How to Find Costumes for Community Theater

Video Transcript

"On behalf of expertvillage.com, my name is Stan and I'm here to tell you about community theater. I want to talk about costumes for a few minutes. Costumes are acquired in all sorts of different ways for community theater production. This last show that Verde Valley did, Run for your wife, was a good example. We had quite a variety of costumes in this show. We had men's suits. Some of these were donated to us. Some of these we acquired at Good Will industries and if you go to your local thrift shop, you can find lots of clothing and other things for the set too, props and so on. Thrift shops are an excellent source. Some of the costumes were supplied by the actors themselves. That's always nice because we know they're going to fit. Then some of the costumes were made for the actors by the person who's in charge of costumes for the show. One of the actors in this place played a police officer, who in a sort of a funny scene decided to have tea. He went into the kitchen to make tea and he needed to come out wearing an apron. This apron was made for him by our costume mistress. Another fellow in the play was painting his apartment upstairs. You never see the apartment, but he keeps coming back into the set with more and more paint all over him. As more and more paint spills and gets splashed around. He had a whole series with different stages paint staining on them that he would change from one to the next as the play progressed. We had people having a lot of fun putting the paint on the t-shirts and the pants and so on. He had a lot of fun with the pants. At the end he put a big hand print on it. You can have a lot costumes. As I said, there are all sorts of sources for them. Makeup is the same thing. The most important thing with makeup is keeping it organized and you need somebody in charge of just keeping the makeup stocked. Every actor should have their own box of makeup so that they feel it's sanitary and they know what makeup they're going to use and it doesn't get all mixed up and so on. The big problem you have with costumes too for that matter is storage space. We'll talk more about the storage place problems and how to solve those when we talk about props. "