderella’s golden ball gown, its skirt cascading to the floor.
On stage, Cinderella spins in a circle as she pulls open her bodice to release the gown, and from the audience’s point of view, the transformation is seamless.
It’s not as easy as it looks. It never is.
“Making the magic happen involved a lot of research and trial and error,” Mary Kate said.
To stage the show, the theater brought in Emily White, a New York City-based costume designer who worked closely with David to research how transformational costumes work, what to expect when constructing them, and how the actors incorporate them into crucial scenes. The pair created two gowns for the show.
“One of the first things I had to learn was how to hide the ball gown underneath the house dress so the audience wouldn’t see it,” David said. “At the same time, it couldn’t be too bulky because we didn’t want it to look like she was wearing a pool floaty underneath her dress.”
David grew up in Maryland and was educated at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
“My interest in costuming was sparked years ago in high school when a friend asked me to help him make a ‘Star Wars’ costume,” he said.
With his mother’s help, he learned how to use a sewing machine and discovered a love for making fashion. Then came theater costumes.
“My high school theater department tapped me at one point to help reimagine the show ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ and that’s when I knew I wanted to work in theater,” he said.
Over the years, David has created thousands of costumes. Many of them hang on racks, organized according to periods in time for easy access.
“There’s also a wall full of hats, and a wall full of shoes,” Mary Kate said. “It’s really fascinating.”
On stage, miracles can happen at the intersection of props and costumes.
Just ask Jeremy Fiebig, founder and director of mission for the Sweet Tea Shakespeare production company and professor of theater and directing at Fayetteville State University.
Last year, Jeremy commissioned Mathew McDonald to craft a vintage diving helmet for Sweet Tea Shakespeare’s production of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” with an underwater scene featuring a spearfishing diver.
To transport his audience back to the 19th century when Jules Verne penned the classic tale, Jeremy needed convincing props and a perfect venue.
“We selected the Fayetteville Pie Company (now Friends Table) as the setting,” Jeremy said. “Its two-level structure and exposed metal and wrought iron decor provided the nautical look and old-ship ambiance that we needed.”
Jeremy founded Sweet Tea Shakespeare about 12 years ago.
“We produce plays year-round, and they are usually small Shakespearean productions,” he said. “We bounce around town, popping up in breweries and restaurants, church halls or outdoors in gardens, and other public spaces.”
In addition to Shakespeare, the company performs adaptations of classic works like “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Last month, the theater company staged Homer’s “The Odyssey.”
Mathew, who works as an electrician, describes himself as an artist and a “maker,” a member of a culture devoted to creativity and innovation. He grew up in Fayetteville and recently moved to Franklin, North Carolina, to pursue his love of the outdoors.
He was excited about the chance to craft a vintage diving helmet for “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and studied photos of vintage underwater helmets and viewed other helmets in real life. Two things stood out.
“The helmets were shiny and so heavy, an actor wearing them would not have been able to move around easily and it would have been impossible to use,” he said.
He crafted a realistic helmet using lightweight EVA foam, the kind of material that makes up floor mats in gyms. He rigged the helmet with LED lighting on the inside and used a 3D printer to make a battery box and some of the trim and fixtures.
He knew he would have to make it appear realistic and put his imagination to work.
“This is a diving helmet that has been on a ship for a long time. It’s been exposed to the effects of salt water, and somebody’s probably dropped it a time or two,” he said.
He colored the helmet a dull shade of copper and painted the trim in brass and silver. He used various shades of green and brown paint to craft the appearance of oxidation.
The crowning touch was the LED lighting he installed, giving the helmet an eerie glow from the inside and allowing the audience to see the actor’s face inside.
Mathew was pleased with the result.
“I thought the actor used the helmet excellently,” he said. “Thanks to the lighting, you could see his face illuminated inside the helmet and it did exactly what it needed to do.”
Props are a way to tell a story quickly and clearly and spark the audience’s imagination and help advance a story, Jeremy said.
“I don’t think we could have had an underwater scene without Mathew’s helmet,” Jeremy said. “It illustrated instantly that we were staging an underwater scene.”
When considering props, Jeremy banks on simplicity and relies on the audience’s own vision to fill any gaps.
“I ask myself if I can get this done with a piece of fabric, two pieces of wood, and a little paint,” he says. “And if it can’t be simple, it can still be beautiful, magical and catch us off guard, surprise us, and take our breath away.”
Sometimes props are a part of the script, Jeremy said. And sometimes they are implied or interpreted. They spark imagination, draw the audience in, and make them aware of circumstances and context.
“For example, Hamlet carries a skull, one of the most famous props in the world, and the script calls for him to pick it up and talks to it,” he said. “Implied props might be candles and torches, not mentioned in the script, but when the actors talk about the darkness before suddenly being able to see one another, they’ve signaled that they’ve lit a torch.”
For Randy Burkhead, imagination is a gateway to props that surprise and delight audiences.
On a late summer evening, Randy is at the Gilbert Theatre attending rehearsals for the September production of “Heathers: The Musical,” a dark comedy about a clique of high school girls with murder on their minds.
She has put together a pretend bomb made up of authentic-looking red sticks of dynamite bound together, complete with fuses and a detonator, all of which she made using a 3D printer.
“You can see these dynamite sticks have some ink bleed on them, and that makes them look real,” Randy said. “I mean, I don’t really know what dynamite looks like, but this is what I imagine it would look like.”
She has also crafted firearms and blood packets for the show and says figuring out how to use them has been both challenging and fun.
“I had found a couple of ideas for the blood packets, like sandwich bags filled with fake blood,” she said. “I’ve also considered rigging up bubble wrap filled with blood so when the actor gets shot and puts his hand up to the wound, he pops the bags, and his hand comes away bloody.”
Randy has a doctorate in information technology and works in cybersecurity. She is from Fayetteville but spent some time exploring new places after earning her degree. She says she fell in love with theater in Fayetteville while performing in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” at the Gilbert Theater in her youth.
Randy moved to Illinois in 2020 and was volunteering with a horse therapy program for special needs kids when she discovered props and prop-making.
“I started showing up at the ranch as characters like Bo-Katan Kryze from ‘Star Wars’ and Belle from ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and bringing props I made,” she said. “At the end of the year, I made medals and prizes for the kids and items the program directors could auction off to raise money.”
When she moved back to Fayetteville in 2022, she returned to the Gilbert Theater and started making props using 3D printers. One memorable piece was a realistic-looking severed head for “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
“They were just going to use a Styrofoam head, and I knew I could just scan the actor’s face and make a model and print it,” she said. “So, we did that and were able to use a replica of his severed head with his face on it.”
She recently collaborated with Sweet Tea Shakespeare to make a bow for its September production of “The Odyssey,” which tells the story of the journey of Odysseus, a Greek mythological hero with enough strength to string his heavy bow and win a contest to win back his wife, Penelope.
“I made the bow out of PVC pipe and leather wrapped around it and did the bridging and everything,” she said. “I think it’s one of the coolest things I’ve made yet.”
But even the cleverest props can fall flat if they don’t work or if the actors don’t use them correctly. So Randy had to show the actor playing Odysseus how to string the bow she made so it would curve enough to build the pressure and tension it needed to fire an arrow.
And in “Cinderella,” a malfunctioning ball gown might have ruined the whole show.
“Nothing would be worse than having a transformational costume that would not transform,” David said.
During every fitting, the actress playing Cinderella transformed the two gowns over and over to monitor how well they worked. One day, she and David spent almost an hour setting and resetting the dresses and releasing them while looking for problems and ways to make them open perfectly.
“It took many attempts to really get them working consistently,” David said.
Cinderella became such a hit, its run was extended for a few days.
“It was so much fun,” David said. “I get a sense of pride every time something I work really hard on gets a few cheers and laughs.”
Randy gets her joy from simply finishing the props she makes.
“You put in a lot of work and effort to have something you hope people appreciate,” she said. “Whether it’s in theater or a display piece, or something you wear just to make kids happy.”
When props are done well, they blend into the scenery, simply adding to the storyline without stealing the show.
Randy compares them to her cybersecurity practice.
“When I’m doing my job right, nobody knows it, but when something goes wrong, everybody knows,” she said.
In a production like “Heathers: The Musical,” for instance, the props don’t make the show, but they can certainly break it.
“If an actor comes out with a piece of paper labeled ‘bomb,’ people are not going to suspend their disbelief for that,” Randy said, “but if a prop maker is doing their job right, their work is almost unnoticeable, and supports what’s happening on stage and makes the show work.”
Read CityView Magazine’s “Arts & Culture” October 2024 e-edition here.