When the curtain rises at the Stratford Festival, the spotlights shine down on some of the best stage actors in the country. But they also illuminate the work of behind-the-scenes artisans whose skills are also essential to the festival’s success.
These craftspeople – including costumers, carpenters and wig makers – are fine-tuning costumes and set pieces until opening night – and, in many cases, well beyond.
The Globe spoke with six of the festival’s talented makers about their preparations for the 2025 season.
Mark Smith, construction carpenter
Mark Smith and his crew of carpenters build the festival’s plays from ground – or, more accurately, the stage – up. Their work typically includes crafting furniture and sets, but it can also mean undertaking stage modifications. This year, for example, a temporary gutter infill – a type of stage extension – that can be easily collapsed and rolled away will bring the Festival Theatre’s stage closer to the audience for Annie.
Right now, Smith is working on some of the many picture frames that will cover the stage for Sense and Sensibility. Some of them have been specially built for the presentation; others have been repurposed from other productions or store-bought and altered. Stratford’s carpenters will generally work on shows in order of opening date. Sense and Sensibility begins in late May, so its set pieces are not as far along as some of the striking designs for the coming production of Macbeth directed by Robert Lepage. “It’s rare to have such a Shakespeare set,” Smith says. “But, you know, it’s Robert Lepage. It’s a spectacle.”
Before they begin work on any new set pieces, Stratford’s designers will scour the festival’s enormous warehouses to see whether any props can be repurposed or modified, but much of what appears onstage is custom-made. Smith, who is in his 26th season with the festival, has said one of the biggest challenges in applying his traditional carpentry skills to the stage is learning “how to make things that are fake look real.”
Another is ensuring everything is more or less temporary: Set pieces need to be easily disassembled, removed and stored between shows. “You don’t want to be grabbing a screw gun every time you need to do a show changeover,” he says.
The gutter infill for Annie is a good example of Stratford’s sets being built for impermanence. Designed by Smith, it can be disassembled in 90 minutes. “It’s quite magical,” he says. “It’s choreography.”
Tracy Frayne, head of wigs and makeup, Festival Theatre
If the clothes make the man, at Stratford the wig makes the character. From the telltale red curls of Annie to the elegantly coiffed styles of Sense and Sensibility, the hairpieces worn by the festival’s players are key to their costumes – and require a deft hand, like department head Tracy Frayne’s, for styling, setting and meticulous upkeep.
Almost all of Stratford’s wigs are made from human hair; each is tailored to the head of the person who will be wearing it. Some of the wigs, such as ones that are prepurchased synthetic wigs, have stretchy backs, while others made from human hair are built from scratch using a custom foundation with no stretch. In both cases, actors are fitted with a lace front that conforms to the shape of their head and holds the wig in place seamlessly and invisibly. If a wig is reused by a different actor, it will be fitted with a new lace front. Sometimes, several layers of lace are visible on the underside of a wig that has been featured in numerous plays.
Wigs that are made with real hair require resetting and restyling after each performance. The tightly coiled wig that will be worn by Harper Rae Asch, who plays Annie, is among the few made of synthetic hair, so that Frayne won’t have to reset the tidy curls as rigorously after each show. The dishevelled wig, however, which is worn before Annie meets Daddy Warbucks, is real hair.
Frayne, who has been with Stratford for 18 seasons, learned on the job after her aunt, who worked in the wigs department, suggested she apply for an internship. “I’ve always liked working with my hands,” she says, adding that, yes, she can cut real hair.
Sylvia Minarcin, paint and dye craftsperson
Much of Stratford’s behind-the-scenes action focuses on construction, but destruction is just as important a part of the magic, whether it’s helping an actor look as though they’ve been riding back roads on a motorcycle or living in an orphanage. The dyeing, painting and, yes, wrecking of fabrics is often key to elevating a character’s wardrobe from mere garments to a part of their identity.
This year’s Macbeth is set during the North American biker wars of the 1990s, so Sylvia Minarcin has painted leather vests to make them look old and dusty. She’ll also apply pieces of fabric so it appears to be peeling. “You need things to last the run of the show,” Minarcin says of why costumes are not typically actually damaged. “We could turn this back into a black leather jacket.”
Minarcin is also part of the team responsible for finding the right dyes (or, as the case often is, combinations of) to transform textiles into the visions dreamed up by Stratford’s set and costume designers. Each year, the team catalogues the dye formulas and combinations for the season in several binders.
Although Stratford generally prioritizes reuse for its costumes, in some cases, a little wear and tear is just the ticket. In As You Like It, a number of characters have been living in the forest, so their clothing required, as Minarcin terms it, a “heavy breakdown.” Her favourite tools for destroying a piece include Dremel tools, wire brushes – and a miniature cheese grater.
Connie Puetz, boots and shoes craftsperson
From the moment they hit the stage, an actor’s shoes are doing heavy lifting, whether that’s complementing a costume or maintaining their look and structure through multiple dance numbers. Connie Puetz and her team make sure the theatre’s company is always putting the best foot forward.
Shoes at Stratford are either bought (and modified) or built from scratch. For Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Puetz stripped dance shoes of their original colour and then mixed and applied custom paints to match the show’s costumes. For Annie, many of the boots worn by the orphans were custom-made: “They have to be able to do all these acrobatics, but we didn’t want them to look like an ankle boot you can buy,” Puetz says.
At Stratford (as in life), shoes often say something about a character. For Jolene, an oil heiress in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Puetz will be affixing gold tips to the toes of her cowboy boots – the only pair in the show with such bling.
Kaz Maxine, milliner
A hat can be an iconic piece of wardrobe, and at Stratford, custom millinery is the name of the game. Period-appropriate hats and lavish finishing touches – such as elegant feathers, jewels or satin ribbons – can often denote a “good” character from one whose intentions are less than pure.
Hats constructed for dramas are different from hats built for musical theatre, Kaz Maxine explains: “Musicals are fast and dirty.” Many hats must be able to maintain their structure through quick changes, when they’re hastily thrown into a basket. For Sense and Sensibility, Maxine is reinforcing hats built for previous dramatic productions so they can withstand what she calls “musical action,” since the play is not actually a musical.
Maxine, who has been working with Stratford since the early 1980s, feels at home in the Festival Theatre’s workrooms. Unlike seamstresses, who can easily sew for leisure on home machines, most milliners don’t have the required equipment and facilities in their private dwellings – which means it’s not uncommon to find Maxine working on her own projects behind the scenes.
Melanie Farrar-Jackson, cutter
Stratford’s sewing and tailoring operations are a sight to behold: Dozens of seamstresses and tailors construct the season’s costumes from the first snip to the last stitch in three dedicated rooms. The work begins with cutters, such as Melanie Farrar-Jackson, who interpret the costume designers’ sketches into sewing patterns.
After Farrar-Jackson sees a costume sketch – like this one, for Annie‘s Boylan sisters – and meets with the designer to discuss fabric and colour, she gets to work creating a pattern. This is done one of two ways: by taking measurements of the actor and then drawing the pattern accordingly, or draping fabric onto a stand that’s similar in size to the actor being costumed, then marking the cuts.
Fittings take about an hour. At every stage, the designer is able to check in with questions, tweaks and adjustments.
It’s not just conventional clothing that Farrar-Jackson makes: Years ago, she had to design a T. Rex costume for the festival. She bought a plastic dinosaur to get a sense of how it might be constructed, drew up measurements for a Ken doll and then scaled them up for a human actor.
Some costumes require more problem-solving than others, such as the maid outfits for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. The bullet bras were purchased, but they didn’t have adequate stretch for the show’s musical numbers. Farrar-Jackson and her team took the backs off the bras, filled out the cups and then attached what remained to a spandex corset. Farrar-Jackson says she thinks of herself as a “fabric engineer,” combining the artistry of costuming with the strict down-to-the-millimetre mathematics of custom pattern-cutting.
