BWW Blog: Samantha Tirrell - Costuming The Hairiest Pirate Who Ever Lived

This week over at the Theatre Institute at Sage, we staged Backbeard's big visit to the tailor shop, where two ostentatious tailors are given the fashion challenge of their lives -- Backbeard, who has been restricted by the Pirate Council to wearing only clothing without color, needs new clothes after his pants rip during his birthday fight. The tailors give him just that, and they send the colorfully-clad pirate on his way with a little pink pig to replace his missing parrot. Challenge accepted and conquered.

While this seems a large task for the tailors, dressing this pirate is an even larger task for Backbeard's costume designer. Before she can give Backbeard his new clothes, and even before she can put him in his ripped and dirty pirate attire, Lynne Roblin needs to make Backbeard the hairiest pirate who ever lived -- it's part of the title, after all.

Lynne has been hard at work on this monumental undertaking. She plans on dressing the actor playing Backbeard in a body suit covered in hair, and she faces the unique challenge of convincingly attaching synthetic hair to a flesh-colored body suit while still allowing the actor to fulfill all of his responsibilities in the costume without restriction. In order to ultimately preserve the work put into the costume piece, this means that the synthetic hair must be flexible and able to move with the actor while still remaining firmly situated to the body suit.

I found Lynne this week poised over a table in her costume shop wearing a gas mask and working diligently with rows upon rows of synthetic hair. She had already methodically zig-zagged the long strands of black hair through a long strip of stretchy flesh-colored lace, and was then securing the hair onto the lace with a fine line of silicone, which she hopes will allow the hair to stay on the body suit but allow it to move freely with Backbeard's body. The next step here will be attaching the lace to the body suit, putting the actor into the body suit, and then figuring out just how hairy Backbeard will actually be. She hopes that after many attempts at figuring out the best way to tackle this first integral step in constructing this costume piece that she has finally figured it out, which will allow her to move forward with the dozens of other costumes that this show requires.

With a central focus in Backbeard on wardrobe and the reactionary interpretations of clothing choices, Lynne has a busy month ahead of her. Check back for more updates on costuming this massive, hairy pirate and his gang, and to see how his hair suit turns out!