Directing Capstone Costumes | Fall 2024

Production: Ride the Cyclone by Brooke Maxwell & Jacob Richmond

Practices: Measuring | Patterning | Hand Sewing | Garment Alterations | Quick Change Rigging

Style/Era: ~2009

The Loyola theatre major capstone project is a semester long directing course where majors are to select a show of their choice to create a directors production notebook as if they were going to do a production of the show. The course culminates to a presentation of a 10-minute scene to showcase a part of the work resulting of the course to an audience. I chose to do the musical Ride the Cyclone by Brooke Maxwell & Jacob Richmond for my capstone project, and in addition I decided to challenge myself to design and costume my production in order to present and  engage with my costume design and technology skills for my theatre major capstone.

My goal was to design costumes that would both serve the piece and be achievable within my time frame and semester schedule.  As a result, I opted to use pieces and garments that I already owned to drive my design so that builds were kept to a minimum and not too complex given I would need six characters who would be dressed in a matching uniform. Ultimately, I settled on a design that revolved around white and black formal uniforms as I had a good collection of white dress shirts at my disposal and counted on most of my cast owning a pair of black pants or a black skirt. In the end, I only needed to build the bowties, neckties, cummerbunds, and frankenstien together the Karnak robe. The bowties and neckties were made from quick trial and error draping; the cummerbunds were made from a pattern borrowed from our Department of Fine and Performing Arts Costume Shop draper, Robert Kuhn; the Karnak costume was made with a Halloween vampire cape, old suit jacket sleeves, and an old table runner.

Points in which I was challenged:

• Figuring out how to make the ties

  • For the bowties I decided to simply fake them by folding and stitching the bowtie into place, for the neckties I settled on having the two sides meet with a snap.

• The Karnak outfit required a bit of creative thinking to both present itself as a costume and be easily to get out of.

  • Relying on perspective and some snaps, I was able to successfully make the Karnak costume work for the opening of the scene and the quick change.