My favorite costume malfunctions

Live theater! Impressive, exciting, there’s only one chance, everything happens in the moment! Which also means… a lot can go wrong in that moment. In my short four-year career I have been privy to a lot of fun mishaps on stage that needed some improvisation to fix. Today, I’ll be sharing my favorite costume malfunctions and how we were able to fix them.

Mamma Mia

There are two notable costume malfunctions that happened to me in my time in Mamma Mia, both when I was on as Sophie. In my main track as Ali there wasn’t a lot that could go wrong, other than sometimes my heel would get stuck in my ‘Voulez-Vous’ skirt whilst dancing. Though that was annoying, there were never any severe consequences. These next stories however had me going through a whirlwind of feelings, most notably panic, anxiety and laughter.

Magic trick for a ripped skirt

Mamma Mia is known for being a “cheap” show in the musical theater community. The set is easily built and not that complicated to manage, and some of the costumes have been around since the show premiered in Hamburg in 2002. It is not a rare thing for a show to recycle costumes, it is actually very common. It is an eco-friendly and cost-friendly way to keep the look of the show as homogenous as possible. This does mean, however, that the older the costumes get, the more easily they break. This was the case with my Sophie “opening skirt” as we called it. 

The role of Sophie spends about the first twenty-five minutes of the show in this outfit, and during this time she never leaves the stage. Imagine my panic when the skirt ripped almost top to bottom during the very first scene. During the choreography of the song ‘Honey, Honey’, the skirt got caught under one of my colleagues as I tried to stand up, resulting in a giant rip from about my bum to just above my knee. I was not due to leave the stage for another good fifteen minutes, so my colleagues worked together to fix this problem as smoothly as we could. Backstage, the dresser team was alerted and they quickly provided the skirt of another Sophie for me to wear. After the song ‘Honey Honey’, the ensemble would enter the stage and hide behind the houses on set for their choreography in the song ‘Money Money’. During the scene before, the characters of Sky, Pepper and Eddie are introduced. It was my colleague who played Eddie at the time who approached me and whispered in my ear “There’s someone standing behind the house with a new skirt go, go now, we’ll cover you” and so I did. I sneakily made my way behind the set where someone from the ensemble was waiting with a new skirt which she quickly pulled over my head and sent me back on stage just in time for me to be where I had to be to meet Sky. As the scene at the front of the stage was playing out I asked him if I was covered to which I received a thumbs up. The show continued and my heartbeat didn’t slow down for quite some time after.

Striptease during Lay All Your Love On Me

Sophie does not leave the stage from the beginning of the scene before ‘Lay All Your Love’ until the curtain drops at the end of the first act. She does, however, have a costume change on stage while the houses of the set revolve and turn into their next position. How does all of that work–and, more importantly for this post–what went wrong? 

You change into your jazzy jeans and green crochet top for the bachelorette party (Super Trouper until Voulez Vous, the end of the first act) and over that you wear a white wraparound top and some baggy blue pants with elastics at the bottom to keep the heavy bedazzled jeans from poking out underneath. The last bars of the playoff of ‘Dancing Queen’ blast through the monitors, my cue to go onstage is almost there when I notice some of the glitter of my jeans sneaking out at the bottom of my baggy blue pants. Naturally, I bend over to hide it again when I suddenly hear a soft “pop”. I didn’t think much of it, until I touched the back of my pants. The zipper had broken. Uh oh. The part of the zipper that you pull to open and close got stuck up top, but the teeth or chain of the zipper had split open. This was a problem, because I had to fix this myself on stage during the aforementioned quick change on turning set pieces, and before all of that, I had to perform a scene and a song. I entered problem-solving mode in my head. I decided to stay close to the set to hide the gaping hole in my backside and figured out a way to dispose of the blue pants prematurely. ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’ is an uptempo love song between the characters of Sophie and Sky, who are on the eve of their wedding, and it could be interpreted as being a little frisky. What I decided to do is the following: in the choreography, Sky is supposed to pick up Sophie and twirl her around. I (for some reason) thought this was the perfect moment to get rid of my pants. Right before I was twirled, I pulled and broke the top part of my zipper completely, leaving the pants open. As I was lowered back to the ground, the pants obviously started to sag (the look of confusion on my colleague’s face was priceless). As I was singing, I stepped out of the pants, did a little dance with them and threw them in the wing (which was unsuccessful and one of the members of the ensemble apparently grabbed it with their toes to pull it off stage completely which I didn’t see because I had my back to it) before continuing choreography. It was the easiest quick change in my time in the show, but I do wonder what the audience’s thoughts were when Sophie suddenly started to undress and ruined the reveal of the ’Voulez-Vous’ outfit.

Tarzan

The ape costumes in Tarzan are not many nor incredibly complicated, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a rip or a tear. I haven’t had any costume malfunctions in this show other than the occasional slip on my pants that almost resulted in the splits, but there is one story that I particularly enjoy and have to say I’m proud of that I am the only person in the Stuttgart production who it has not happened to.

The Waiting For This Moment skirt

Ah, Waiting For This Moment. So much is happening in this beast of a number. There’s four people flying on stage, one person flying in the audience, four beautiful dancers, a giant plant, Tarzan flying around and… Jane’s outfit. My goodness is this one a thorn in anyone’s eye. It is beautifully crafted, don’t get me wrong, I felt very posh wearing it, but really Jane? You’re going on a jungle expedition dressed like that? Sure, girl.
At the end of the song, the big poofy skirt is removed by one of the boys in the ensemble. The skirt is closed with a few strong buttons for easy opening, but that comes with a problem: buttons can pop open when they are not supposed to. Jane does a lot of walking, frollicking, running and spinning during this song, including a walk up the tall steps when she enters the stage via the audience. Let’s just say, it’s happened more than once that the skirt popped open and Jane was left standing in her bloomers a little too early.

Frozen

I have only been in the company for about half a year, and there have not been lots of malfunctions (yet?), but I have broken and ripped my fair share of costumes already. I think I hold the record for the Anna who has caused the most distress to my costumes. What can I say, I like to give a hundred per cent! 

The Dress Overpull

My favorite malfunction however happened not too long ago. The song ‘First Time in Forever’ is a beast. It is adult Anna’s true introduction and (in my opinion) the hardest song in the show for this character. There’s a lot of moving set pieces and choreography, and part of that choreography is what we call the ‘dress overpull’. The two handmaidens will take Anna’s coronation dress and pull it over her head to dress her whilst Anna is singing. It is something that is practised meticulously to get just right, but, as with everything in live theater, sometimes things don’t go as planned. The ballgown is made of multiple layers that need to be separated correctly by the handmaidens in a short amount of time to successfully pull the dress over Anna’s head. Sometimes it happens that Anna gets stuck between the layers of the dress, what happened to me however is something else. You know these annoying strings on some of your sweaters or tops to hang them on a clothes hanger to take the weight off the shoulders of the shirt so it stays nice looking? Those annoying things? The Anna coronation dress has those to help upkeep the quality of the dress because it’s so heavy. One of these little loops got stuck on one of the hooks at the back of the dress to close it, which resulted in three on-stage tries to get me in the dress because it took a second to figure out what exactly was the problem in the short amount of time we had to get it done in the music. Speaking of music: while we were trying to figure this out, I had to keep singing. I was fully prepared to continue the song in only my undergarments, but in the nick of time we were able to get me dressed and we could continue as usual, with some added heart palpitations and a feeling of euphoria afterwards because we got it done.  

Olaf’s Nose

The other Frozen malfunction I want to mention is one I caused. Not to myself, but to my colleague playing Olaf in this particular show. Anna is supposed to be pulled out of the way by Kristoff before Olaf starts singing his song ‘In Summer’. I don’t really know what happened, but as I was pulled away, Olaf was a little closer to me than I anticipated and in swinging my arm I accidentally smacked off his carrot nose. After a split second of panic I scrambled to get the nose and plop it back on Olaf’s face (while my colleague playing Olaf abandoned the script and just screamed in character) just in time for him to start singing. Me? I spent the song trying to keep my composure and not burst out in a laughing fit.

However stressful some of these situations might have been in the moment, it does add to the fun and spontaneity of live theater. And since nobody got hurt (maybe some egos did, but I’m talking about the physical here) we can usually look back on these moments with a smile. 

Have you ever seen something go wrong on stage? If you want to leave a comment or suggestion, feel free to e-mail it to calltimetheblog@gmail.com. Until next time! 

Liefs,
Lyssa 💕