Step behind the sewing machines with Sarah McCarroll, costume shop supervisor for the Utah Shakespeare Festival and professor of theater history. Explore the intricate balance between artisan craftsmanship, historic body silhouettes, and the high-stakes logistics of managing a 65-person costume shop during a bustling festival season.
Key Takeaway 1: The structural mechanics of running a 65-person costume shop during peak build, balancing artisan craftsmanship with the daily logistics of wardrobe supervision.
Key Takeaway 2: How historical clothing and silhouettes—from Victorian leg-of-mutton sleeves to corsets—function as social commentary and shape physical movement on stage.
Key Takeaway 3: The distinction between costume design and costume technology, and the career advice that "there is no schedule but your schedule" when building a healthy life in the arts.
Connect with SUU & The Festival:
You are listening to the APEX Hour, hosted by Ryan Paul on KSUU Thunder 91.1. This show allows
more personal time with our guests, allowing them to give us their stories and opinions. We will also
give you new music to listen to, hoping you enjoy some new sounds and genres. Welcome to this
episode of the APEX Hour.
Welcome to the APEX Radio Hour Utah Shakespeare Festival edition. I'm producer Lauren Bird, and
I'm here today with Director of APEX and Professor of History Ryan Paul and our special guest Sarah
McCarroll. I'll turn it over to you, Ryan.
Thank you, Lauren. We are so excited to have Sarah McCarroll here in the studio. I have been a fan of
yours for a long time, and we've we've kind of tangentially spoken over the years, but I've never
really had a chance to sat down and and talk with you and hear your story and your amazing journey
at the festival. She is the costume shop supervisor here at USF, and we will talk all about what that
means. You know, maybe we should do this first. First of all, thank you for being here, Sarah.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to do this.
And before we dive into your story, why don't you very briefly, take as much time as you want, say,
tell us what the costume shop supervisor does.
So I like to say that I am the everyday fire extinguisher in the costume shop. The way I understand
my role is that Jeff Lieder, who is the costume shop director, the director of costumes at the festival,
and his associate director Lori Hartenhoff, really need their mental bandwidth and the time in their
day free to think about big picture things. By the time we are in full construction mode for any given
season, Jeff is already involved in season planning for the next year. He and Lori are also the people
who solve the big picture problems. For example, eggs in Something Rotten. How do we make them?
What are they made of? We got to prototype them, we got to put them on bodies. And so my job is to
try and keep the sort of daily smaller things off of their plates so that they have the room to do that.
So thinking about things like, do we need a particular kind of zipper that we don't normally have in
stock that we need to order for a specialty garment? Is there a particular show team that is feeling a
little bit of pressure? And if we moved some labor around for the day, maybe they can come down off
that ledge and feel like they're in good shape for whatever it was they were working towards. So
that's the thing I do during the build, and then once the shows begin, moving into dress rehearsals, I
transition into being the wardrobe supervisor for the Engelstad.
So, well, thank you. I want I want to get into that, but two things. So essentially, you are like the NCO.
You're like the the sergeant in the platoon, right? There's, they're like the lieutenants, and you're
really the one that knows how to get things done.
Oh, I would never put it that way. All of those people know how to get everything done. I just happen
to be the person who's getting it done on that day.
There you go.
And the reason I know how to get it done is because of the mentorship I've received from those
people.
Yeah, it's not an, it's not an, it's not a derogatory slur on them. I mean, it's just, there's big picture
and and nuts and bolts.
Yeah, and but I really want to sort of emphasize that they're not people who sit at desks all day, right?
These are, everybody in that shop is hands on all the time. It's just that where the focus of our hands
is transitions. There's really not space or time for anyone to simply be administrative.
Yeah, I do remember Jeff Lieder leaving, I remember leaving a dress rehearsal late at night and in the
artist lounge, Jeff and a few other people were still sewing eggs.
The eggs were an undertaking, it is true.
And I do think that I agree. In the years that I've known Jeff Lieder, he is he is not above getting his
hands dirty. He is involved in every aspect of that process.
And in fact, loves it, and is one of the best technicians I've ever had the privilege of being mentored
by. What Jeff knows in his little finger is more than I will ever know on the best day of my technical
costume life.
Secondly, I have found, someone told me this that zippers are very hard to replace.
It depends on the garment. It depends on the circumstance. We'd really love it if they didn't break
mid-show. That's the goal. Put them in strong enough that they're gonna, if we have to repair or
replace, we have time to do it.
Because this becomes a shock to you. But I'm not a clothes guy. I mean, I mean that I wear clothes,
but I don't shop for clothes. That's not true. I do shop for shirts, but pants I don't shop that often, and I
have pants that I've had for, I don't know, years. And the problem is the zipper, you know, gets stuck
or loses its teeth. And someone told me in the costume shop that it would be cheap, it would just be
better to buy a new pair of pants than try to replace the whole zipper.
I think that's true for commercially made garments, particularly if you, as the consumer, are going to
have to pay someone to do that labor. By the time you figure 20 bucks an hour, and that's probably
at least a couple of hours? Yeah, you can go buy yourself a pair of decent pants. For costumes,
obviously, we sometimes don't have that option, right? We're not going out to buy. We just had a
zipper repair on one of Gertrude's costumes in Hamlet, and we're not going out to buy a new
medieval robe. Target doesn't have that on the shelves.
So what you're saying is, is I should say that part of my work at the Utah Shakespeare Festival is that
my pants are a costume, and therefore I need the zipper repaired because I can't function effectively
in my role.
You can try that. We'll see how it goes.
I would be happy. Here's the thing. I would be, I love these pants so much. I'd be happy to pay, I'd
pay you 20 bucks an hour, Lauren. Pay 25. Fix that, to. I mean, anyway. Enough about my my zippers.
So let's talk about you. What I always kind of like to start out with, kind of a how we get to now
question. So can you tell us a little about where you're from and why you decided to do what you do?
Sure. I am sort of from multiple places. I was born in Columbia, Missouri, which is a big university
town. It's where Mizzou is, and grew up back and forth between my father in Missouri and my mother
in North Carolina and North Georgia. My mother was a professor of theater and a director, and so I
grew up falling asleep in the aisles of theaters when my mom was in technical rehearsals. And for
years, I swore I would never go into theater. I wanted to grow up to be a constitutional law professor
and sit on the Supreme Court. That's a goal that I have let go. But I started college and realized
somewhere very quickly that people would pay me to spend their money on fabric, and I thought that
was pretty cool. And I knew I never wanted to be involved in the business of being an actor. Being on
stage, I enjoyed. I don't know that I'm that good at it, but I loved it. But that's not enough to make a
career as an actor. You have to be willing to do the self tapes, you have to always be looking for the
next three jobs down the road. And I knew pretty young that that was not something I wanted as part
of my life, so I started working in the costume shop. And like a lot of young people, I had been taught
some sewing by my mother and grandmother, so I had some skills. And when I graduated college, I
started working in a big costume rental house in Atlanta, which taught me a lot of really bad habits
that I have had to unlearn over the years, but it also made me pretty fast at things, which is an asset
and a skill set in some circumstances. And eventually, I started looking at going to graduate school. I
did an MFA in costume design at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and then did what you're
supposed to do during that degree. I had started working out here, I did my first summer out here in
2003, and so I started working in regional theater in costume shops because that's what you're
supposed to do. And I very quickly discovered that I had prepared myself for a career that wasn't the
career I wanted. I didn't really want to spend eight hours a day at a sewing machine, and I was in
conversation, I think this must have been the summer of Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra. Don't
quote me on that. I certainly couldn't tell you the year, but I was in conversation with Michael
Connelly and Leslie Brott, longtime festival performers, both of whom are also educators, and Michael
in particular, who was playing Polonius in that Hamlet, said to me one day, "Aren't you a little bored?
You're like you're good at working wardrobe and you're a good dresser, but that's not doing anything
for your brain. Have you thought about going back for a PhD?" And I had sort of thought about it. And
Michael nudged me, and he had gotten his doctorate at Indiana University, and he put the program at
IU in front of me. And so I ended up, for any number of reasons, not the least of which was the
support of those two wonderful human beings, going back and getting my doctorate in theater
history, and now I teach. I hit the academic jackpot. I walked out of a PhD program into a tenure track
professor professorship at Georgia Southern University, which is in Statesboro, Georgia, and I've been
there for 15 years. And I have very gracious and generous colleagues and a supportive provost who
see my continued work at the festival as a real benefit to the institution. It makes pipelines for
student employment and career growth. It certainly continues to grow me as a costume technologist.
So yeah, that's I think the short version of how I ended up where I am.
Didn't Howard Jensen teach at Indiana?
He did. Howard retired the year before I started. We never overlapped, except that I was the
wardrobe crew chief on the Doctor Faustus that he directed here at the festival.
So Howard Jensen, for those who don't know, was our very first Hamlet back in 1962. He was
involved, and in fact, I think because of the festival chose a career in theater and theater education.
He acted and directed for us for many many years and went on to be to pretty acclaimed
professorship in Indiana.
That's right. Yeah.
So, so the world is smaller,
There are only six people in this business.
And we think the, and they're all six degrees connected to each other and all of us. So, what did, did
you have a love of? I mean, this love of sewing and fabric. Is it as a Southern woman? Is it because
that's what happens? How does that come about?
I think it came from watching the things that came out of people's hands, seeing the creations that
came from a flat bolt of fabric that then morphed into this incredible something, and sometimes that
something is is gorgeousness, right? Sometimes it's it's a wonderful fluffy dress, and I love a good
fluffy dress. But sometimes wonderfulness and gorgeousness is actually about things that are ripped
to shreds, and the layers of detail and visual dimension that come from that. And I just thought those
things were the coolest things in the world. And costume shops can also be these wonderful spaces of
community, right? Like there's work to get done. We're all focused, but these also become your
friends and your networks and your support system. And I really appreciated that kind of bonding in a
space.
What, what did your dad do?
My father was a professor of English. He, he loved teaching freshman English composition. When I
was about 13, my father sat me down and taught me how to write a five-paragraph essay and said, "If
you can do this really well, you can write anything." And up to a dissertation, and I am two weeks
away from submitting my first book manuscript. I have not found him to be wrong about that.
Everything else is just a bigger essay.
I always tell my students that it's much harder to write short than it is to write long.
Absolutely, take my semicolons away, see what happens. I'll be paralyzed.
Yep, we have. I have presentations, and there's you know there's topics that that are always, oh I can
find lots of sources on this, and there's always ones that like it's going to be a little harder, but it's like
yeah. If you choose the big source one, you're going to have a lot more work than if you choose the
small source one.
That's right. Figuring out what to pare down and and really forcing yourself to figure out what the core
of what you want to say or think about is.
Yeah. What was your dissertation on?
My dissertation was on the way costumes create a sort of social body on the late Victorian stage. In a
lot of plays by J. M. Barrie or Oscar Wilde or, see and now I've forgotten everyone who ever wrote in
the late 19th century. Shaw Pinero, the, particularly the women's gowns are being constructed and
supplied by the same couture houses that are being sourced for just, fashionable West End clothing,
so there's there's this sort of circular loop that happens about messages about how bodies look and
behave that's being sent from the stage, and I'm fascinated by the way clothing suggests carriage
and movement and deportment to our bodies in ways that I think really structure our thoughts
without us noticing it.
Can you give me an example?
Sure. If we think about a woman on the late Victorian stage who is almost by definition, particularly in
one of these society plays, wearing a skirt that hits the ground, that suggests to you certain things
about what is possible in terms of how your body moves through space. You do not run, you do not
jump, you do not climb, and that's a social construct as well as a physical suggestion. And men's suits
do the same thing, right? If you put on a suit coat today, Ryan, your posture would change, the way
you use your arms would change because the suit coat would constrain your shoulders. So we're all
sort of being pressured by these things, and on the stage, it becomes a social message, right? That,
that from the audience, you're seeing bodies that are being put in this privileged space of the
proscenium frame, and so it's very easy to translate those bodies as the way we ought to behave.
Right, right. So it would be, and correct if I'm wrong, but in the Victorian era, the longer skirt would
essentially mean I don't walk through the streets, so, I'm a certain social class because my skirts, you
know, I don't walk through the muck and the mire like you would. So someone who is of less
economic status would have a little higher skirt so it wouldn't be as dirty?
Yeah, and that's exactly right. If you look at there are all these wonderful photographs that were
taken in London's East End in the 1880s, 1890s that really show us tenement life, right, slum life, and
none of those skirts really go below the ankles. You don't go much higher than that because then
you're making a completely different statement. But very famously, the ability to wear a white
petticoat in the late 19th century, when cities are caked in coal dust because of industrial production,
says something about your social standing because it implies that someone can wash that and get it
clean for you and get the the dust and dirt of the sidewalk off of it, even if it's just going from your
front door to your carriage.
So when do we stop? Well, not we, because I've never worn one. But when do we stop wearing
corsets?
Never. Corsets still exist. Any number of my young students have corsets they've bought on Amazon.
We see corset tops on prom dresses and wedding dresses all the time. But if we're talking about the
kind of corset that suggests a certain bodily propriety and silhouette. World War One blows a lot of
that out of the water because the role of women in society changes so much, and certainly the jazz
generation wants none of it in the 1920's.
So when when do we start thinking about? I mean, I'm interested in this idea of stereotypical Victorian
life. Like, so, when you, when you do a play like The Importance of Being Earnest, which we did last
season, I mean, we we as an audience expect people to be dressed a certain way. Is it because that's
our vision of Victorian era, or was that really the way people in Oscar Wilde's plays would have been
dressed?
So the answer is yes, and The Importance of Being Earnest is not meant, I think, to be understood as
true realism. It's a realistic world, but Wilde is essentially offering us a parody of Victorian upper
classes. So if you saw the Ernest last summer, one of the design decisions I loved that that team
came to was that the leg of mutton sleeves that are very much real in 1895, that is the silhouette that
you're wearing if you're fashionable, were pushed to the nth degree. Cecily's sleeves, I think we could
have used as a beach volleyball. You know, one of those inflatables, you'd toss it up. So the silhouette
is historically based, but the volume is turned up, which we do all the time on stage for comic effect
or to make a sort of conceptual point about something.
So, in in this process of you thinking about these things, and and as a younger person when you're
actually making them, what's the the first thing that you made that you said, you know, I, I could I
could do this?
Oh my gosh, wow, okay. We are now rewinding the clock 30 35 years we'll see what my brain spits
out.
I am a historian.
I am too, but I usually jump over my own history. I,
Which by the way, is the most important history.
That's true, right? Attention must be paid. We, that we all have value just by our humanity.
Your story must and needs to be told.
Well, thank you. So, oh, I made a dress when I was an undergraduate at the University of Missouri. So
this would have been maybe my junior year of college. I made a dress for a production of The House
of Bernarda Alba that had some beautiful applied trim work on the skirt that sort of looped and
swirled, and I can remember finishing that dress and thinking, "Wow, I think I actually did something."
because it wasn't just sewing straight seams, you know, to put a skirt together. That to me didn't
really feel like an accomplishment. Which doesn't mean it's not. It just means that I was watching
people do more interesting things, and I felt like I had finally gotten to a place where someone was
giving me more interesting things to do.
We we talked with Bill Black, who was a longtime costume designer here. Was. I shouldn't say was,
but is a long time costume designer here at the festival, and he used a phrase we were talking about
the the TV show The Gilded Age,
Yeah.
And the, and the, the stunning the clothes there, and he said something that I didn't follow up with
because we were at the end of the podcast. But this idea of, he said, "they're great. Sometimes
they're a little costume-y."
That's right.
So my question is, will you define for me what what that? I mean, I hear that all the time. Like, "that's
a little costume-y." What does that mean?
I think it means, and I don't want to put words in Bill's mouth, but what I think it means is that our
eyes don't read it as real clothing that would have come out of that character's closet. So, for
example, in the Gilded Age, and forgive me, the character's name is not in my head. The but the, Mrs.
Russell. That's her name. The the lead female who's played by Carrie Coon. She at one point wears
this gorgeous ball gown that has these swirls of black on it, and it's a sort of mint greeny to my eye.
That's based on a real dress by Charles Frederick Worth, who was, we usually credit Worth with being
the first real couture designer. The original dress is black and white, not black and that that teal. And
that teal, I think, to me at least, feels like it's, it's tweaked itself out of feeling like a real part of the
world and into something presentational and designed. That I can see the hand of the designer in that
color choice, and I think that's what we mean when we say costume-y. Regardless of the conceptual
world of a play that you're living in, the costume has to feel, not just for the audience, but for the
actor who wears it, like a reasonable thing that would have come out of that character's closet on the
day. And that's one of the interesting things about costume design, right? Like, what do you wear to
talk your husband into usurping the crown of Scotland and killing the king? I don't know, but Lady
Macbeth has it in her closet. So, but it's got to feel real in the world, even a highly conceptualized
world, even a musical theater world where we we've taken reality off the page to begin with, there is
a reality for the characters in their lives.
I think some of the shirts that I've worn, Jeff Lieder's looked at, and I've seen him sigh and say, "So
costume-y." Now I'm going to say, "Well, Jeff, I Sarah says I got this out of my closet, so therefore,"
But we all wear costumes, right? I mean, there there's plenty of costume theory out there, a dress
theory that says costume is identity. That's not a stunning revelation, right? We choose clothes based
on the way we want to present ourselves on any given day, and we have different facets of our
identity, right? Like I'm always Sarah, but sometimes I'm Dr. McCarroll, who has a meeting with the
dean later today, and sometimes I'm Dr. McCarroll who needs to go sew in the costume shop all
afternoon, and sometimes I'm Sarah and I have to clean the house on Saturday afternoon, or I'm
Sarah but I'm going out for a dinner date with my partner, and all of those identities live realistically
and naturally in my closet. I just pick a different one for different occasions.
I'm not sure, I'm kind of speechless. I'm not sure what that says about me because I don't, I don't
know that. I think I wear the same thing with the dean as I wear, my, my mother, I will tell you is not a
fan of my, she thinks I should dress more professorial. I don't teach, like what you're, what I'm
wearing now,
Yeah.
Which I don't think is costume-y. It's celebrating the moon landing, and very, very retro.
For the record, friends, Ryan has on this great button-down collared bowling shirt with a wide blue
and white stripe and a NASA insignia. It's kind of fabulous.
Very much a replica of what the the original seven would have worn during that time period.
That's true. Yeah, it speaks to the '60s.
And Neil Armstrong is coming back from the moon on July 21st, which is the day we're recording this.
So,
Yeah, amazing.
So it's, it's, it's, it shouts out to my career.
I love it. Says you're authentic, right? And that you don't feel the need to shift identity. You just live
very comfortably in who you are under any circumstances.
Thank you. So, Mom, when you listen to this podcast, you heard it from not only the costume shop
supervisor, but a professor of clothes.
Well, and I think I think our expectations of appropriateness obviously change over time. I am
currently wearing a tank top that does not have sleeves on it. My grandmother would have been
appalled. My mother tells stories of wearing, you know, a skirt, heels, and hosiery to go to class at the
University of Florida in the '60s. I'm assuming it wasn't that much cooler, and I can't imagine.
Yeah, I mean, you see these photos, and I guess this kind of what you're talking about with with the
Victorian plays is, you see these photos of of travel in the 1930s and 50s on trains and planes where
people are wearing ties and women are wearing pearls and heels, and it's like we don't do that
anymore. I mean, we're in flip flops and, not me, but, but others are wearing that kind of stuff to
travel.
That generational difference exists. I do, and part of it's that I was raised by a mother who thinks
about these things, but like I was raised that you dress to travel, and my students think that you wear
the comfiest sweatsuit you have to travel, and those don't have to be value-based judgments, right?
They're generational. They're about what what shifting social mores allow us. And they're probably
ultimately a lot, they probably get more sleep on the plane than I do.
Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's interesting to me that that thought process, right, of of generational
expectations, and, and what we, we translate to what that looks like. Like my, my question would be,
is that really, and, and this is just more of a rhetorical question, but, was everybody in a suit and tie in
the 1950s on the planes? I mean, was that just the expected dress code, or I just I don't, of course,
traveling you see those images of air travel in the 1950s, and it's a lot different than it is. I mean, the
seats are bigger. They're, you're getting shrimp cocktail, and,
Well, and if you could afford to travel by air in the 1950s. That says something about socioeconomic
class, right?
Yeah.
So the answer is probably no. You know, the people who are hauling 14 pieces of luggage onto the
sleeper train, I am a big fan of the old Thin Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy, they're
traveling first class. The people who are sitting up all night in third class look different, but we don't,
we are not shown those representations as regularly.
Because we wouldn't buy tickets to see third. because that's our life.
Exactly.
Right? We want to see films of of lives that we don't already live.
Exactly.
Okay. Well, let's take our first break. This is fascinating conversation. Thank you for this. This is a
song by a group called the Indigo Girls, which are pretty important in, in many people's worlds, called
Galileo. Can you tell us why you chose this song?
So I started college at what was at the time a two-year school in the mountains of North Georgia,
Young Harris College. It's affiliated with a Methodist church, but a lot of my friends and I had
connections in Athens with the, Indigo Girls and REM are both Georgia bands. They played at the 40
Watt on a regular basis. This is back in the early 90s, so you could go and see these people perform
before they became Indigo Girls Barbie movie famous, right? They've had a real resurgence here
recently, and I, what, as I, you asked me about songs for this, and I was trying to think about how do I
organize this so I don't have 800 songs that I'm trying to pick from, and I thought about the sort of
people and places that have molded me into who I am and set me on my paths, and Galileo is one of
those songs I can remember cranking the windows down and turning the volume in the car up as far
as it would go and singing along to with my best girlfriends in college. These are the women who
have stayed with me over the years. They're still the people I keep in touch with. You know, they're,
as the kids would say, they're my ride or dies. So that's why I landed on this song.
Okay, this is Galileo by Indigo Girls.
That was Galileo by the Indigo Girls. You're listening to the APEX Radio Hour Utah Shakespeare
Festival Edition. I'll turn it back to you, Ryan.
Thank you, Lauren. We are back with Sarah McCarroll, she's the costume shop supervisor here at the
Utah Shakespeare Festival. We've been talking about all kinds of cool stuff about clothes, and you
know, we, we have described what you and I are wearing. We should, maybe you could describe what
Lauren's wearing in your professorial fashion.
Lauren looks like a college student today, so that's that's an authentic reflection of identity. Lauren is
wearing a sort of dark gray T-shirt that says "There's nothing as amazing as a musical, and I'm hoping
that that is connected to the work Lauren's doing down in St George this summer.
Sort of. I'm in a Broadway revue, but it's a Something Rotten shirt, so.
Amazing!
I was like, I gotta wear it.
In honor of the season. It's perfect.
Exactly.
Because it's a,
Musical.
Musical.
There you go. Scene. Buy a ticket. Buy a ticket for us to see.
Truly, though, it's a it's a marvelous romp.
It's so good.
Yeah, we're all put together. Our fit check is pretty solid. Pretty solid today. So you used a phrase
earlier that I'm interested in, and you called yourself a costume technician or technologist.
Yeah.
Which phrase did you use?
I think I said technologist.
I think that's a, kind of a cool Star Trekky type term, but, which by the way, is an interesting costume
idea, right? With the different, I mean, think about we talk about red shirts and blue shirts and yellow
shirts representing something.
I mean, this is the way we sort things for audiences, right? We give people cues through decisions
about things like color and line and shape on stage.
So, what what what is a, how would you define a costume technologist?
As a maker, rather than I'm going to say a thinker, and then I'm going to qualify all of this so people
don't get mad at me. So in the costume shop world, we have designers, people whose job it is to have
the aesthetic ideas, right? The people who are in communication with the director, who are
collaborating with the other design partners to create the visual world and aural, we should include
sound design here that you see on stage. So they're thinking of the ideas. They give us the
renderings, those wonderful colored sketches. If you've ever been in the Utah Shakespeare Festival
costume shop, that are hung all around the walls of the building. But then once the the season
begins. You know, first company meeting is first Monday of May, as a general rule. There are a whole
lot of other people who are tasked with realizing those designs, and we think about those people as
being technicians or technologists. And I, although I do design as part of my my work at school, I do
not necessarily think of myself as a designer. I think of myself as an administrator and a technologist.
So these are the people who are evolving the patterns, who are cutting out the fabric, the stitchers
who, bless them, sit at a sewing machine for eight hours a day sewing away at things, or the people
in the crafts department who are making new belts or hats for people, the, the folks in hair and
makeup who are ventilating wigs, they're tying hair onto lace so that we can plunk wigs on people's
heads. All of those people, at least to me, are artisans, but their focus is costume technology rather
than costume design.
So when you think about that idea of of an artisan or a tradesperson versus a just a worker.
Yeah.
How do you distinguish those?
I think an artisan is someone who has a deliberate attention to detail and craft. I, I think workers are
valuable and valued, and certainly in our contemporary society, there are jobs that require workers,
right? We've, we've automated so much that if you're working the assembly line in Detroit, you're
probably doing something that's fairly repetitive and that is work-based, and I'm stepping very
carefully here because I don't want to denigrate that kind of labor. That's real work and often
backbreaking and very hard work. When you think about someone who is an artisan, to my mind, that
calls to mind someone who is dedicated to a growing skill set around the production of an artifact of
some kind that requires nuance, right? That requires active decision making in the moment about
techniques and what the best one is, and that takes practice to get good at.
So I, I've been reading. You've used the term maker a little, some, a lot during this our time, and I'm
interested. I've been reading this book series, and then they, they talk about making in a different
way. It's like historical fiction, but but one of the phrases they keep talking about is that a maker is
someone who, the thing they make, that they become a part of the thing they make.
That's true.
Is that is that a true statement in real life?
In real life, and it's true in some very concrete ways, and it's also true in some more abstract ways.
Concretely, I've never stitched a costume that I haven't left blood in somewhere, and I know in a post-
COVID world that's probably alarming to hear. But we, we, we, you know, you prick your finger on a
needle on a regular basis in the shop. Band-aids are an important supply, but also you can see the
different hands and artistic eyes of different craftspeople in things, in the same way that we can tell
the difference between, oh, a Frank Lloyd Wright architectural design or an I. M. Pei design. Those two
architects have different visual aesthetics. You can see the difference in the hands and eyes of
different drapers who make garments for us, who pattern garments. And it doesn't mean that one's
better or worse. It just means, excuse me, that they, they interpret renderings in a slightly different
way. They maybe make a different choice about how to get to the end goal, so yeah, you absolutely
leave your mark on the things you craft.
It's interesting that I, it seems to me, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that the costume shop is
one of those places here at the festival that doesn't have a lot of turnover in the sense that it seems a
lot of the people come back year after year after year, that Jeff brings back or hires back. It's not like
you have a lot of new, I'm sure there are new people every year, but but it seems that there's a lot of
wisdom and festival knowledge that comes back year after year.
I think that's absolutely right, and I think it's one of the major benefits to the festival of this shop is
that it has such a solid base, and it's also the, it's indicative of the fact that it's a good place to work,
right? Jeff is exceptionally skilled at building teams with good chemistry, and at protecting the people
he works for. In general, although this, this summer created some challenges for us, we don't work 80
hours a week. We don't work at two a.m. That's not healthy. It is dangerous, we play with sharp
things. And we don't take on production builds that we can't reasonably, and handle in a way that's
healthy for our workers, and that means people want to come back. We come back because we love
the people we get to work with. I love the fact that I get to watch these incredibly talented drapers
every summer. I learn something every year that I can take back into my own shop and share with
my students. So yeah, it's it's good chemistry. Jeff's really exceptional at creating good chemistry,
and so people come back year after year because we have good experiences.
So without, I mean, you don't need to get into big detail, but but what are challenges the the costume
shot? I mean, obviously every department will say, I think, budget and time and everything else, and,
and to be fair, over the years the festival has changed a little bit about their production models. And
there were times when people were working at two a.m. and and there was a decision made that that
was unhealthy, and and audiences saw that because people were making changes. But, but what,
what, what are the challenges that, that would be unique to your specific world.
Enough things that can't be sourced without constructing them that we start to tip beyond the hours
available. One of the things that I think is a necessity for a costume shop that is working in a
repertory structure, the way we do here at the festival, where you have nine shows in production in a
very tight amount of time during a season, the Anes starts later, but it has a more compressed
production calendar. So, sort of just as we're getting the other two theaters open, we're diving
hardcore into a two-week push on the Anes. If there's not a balance between shows that are being
shopped or pulled out of stock, and then shows that need major construction work because of the
requirements of the text or the conceptual approach, that can create challenges because there really
are only so many hours in the day.
So, what? Let's talk about then, what your, how you get here. So you've been here for for 20 seasons,
Less than that, but I started in 2003. I, I've taken some years off over over time to focus on family or
other parts of my professional life. I think I'm probably at 17, 18, 19, somewhere in there.
Okay. So how does how does your world connect then to the Utah Shakespeare Festival? When when
do these two stories connect?
I need you to ask me that question differently. I'm not sure I understand what you're.
So I want to know from where you start, like where you you go to school, you learn, you grow, you
become this, and then all of a sudden you say, "Well, regional theater, Utah Shakes." How does that?
How do these two? How do the Sarah McCarroll and the Utah Shakespeare Festival end up
connected?
Amazing. So while I was at Alabama doing my MFA, one of the things that is true of any MFA is that
you're encouraged to start working professionally because that's building your network and starting
to set you up for your career beyond the degree. And my professor Donna Meester knew Jeff, and I
said something in passing to her. I think even at that point, and boy, I knew so little about the the
regional theater or the professional theater world at that point in my life, but I had said something in
passing about how I had I had heard about this place called the Utah Shakespeare Festival. It sounded
so wonderful, and I loved Shakespeare. And wouldn't it be cool to work out there? And Donna Meester
said, "Oh, well, I know the costume director out there," and had me apply, and you know
recommended me to Jeff, and so the summer of my second year of my graduate degree, I started
working out here, and I was a stitcher. I stitched on 1776. I made, I think, I made the coat Phil
Hubbard wore in 1776, to name drop another longtime festival performer.
The blood stained coat of Phil Hubbard.
And I stitched for a couple of years, and then had finished my graduate degree and moved up to
being a first hand, who is the the person who cuts the patterns out, right? Cuts the fabric out and
hands them off to stitchers, and the wonderful and talented Diana Girtain and I were a draper and
firsthand team for David Mickelsen for years, back when we were still in the the old dentist's office, if
anyone remembers that costume shop.
So the the draper is the one, so the designer says this is what I want to look like, and the draper
essentially designs the pattern like freehand, figures out how this turns into a three,
Yeah, they put muslin on a dress form. Usually, we, we, you find one that's the size of the actor, or
you put padding on it to create the shape of the actor because we're all individuals and dress forms
are standardized, and then so they figure out what that pattern looks like. They turn their muslin
drape into a paper pattern that they then hand off, and the first hand cuts it out.
So draping is like art and science.
Absolutely.
You got to have some math.
Fractions are your friend.
Are they?
They are in this world.
I guess they're in baking too, right?
This is true, yeah.
So, so they, so then the the first hand you say sews that sews the pattern together.
Cuts it out.
Cuts it out.
Cuts it out, and then hands it to the stitchers.
Which I'm sure is challenging, right? I mean, it's like you cut, it's not like you have an unlimited supply
of velvet.
No, and you have and velvet is its own kind of trick because you can only face the pattern pieces on
velvet in one direction because velvet is pettable, for those of you who you know velvet is tactile and
it looks different going in opposite directions. The first thing I ever had to cut as a first hand, I was
first handing for Louella Powell, who was draping Dr. Faustus, designed by Linda Pisano, in what I
guess would have been 2005, I think. And Linda had found this beautiful fabric, red and gold metallic
brocade fabric that she wanted a pair of pumpkin breeches made out of, but the fabric had stripes on
the edges of the width of the fabric, and she wanted those stripes to sit on top of the pleats of the
pumpkin breeches. So before I could cut it out, I had to cut the fabric apart, figure out what the pleat
intervals were, and resew the fabric together so that the stripes were sitting where they needed to
be. And it had to be done for photo call. This was back in the day where we did a photo call that you
had to have about a third of the show done for, as opposed to the three or four costumes that we do
these days. This is much more sane. What we're doing now is much more sane. But I can remember
thinking, I'm going to mess this up, and I'm never going to work here again. I'm I'm going to get this
math wrong, and Jeff's gonna fire me on the spot. And that didn't happen. I talked to Louella a lot. I
talked to Diana a lot. I talked to Linda a lot. And 14 people triple checked me, and they looked
beautiful on stage. Don Mackay wore them, and they look they looked great. But I do remember
thinking, I'm gonna have a nervous breakdown, and then I'm gonna get fired this afternoon.
So are we still using like big O scissors? I guess they're probably not called scissors. What's the term?
Scissors is fine. Sheers is fine. Yeah, I mean, there are people who will cut with a rotary cutter or a
mechanized cutter, but we don't tend to cut in quantity, which is what those things are good for,
right? They're they're good for stacking 18 pieces of fabric and then wonking through them all at
once, and that just doesn't tend to be the reality of what we're doing. We tend to make one-offs of
things that are specifically fit to an actor's body. So yeah, you're cutting it out with scissors and
you're marking stitch lines for your stitchers. It's a it's a relatively involved process depending on the
garment.
So, what? What, is there a second hand? Like, what's the, I'm interested in the evolution of these
terms, right? Because if you said to me the draper, I wouldn't necessarily think that's the person who
who puts patterns together.
Well, so draping is the way fabric falls, right? And so, drapers are thinking about the way fabric will
fall on a body. There are also places who would call this person a pattern maker. In some places,
there's a historical separation between people who are drapers who do women's wear and tailors who
do menswear or women's suits. The term first hand comes out of French couture, where the first hand
is traditionally the first set of hands to touch what we call the fashion fabric, that is, the real fabric, as
opposed to something cheap like muslin that we mock something up in, because it's much easier to
figure out where you've gone wrong in muslin than it is in the 40-dollar a yard brocade.
So the draper just hands you a, like I would imagine, like you buy at the store a sewing pattern that
that is already cut out, or do you have to, does the first hand cut out the pattern from the pattern
sheet?
Depends on the draper. So we are not printing patterns right the way those commercial tissue paper
patterns are printed. There are some drapers who use what is essentially like brown butcher's paper.
In which case, as a first hand, you are likely to be handed the pattern shape that you need to cut out.
It will have no seam allowance on it, you have to add that back in.
What does that mean?
So, seam allowance is the amount of fabric that we use to make sure you have room to actually sew
it. If you think about where your sleeve connects to the body of your shirt, there's still, on the inside,
there, right? There's, there's a seam in there, and you have to have that because you can't sew on
nothingness. So, but some other drapers, the wonderful and talented Jacki Armit, who teaches at
Florida State and is a regular at the festival, Jacki uses what we call white dot paper, where you can
lay out more of your pattern pieces and you don't cut them out individually. It's a difference in
technique, you know. As I, as we said, drapers come at these things from different ways.
So the the draper, the first hand, and the stitcher,
Right.
Right? And then that. So the, I, sorry, let me let me restate this. The, the process. How many? Well, I
guess I may ask, is there a draper per show, or a draper per theater, or?
So the way we have historically worked here at the Shakespeare Festival is that there's a draper for
every show who then has a first hand and a team of two to five stitchers. We average out probably at
three for the show, depending on the scale of the show. There are places that do it differently, where
everybody's working on all the shows, and you just have your assigned drapes. That just isn't the way
that we we set set things up here, or haven't historically.
So we have eight drapers, eight first hands, and a number of stitchers. Like because we have eight
shows.
We have nine shows.
We have nine shows.
Green show.
Green show.
You have to count the green show. Green show is real.
So not yeah. So yeah, forgive me. Nine shows, and and and the green show has its own draper.
It does.
Too.
Yeah.
So,
So nine shows, nine first hands, and then a quantity of stitchers and crafts artisans, and an entire hair
and makeup department.
And so, how many people then, once everything's up? Anes is going to see, now. Like now, the
season's going, you're at max level, how many people are in the costume shop?
At max level during the build, we're probably, if we include volunteers, and we certainly should
because they are invaluable to us, we're probably at about 65. We're down, we're bigger this year
than usual because the Randall has larger wardrobe needs than usual. A
A lot of eggs.
So many eggs. We're down to 10 16, We're probably down to about 22-ish. That's a ballpark.
Are the Drapers still here?
No, they've all they've all gone away. So, so if the first hands, I don't think we had have any firsthand
who stuck around to run wardrobe this year.
So the that's that's a pretty interesting. So all those those people need to fix fix anything that that
breaks. Do the Anes drapers come later like the cast, or do they?
They do. This year one of the Anes drapers, Jillian Gregory, she came out earlier than Alex Hegman,
who was the other Anes draper, and worked on the showgirl omlets for Something Rotten. That sort of
became her project, and then she transitioned over to the Anes. But yes, in general, they they do
come later, which is great because not everybody can be here the first weekend of May, particularly
people with academic schedules. I'm very lucky. I have very gracious colleagues and a supportive
provost who let me leave early. I essentially wave goodbye and give my finals on the road, and I go
back late. But you know, trying to accommodate academic schedules because a lot of the people who
work here are academics in the other part of their lives. It's nice to have some offsetting contract
dates.
So when do you move then from first, first, so costume shop supervisor, the job you have now has
always been around.
Yes.
So when do you move from? Do you move from first hand to draper, or do you move from first hand
to costume shop supervision?
Jeff, Jeff years ago gave me an opportunity to be a baby draper for a fall season for Pippin maybe, and
I said I don't think I'm ready. I don't think I can do it, and it it actually became pretty clear to me that
I'm, that's not really where my skill set lies. I drape at school when I have to, but I will never drape at
the quality or the the pace required at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. One of the things that had
happened in there while I was being a first hand is that I started working as a wardrobe supervisor. I
love working wardrobe. If I had known when I was 20 that I could move to New York, get my union
card, and just be a professional wardrobe person, my life would look very different. And I'm very
happy with my life, but you know, it's one of those Robert Frost roads in the wood moments.
What is a? Define that.
So Robert Frost,
No, I know Robert Frost. I mean the wardrobe supervisor.
Oh, sorry. So, a wardrobe supervisor is the person who is in charge of running, supervising,
mentoring, organizing the crew that helps actors during performances. So, not every change an actor
can do by themselves, right? Some things zip up the back, and we don't want anyone dislocating their
shoulders to get into costume. Some changes you cannot accomplish in the time provided by the
script and the production without help. So we're standing in the wings waiting to yank people out of
one set of clothes and throw them into another. So I started doing that relatively quickly during my
time at the festival, and I loved it. I fell in love with being a dresser. I'm still doing it, even though my
knees are starting to suggest that perhaps I should consider not, because I just, I mean, this sounds
very odd. I get a real kick out of chasing someone around with a water bottle for two and a half hours
every night. So I started doing that, and I think it became evident, certainly to Jeff, who's very good at
identifying skills and then nurturing them, that my real strength was in organization and people, not
in what my hands were doing technically. And I took a break early on in my time as a professor
because I needed to publish to get tenure, and my mom and I were going to do some traveling. And I
called Jeff the summer of 2020 and said, "Jeff, I need to come home. I need, you know, I need to be
back." And then the summer of 2020 didn't happen, but but then I came back in 21, and by by the
summer of '22, we had sort of developed me into this role that I currently have, which I think looks a
little different than it has previously, because there's a way to envision this role where you're
essentially someone who is moving things back and forth between stock, and I certainly do chunks of
that, but because I'm a little older than some of the people who've been in that role previously, there
are just things that I can take on because I'm I'm more ready for the workload. So I coordinate records
of rentals that we might be using, or things we've borrowed from other places, and I can check in with
the teams every day and see where people are.
So again, let's take our our next break, and then I want to talk about your typical day.
Okay.
Okay.
Sure.
So this, and I should have said this earlier, and I apologize, but for those of you who've listened to the
podcast before know that instead of playing commercials, we ask our guests to provide a list of songs.
We usually ask for five or six so we can choose certain ones that that means something to them that
we play instead of commercials. And I recognize Sarah that this that it is not necessarily an easy task,
and in all the years I've done this, however many 100, 100, 200 episodes, that I've only had one
person ever say I can't do it, it's like choosing kids. And fortunately, I knew that person, so I was able
to kind of say these are songs that I'm choosing the songs for you. But I recognize that it's it's a task,
and, and I struggle because I would wonder, if I had to do it. No one's asked me, and so it would
depend on the day. But but I appreciate that. I appreciate the effort that you put in.
It was fun. I had a good time. I mean, I, I did hit decision paralysis a couple of times, but I had a blast
doing it.
So this song is one that you that Lauren, I'm sure knows that, that has become very popular. It's
called Shake It Off by the Taylor Swift.
The one and only.
So why did you choose this song?
As I said earlier, I was trying to think about the things and people who've influenced me, and that has
to include my students. I have been so privileged over the last 15 years teaching college to have so
many wonderful students, and particularly some really wonderful young women in my life who've
worked in the costume shop or who I've worked with on productions. And one of the great things, as
I'm sure you know, Ryan, about teaching college is that if it doesn't kill you in the first couple of
years, it will help keep you young because your students help keep you tapped into pop culture and
the the zeitgeist that they're living, and that means that Taylor Swift has unavoidably become a part
of my experience. I have some real Swifties who are among my nearest and dearest recent
graduates, so I wanted to honor their contribution to my life and how vital they help me stay in terms
of just joy in approaching life. And I think that's one of the great things about Shake It Off as a song,
right? That we really can choose to not tap into that negativity. And I don't want to get too deep
about it, although I know everybody does on the internet. It's also just, as my students would say, it's
a bop. It's just a great pop song.
Okay, this is Shake It Off by Taylor Swift.
That was Shake It Off by Taylor Swift. You're listening to the APEX Radio Hour Utah Shakespeare
Festival edition. I'll turn it back to you, Ryan.
Thank you, Lauren. Are you a Swiftie?
I'm not a huge Swiftie, but I do enjoy her music.
I have to admit, I have a Taylor Swift playlist on my Spotify.
I don't know. I don't know why you said that in such a deep light.
Well, it might kick me out of maturity. I don't know. I don't think that's true. I think there are lots of
women my age who love Taylor Swift, and that there's nothing wrong with that.
I think there are lots of men my age who love Taylor Swift. I mean, I don't know, we're probably pretty
close to the same age, I would think.
We'll ballpark it.
But, but I yeah. So I appreciate. Well, to be very clear and very honest, that's probably the only Taylor
Swift song that I know.
Oh, I bet you know Taylor Swift songs that you don't know you know. They're everywhere, Ryan.
Oh yeah, there's so many.
If we didn't have to finish this podcast, Lauren and I would be setting up a playlist right now to prove
to you that you know more Taylor Swift than you think.
Absolutely.
Well, I would be shocked and surprised. My music tastes. Anyway, enough of my stuff. But again, it's
not because I have any, any, you know Taylor Swift's not. I just found that, that I find that my music. I
teach rock and roll and other kinds of things, so I spend my time listening to, you know.
Well, I gave you some of those too. We'll get to them later.
Yes, yes, yes, great, great. So let's. We're here with Sarah McCarroll. She's the costume shop
supervisor here at the Utah Shakespeare Festival for 17 18, seasons. She's been been here, seen a lot
of stuff.
Yeah.
Sewn and cut and drape, not draped, I guess, but did a lot of stuff. So let's talk about what your
typical day is. So today, I think we have four shows, right? Two in the, we got the matinee and the
Randall and the Anes, and then a show in the Engelstad and in the Anes tonight. So let's, typical day.
So I've moved into the very privileged part of my summer, where ultimately all I have to, have to
most days is run my evening show. One of the things about the Engelstad, because we're outside, is
we don't do matinees because everybody would die, and no one wants that. So,
Although it is Shakespearean that everybody dies.
Yeah, but they were in the middle of the little ice age. We're not. So really, these days, if I need to go
into the shop to check on something or to make sure that we we have the supplies we need. Jeff
Lieder and I had a quick little text conversation yesterday about needing to restock the Febreze.
That's a very important supply for us when we've got people running around on an outdoor stage or
the indoor one, for that matter. I'm still in the process, one of the things that falls to my purview is
figuring out understudy costume tracks. So we've already put understudies on this summer. We make
sure that we have a plan for any understudy that needs to go on. We don't necessarily do all of the
notes, but I've fit every understudy, or I will have by the end of this week. So when I finish this, for
example, I'm headed up to the Anes, where Luke Elison is going to come in for an understudy fitting.
He's covering Sean Dale, who plays Polidori in Frankenstein, and sometimes you get lucky because
people are sort of the same. Oh, Luke Sidney Johnson is covering Matt Koenig in Something Rotten.
They are very similar in scale. Luke walks straight into all of Matt's stuff. All I really had to do was pull
him a pair of boots. Luke, Luke Ellison, who's covering Sean. They're not built on the same frame. You
know, we have a vast myriad of differentiation in human forms. So I went out to stock yesterday
morning and pulled for Luke and a few other people that I need to finish up now that the Anes is
open, so that we have a plan if the unexpected happens. It's never the people you think. This is what
I've learned over the years, you can't hedge your bets against it being the people you think might
have something that caused them to miss a performance. So I'll head off to the a fitting when we're
done here. So sometimes I have those in my days. I'm starting to think about the fall semester, so I'm
starting to work on getting my syllabi into shape and that kind of thing, but really at this point in the
summer, I'm quite lucky that, pardon me, that things have chilled out a bunch. That's in contrast to
when we're in dress rehearsals, where the day starts at 8:30 in the costume shop with a morning
meeting of sort of senior staff, and then I, what fires we've set overnight that I might need to help put
out. I check in with the painter dyer and see if he has everything he needs. Every so often, that
involves a run to Walmart for 30 pounds of salt because we use it in the dye vats. And then very often
I'm engaged with paperwork, so I'm I'm making sure we have wardrobe paperwork ready to go checkin
sheets that account for every item a performer wears, or dressing lists that tell us what they wear
in each scene and what comes on and off between those scenes, and then I'm maybe taking a
designer out to stock, or I'm running a load of returns out to stock. Clarissa Clark, who is one of the
costume shop assistants, she keeps us all on the financial straight and narrow. Clarissa also does a
whole lot of that to-ing and fro-ing. Sometimes it's, I have a young stitcher who needs to talk about
how they're handling interpersonal or the workload. Mentorship is a part of the day, and then you you
get dinner and you put on your blacks and you go run a dress rehearsal, and it's a 14,000 step day,
and my phone is really happy with the amount of exercise I've gotten.
Wow, you know my, you know, I'm an understudy this year for Yorick.
Do you know who Yorick is?
Yes.
Okay, good.
It's been a long journey. My fitting fitting went really well.
Oh yeah, yeah.
So that's just, you know you know I'm just kidding, right? Okay. As long as, I don't want you more
than you. So I don't have that ability to,
Pop your head off and just be a skull for the evening?
Like Jack, Jack Skellington? No, to be, I'm not an actor. I guess I'm a, we're professors, so we're
performers. I mean, we do, we do, we do, I do you know many shows a day, just but not,
Oh yeah.
Some kind of thing.
A classroom lecture, particularly if you're going to keep students engaged, is absolutely a
performance.
Yeah, so well let's, I mean I'm, I'm interested in, I think people. First of all, I didn't realize we had dye
vats.
Uh huh. Big jacketed steam kettle.
That was a very enthusiastic, "oh yeah."
They're fun. I mean, the things that our painter dyers do this summer. It was Josh Kelly, who comes to
us from Washington D.C. And if you go look at Something Rotten in particular, there's a number that
takes place in Soothsayer Alley, and he did some stunning dye work in these purples and greens that
feel very decaying and atmospheric on the the denizens of Soothsayer Alley. I mean, the things those
people, it's as you say, it's science and art, right? And if you're a painter dyer, it really is chemistry
plus artistry, and it's astounding to me.
And once you dye the fabric, how long does it have to dry?
Depends on the fabric. We heat set most things so that they can be washed or dry cleaned as
needed. There are a number of things in the Engelstad this summer that have distressing on them,
and they're so well heat set we can throw them in the washer and the dryer, which is amazing.
How often? How often do you wash them?
Depends on how sweaty the actor is, and they throw them in, right? Troilus and Cressida, a lot of
those military things, because they're running all over the place with swords in their hands, go in
every performance. So we're washing them twice a week. There are some things in Hamlet, for
example, like some of Ophelia's, I've lost my, my distressed stuff. We could hand wash them and lay
them flat to dry if we needed to.
Okay, so you, the, the job that you do in the Engelstad during the performance,
Yeah.
That's the wardrobe supervisor, right? And that's every show.
It's every show. It's only six shows a week.
Yeah, that's nothing. Six shows a week.
The Randalls work at eight shows a week. They work much harder.
That's true. So, so you put on your blacks.
Yeah.
And what happens? So you show up at what time? The show starts at eight. Fight call's at 7:30.
Yeah.
You know the hardest working people at the festival, the girl, those guys, those guys out in the grove,
the orientation guys. I'm there, you know, I'm there going, you know,
Talking things out.
No, the Green Show.
Yes.
Yeah, those are the hardest working people because they're in like 17 shows.
They come running in. Particularly on Troilus nights when we get five of the six of them, it's an
onslaught at about 15 tell.
So you, you, you've had your coffee or whatever. You put on your blacks, and tell me what happens.
So the wardrobe crew shows up at about 6:15, and we start in the basement, which is where our
storage and laundry facilities are. And the first thing we do is put away the laundry from the previous
night. So we, we get the t-shirts out of the dryer. We take the hanging things, which tend to be
undergarments because we don't, you don't want to run all that elastic through the dryer as often as
we wash things, right? They won't make it through the summer. The rubber will start to degrade. So
we sort things by performer, and then every performer has a, a tub, a little accessory bin that lives on
a baker's rack. So we put things back in, and then we load up the elevator to go upstairs. We take the
racks for the the show of the evening, which are empty because we've put those costumes into the
dressing room the previous night. We take those up so we have them ready at the end of the night.
We take laundry baskets up. We take Febreze and Lysol up, and then every dresser has primary
responsibility in the Engelstad, at least for certain actors. You check in all their garments. You make
sure every single item is there. That includes things the audience never sees, like washable
undershirts or their socks. And then you do any maintenance that's needed, if things need to be
pressed or steamed. I, I press Mat Hostetler's tuxedo shirt before every Troilus and Cressida to make
sure it looks nice and crisp. And usually by that point, it's about 7:10. After you do your presets, if you
have garments that need to be in a different place. I do a quick change with Blake Henri right at the
top of Twelfth Night, where he goes from being a sailor to being Toby Belch. We're doing that change
in the stage left stairwell, right by the door, out onto the side stage and the ramp, because that's
where he needs to be. So I, I make sure I take all the garments I need for that change, and I get them
all set up. We've got a chair. I've put a note on it that says "Don't take my chair away." And then, you
know, by that point, it's maybe 10 after seven, and now you're waiting for actors to show up. And
sometimes that means bring a book. I happen, this summer, to have a lot of actors who are very selfsufficient
and who have clothes that don't require help, but some people are dressing, like if you're
dressing Kayland Jordan playing Olivia, she can't get into that dress by herself. So you're helping
people into costumes. You're checking in with folks, making sure they're okay, seeing if they need
anything. The Green Show kids, and we have at least, kids. The Green Show performers show up at
about the 15, and we have at least one person in every show. We've got five in Troilus and Cressida,
two in Hamlet, and one in Twelfth Night. And that that's usually, okay, now we need to help them get
ready for the top of the show because they have a compressed time frame. And then at 8 o'clock, the
show starts, and depending on the show, I'm dressing Walt for Hamlet. Really, what I'm doing in
Hamlet is following Walt around with a water bottle, so that we can keep Hamlet hydrated every time
he comes off stage. There aren't a lot of costume changes that I'm dealing with in that show. Troilus
and Cressida we're we're helping people with changes. We're hanging up things they've already worn,
but there's not a ton of compressed changes in Troilus and Cressida until the last six minutes, when
we have to get everybody into Myrmidons, and it, it is all hands on deck in the inner below because
we, we can't even go as far as the green room to be successful with those changes. Braedon Young
has a 20 second change that involves pants, and so his red Trojan pants have these enormous
specialty zippers down either side, so that he can put his blue myrmidon pants underneath those.
There are four people on that change, and watching it is one of the highlights of my week because at
this point, it's gorgeous choreography.
I'm surprised they haven't filmed that.
Well, it's very dark back there, and there's a lot happening, and a lot of people, many of whom are
carrying swords, and I think trying to put another body into that space would be a bad idea.
Well, I mean, we don't say we have to film it when it was happening in real life. It's theater.
Yeah.
We have to rehearse it.
Yeah.
Make safety. Safety first. And by the way, those myrmidons are pretty weird looking.
Aren't they great? I love them. I think the gas masks is a brilliant idea in terms of, how do we
translate this force that Achilles calls on into the conceptual world of this production.
Yeah, and plus you don't have to worry about saying, "Hey, I just saw you 20 seconds ago."
That's right.
I just saw it last night. It was so cool.
I think I think it's amazing. I love it. I'm a big fan of Carolyn Howarth as a director.
So let's, the, the the festival has changed over the years. Obviously, you talk about the first time
where the the costume shop was, and there were times when it was a mile away, and we had to drive
people. Now, with the, the, you know, 10 years ago, we, the Beverly was dedicated and built with this
brilliant and beautifully, I, I think it seems to me organized costume shop that's right on site. So, will
you describe for us what the costume shop looks like?
We have an enormous privilege at the Utah Shakespeare Festival because our costume shop has a
wall of windows, which means we have all of this incredible natural light. Very often, costume shops
are shoved in basements somewhere, and you sort of come out like elves emerging from the mines of
Moria or something at the end of your day. Dwarves, I guess. The Lord of the Rings people are going
to come for me.
Oh no, I think, doesn't one of the elves goes to the mines of Moria?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. I'm sure Legolas gets dragged down there.
And in the Rings of Power, doesn't Elrond go?
Oh, you're out of my depth now.
You've never seen the Rings of Power?
I haven't yet.
You know, I know a lot of Lord of Rings wouldn't like it, but I think it's pretty all right.
We have a number of bays that are divided by partition walls that come about halfway down the
depth of the shop that allow us to sort of segment where show-specific teams are, which I think is
helpful for focus.
Does every show have a bay?
Well, we've got about seven bays, and there are nine shows, so sometimes things get tricky. Usually,
we have to figure out where we're slotting the Anes in, and often that's about where the smaller
shows in the the season that begins earlier, where those are because they will tend to be wrapping
up, and so we can we can nudge the Anes into those spaces. Right now, it looks like this amazing,
incredible, spacious area. When you put 65 bodies in there, plus all of the racks of pulled things that
designers are working from and costumes that are emerging from Stitcher's hands, the space gets
pretty tight pretty fast. But it's a, it's a very pleasant place to work. When you come in, when we're at
full strength, I think what you hear is a buzz of energy and communication, and that's what you want
in a space like that.
And the behind the bays, I mean, if you look further to the west,
Yeah.
You have,
You have an entire hair and makeup space. I'm sure they'd take three times more tomorrow. Most of
us would, right? And then behind them, as you move towards the bottom end of the building, there's
there are a couple of bays where crafts lives. We call one of them the armory. It's where all of the the
metal work and the leather work tends to to live. And then the first bay, a lot of millinery work, the
the fabric work tends to happen in there. And then there is an entire dye room because you want
those dye particles kept separate from everything else.
So the the the jewelry. I mean, we we've talked with with Brian Gonzales, and he talks about the
bracelets and the horned necklaces that he wears. Is that all part of costuming, or is that part of
props?
Largely part of costuming. Although one of the things that is always true in any theater is that there's
negotiation in terms of who's taking care of what, and sometimes it has, it just develops in terms of
who decades ago had the room to store something. We have, in costumes we have parasols, props
has canes and walking sticks, and I don't know that there's a real rhyme or reason to that, except that
that's how it evolved here at this festival.
And then, how many fitting rooms do you have?
Wait, this is going to require me to count. 1 2 3 4 6. We have six fitting rooms.
And those are all, and, and you are the one as the costume shop supervisor who schedules fittings for
when actors come in as they get fitted.
So Lori Hartenhoff is the person who takes the point on that, Jeff's associate costume director. And
what happens is that designers turn into Lori their fitting needs for the next day, she sends them to
stage management. There is a scheduler on the stage management staff because there are just so
many moving parts at this festival, and you have to pay attention to things like when are you calling,
particularly equity actors, because there are mandated lengths of turnaround time between an
evening rehearsal. Like we can't call them for a nine a.m. fitting; they have to have a certain amount
of break from a 10:30 release from their evening rehearsal. So Lori puts that request in to the
scheduler every day around noon, and then there there are often a couple of phone calls back and
forth that, that can be about negotiating, or we can't get you this person, is there someone else you'd
rather see instead? So that everybody is is sort of collaborating to do our best to move the work
forward.
So how does this then compare to the costume shop of pre Beverly? How does that work out?
Both of the costume shops that I experienced pre Beverly, i.e. the old dentist's office, which used to
sit basically where the admin building and the Anes are now. I'm ballparking geographically. And then
the old elementary school that was out on Hamburger Highway across by by the interstate bridge.
Essentially, both of those, because of the nature of the physical space of the building, I think teams
felt more segmented. I think it was harder to know what was happening on other teams, and see the
product that was coming out of other groups of people who were working. And I think you, you know
most people end up walking through the shop to get to where they work in the mornings, so you
really do have a sense of what the collective effort is creating. So to me, it feels more like we are one
large team, although everybody has primary assignments, and less like we are segmented spaces.
The thing that I remember about the old, the old old costume shop is that you walked in and there
was like this giant thing, table thing in the middle of the floor.
Yeah.
There was like this giant workspace, and there was just fabric everywhere, and it had this kind of
interesting smell, not not not like musty or, but just this, like I can't even describe it. But it was just, I
can still see it in my mind's eye. Just this big table that was always covered with fabric, and,
That was someone's draper's table, right? We had a draper who was right there when you walked in,
who often turned into the sort of courtesy greeter and pointed you in the right direction. The thing I
remember about the dentist's office is that the stairs, from the upstairs to the downstairs, tried to kill
you. They had an, they had uneven rises, and the bay that was to the left of those stairs was often
where Janet Swenson's show was. Janet was a longtime professor at Brigham Young and designer
here for years. And I tripped up those stairs a lot because I'm a klutz, and Janet, Janet was not best
pleased when I would curse tripping up those stairs. So Janet trained me to say "Oh spit" when I fell
up the stairs, and that is something is something that has now stayed with me for 20 years.
Yeah, they had to put the McCarroll sign up that said "Don't run with scissors." They
They had to put the sign up that said "Watch your mouth."
Well, you've done great so far.
Thank you.
So the, you mentioned something earlier on in our conversation about working at a costume
warehouse, which I'm assuming is a place where like theaters and movie production, they all rent
costumes for whatever they're doing.
Yeah.
Is that?
That's exactly.
That fair? And and you said was in Atlanta, right? Which I'm, is a hotbed of production. I would, I don't
know if it still is, but it was.
But certainly still is. It was less so in the late '90s when, which is when I was doing that job.
So in that, you said that you had learned some bad habits and some good habits.
Yeah.
What are the bad and what are the good?
The bad habits are that I learned every cheap and sleazy sewing alteration trick in the book, and
sometimes cheap and sleazy is the answer. Things that might look okay but aren't as polished, but
get it on stage and get it on stage fast. And that has stood me in good stead over the years. It
certainly stood me in good stead in that job, and I have worked in academic environments, and some
professional environments over the years that were not as supported as the USF shop, right? Not
every place has the luxury of this budget and this staff. So it taught me how to get things on stage
fast, which has been a benefit. But when I got to graduate school, and certainly once I got to the Utah
Shakespeare Festival, I did, there were things that I had to say, "Oh, we have the time to do this right
here, and it is the expectation that we will take that time. We will not take the quick work around."
And so, ultimately, both of those things I think are pretty good to have in your back pocket.
Yeah, I mean, I like the idea that we have the the expectation because we have the time to do it. I
think one of the challenges, I don't know if you experience this in in your world. I teach a lot of classes
in public history, so it's like history outside the classroom, museum exhibits, and historical markers,
and and oftentimes when I worked in museums, when grad students come in, they would say, "Well,
this isn't how we do it." And I said, "Well, you need to understand there's a difference between
academic ideals and workday realities."
Absolutely.
And I would imagine that that's also a part of what you're doing. And I think the the best prepared
students, and I say this to my colleagues all the time, is, the best prepared students are those who
understand that, that there's a foundation, and sometimes that foundation needs to be done in a
certain way within the resources that one has.
And I think it's true in any discipline, whether that's an intellectual discipline or an artisanal discipline,
you need to know what the rules are because there are reasons for them, and then you need to know
how to make the decision to break them. And sometimes that's about, oh, I know a really fast, and no
one ever needs to look at it on the inside way to repair this, because I got to get it on stage, because
this actor has another scene in five minutes, and I can circle back and do it right later. That's the
moment to make that decision. The moment to make the, no, we're doing this right decision is, we're
building the coats for Valentine and Curio in Twelfth Night, there or, and Orsino. They are all upper
class gentlemen. We need them to look nice outdoors with sweaty bodies until September. We're
going to take the time and put the right interfacing in. We're going to do the nice tailoring. We're
going to make sure these things are well constructed because we have the time to do it, and it is the
expectation here.
And plus, Lavour has arms like oak trees, so it's extra fabric.
He is fit.
That dude is fit. I mean, his fit check is awesome too, by the way.
That's a different fit check.
It is, but I would imagine. But he, that's what the kids are calling it nowadays, he did the most
compassionate thing the other day for me. I mean, and, and we don't know each other well at all,
really. But it was a very compass. He, he treated me like a human being, and I think that's a like, not
that people don't treat me like a human being, but he recognized that I was not in the right space and
provided something that was it was a beautiful moment for me.
One of the things I value so much about the Utah company, the Utah Shakespeare company, outside
of the costume shop, it's true in the costume shop, but it's also true of the company as a whole, is
that jerks don't work here repeatedly. You know, you hear horror stories in theater about actors who
are terrible to their dressers, and that just doesn't happen here. It's not the company culture. The
performing company is delightful. I love getting to collaborate with all of them on the work we do
together. It takes all of us to put the thing that an audience sees on stage, and there's a great deal of
value placed on the people that no one ever sees by the performing company here. And I think that's
about John and Michael's leadership. I think it's about a long history of that. I think ultimately it's
about Fred and the people who have been put in positions to model that affect over the years.
Yeah, I think that's a great a great point. So, what is the good habit you learned at the costume
house?
The good habit I learned is the ability to juggle multiple balls simultaneously. When you're working at
a costume rental house like that, in addition to the sort of over-the-counter rentals that you're doing,
you know, Halloween is, October is really not a fun month. You're also trying to get shipments of
Oklahoma for a high school, or My Fair Lady for a college, or The Country Wife, which is a restoration
comedy. Excuse me, yes, restoration comedy, out the door to a college performance program, and so
you really have to learn how to keep multiple projects in multiple stages of execution straight and
organized in your head on a daily basis.
Were all of your rentals like Atlanta-based, or was like internet and like so?
The company I worked for had, still has, locations all over the country, so we primarily handled the
southeast, but we certainly shipped things to Virginia and Tennessee and Florida, all of, you know,
Kentucky, in addition to all over the state of Georgia.
So, but we don't. The festival doesn't use rental houses.
No, it's not a good financial outlay for us because our seasons run so long, and houses like that
generally charge by the week. So if you think about, you know, a costume is 75 bucks for the week,
even if they give it to you for 50% the following weeks, all of a sudden we're into 1000 plus for a
single costume, we can make it for that.
And our, and plus our storage is pretty cool too.
We've got great storage. We have tons and tons of Elizabethan stuff, you'll be shocked to hear at a
Shakespeare festival, but growing stock as the festival, I think, expands its conceptual approaches.
Growing stock in, in lots of other periods too.
Yeah, it's a pretty cool. It's up by the, in the prop warehouse area at the Bulldog facility. Pretty cool.
So before we move into our final break, I, I always like to ask this from professors or from, you know,
folks who are teaching. What what advice do you give to students? So you've talked about your
mentorship. So I guess the question, first of you, let me ask this. You've been mentored as you've
talked about.
Yeah.
What's the best advice you've been given, and what is the most relevant advice you give the student
that's ready to go out in their professional career?
I think the best advice. I've been given is to slow down and ask questions. It keeps you from going off
half cocked. It means that you, even if you're really upset about something or really angry about
something, if you ask questions, it automatically sort of puts you into a space of approaching the
situation with empathy, because you're asking for someone else's perspective before you address
whatever the issue is. That is a lesson I am learning in a present progressive way, right? It's one of
those things I keep getting better at. So yeah, I think that that's on the list of pieces of best advice
I've been given. What I say to my students is, there is no schedule but your schedule. The world will
tell you there's a timeline for where you should be when, and the world is lying to you. The only
timeline that matters is the one that makes sense for you and your life, because I think it's really easy
for young theater professionals to turn theater into their identity, and I think that's not necessarily the
healthiest thing. Theater is what we do, not who we are. And if what you need to do is work on the life
outside of theater, okay, go do that. Be healthy, be happy. You don't have to stay in theater. All I
actually, I mean, I would love for my students to make their career in this business that I love, but
ultimately your only responsibility is to build yourself a life that makes you healthy and happy.
Yeah, I think that's brilliant. I've been trying to tell Lauren that. She wants to be an engineer, and I
just tell her you got to quit wearing that train cap. No, it's not that kind of.
No. We all need accessories.
Love a good accessory.
There it is.
She's not wearing a train cap. So, thank you for that. I think that's, that's great, great advice, not to
be defined by your job.
Yeah.
Because that, that's never a good thing.
It's taken me till almost 50 to learn some part of that lesson, but the more the better I get at it, the
more I find that all the parts of my life feel healthier and happier.
That's good. I'm happy to hear that. So let's move into our, our third song. This is a song by Bonnie
Raitt called Something to Talk About. Why did you choose this song?
Because it's a great jam song by a powerful female guitarist, but also it is a song that my partner,
who happens to be an actor at the festival, my partner and I both really love. And there have been
some great Sunday drives with Bonnie Raitt blaring on the radio, and he is an important part of my
life. And I wanted to make him part of this list too.
I think I know who we're talking about.
It's Chris Mixon.
And I love that guy. And the thought of Chris singing out loud to Something To Talk About just brings
me great happiness.
He has a great appreciation for a good blues guitar, and Bonnie Raitt is a good blues guitar.
All right, this is by Bonnie Raitt.
That was by Bonnie Raitt. You're listening to the APEX Radio Hour Utah Shakespeare Festival edition.
I'll turn it back to you, Ryan.
Thank you, Lauren. We're here with Sarah McCarroll. She's the costume shop supervisor here at the
festival this season. And for those of you who've listened to the podcast before, know that this is our
segment where we talk about what's bringing us joy. So first of all, Sarah, thank you for taking the
time to talk with us.
Absolutely, I had a great time.
I appreciate it. It's been a great time hearing these stories, and I've, you know, just, I could talk to you
forever. So let's let's go with this, Sarah McCarroll. What are you currently watching, reading, listening
to, or playing that is bringing you joy?
So I have a book manuscript that is due in a week and a half, so I'm currently not engaging in a great
deal of just for pleasure watching, reading, or listening. But my mother sends me, when I'm out here
in the summers. Mom sends me clippings from the New York Review of Books about, largely art books
that she thinks I will like. So I'm currently working my way through a batch of those. There has been a
piece on Rembrandt. There are a couple of articles on John Singer Sargent, who's had a couple of big
exhibits recently and is one of my favorite artists. So I'm really enjoying working my way through
those as sort of small bitable chunks of things that I have a great time with, and it helps me construct
my Christmas book list. But I'm also listening to a lot of classical music these days because I find it
calms me down, it soothes me, it you know smooths out the nerves. So I'm listening to a lot of Handel
and Vivaldi and Corelli, Baroque musicians, and I find that that puts me in a mindset where other
things can happen in my brain. I think it's because there aren't lyrics to connect to. I'm also listening
to a lot of jazz. I'm listening to a lot of Coltrane right now for part of the same reason, it gets it gets
the juices flowing in other ways