Angel Fox

Thea 499C

2/21/2016

Carrie Stage One Paper

My senior year design will be designing the costume, hair, and make-up for the MSU

Production of Carrie: I known going in that a musical is complicated in the sense that sound,

scenery, costumes, lights and props all have to be balanced and suit the show, all the while

juggling large casts of people. The details can become overwhelming at a moment’s notice, but I

am confident I shall make it through a produce a striking show. Going in to the design period I

have a pre-existing love for Stephen King’s Carrie, so it is a story I have already imagined and

occupied in my mind. When Carrie was first announced as a show and would be a musical, my

initial thought was, “someone made Carrie into a musical...they make everything into a musical

now”. I am glad for that because I was pleasantly surprised at the quality and power the play,

once I finally read it. I went into this show wonder how successfully the story could be translated

through music. I quickly came to love the show and the angst of the music paired with the classic

story. The music allowed me to further investigate the unique qualities f each character by how

they sang, and what genre they sounded like. From the character, Chris, I noticed her belty and

growly nature and connected it to her ego and sassy behavior. By going through this process with

the character this way I felt more in tune with their character’s objections and desires.

The concept was hard to discern at first. The book, Carrie, had a very grounded concept

of time and a difficult to convey supernatural element. Despite that the play was excellent and

handle the subject matter in a way, I never thought, possible. Sean decided that he’d have the

play set in modern day. I ran with this until I made the decision to go with a popular Fashion

movement of Hipster culture for the theme of my design. From there I began researching and

analyzing the lesser known to me, trending fashion of this generation’s high school demographic.

Millennial culture has recently been the focus of the movement often reinventing and

embracing older pop culture or thrifting for the cause of conservation. Terms like indie or

bohemian are used to describe a facets of this fashion. I decided that to be able to convey unity

while embracing the dynamic Body types in this show, that Hipster culture would give me the

most room for expressing slight individuality while still maintaining unity. Then I had to

ostracize the character design for Carrie, as she as a person is behind on trends but still in a

modern setting.

That was the easy part of the design process as I would soon realize that the build and

opening of this show was to happen in only a month. Planning for this fast a pace for a show

wasn’t proving to be easy as I began to break the play down and discover just how many

costume pieces would be required to cloth a cast of 22 members. (There were more initially but a

few had to drop out, which was a struggle in itself.) When we had our first production meeting of

the semester I had all my research and sketches ready, but Sean wanted there to be a slight

change for each character through the show which added many costume pieces, a cast of 22 is

already ambitious enough but now each one will have at the bare minimum 2 costumes and

Carrie now had 5 costumes to herself. I’m nervous with this time frame that no matter how

much prep I do, this will be down to the wire,

I have my doubts about how this will turn out given the circumstance the designer face

with this show as far as time is allotted. Regardless of size and time line, I wanted this design

and I’m still eager to try and put on a great show.