Designed to amaze

Egyptian headdresses featuring cougar and deer heads, plus a full-sized camel costume. Island headscarves that give way to Parisian berets. Then there’s that dazzling robe needed to live up to the musical’s title: “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”

The show calls for 59 headpieces for a cast of 25, with many quick changes needed.

But Omaha Community Playhouse costume designer Georgiann Regan didn’t hit the panic button when the popular musical was chosen last spring, and she’s not hitting it now, just five days before opening night.

“I’ve been doing this 35 years,” Regan said. “You know what the pitfalls are. The big thing was figuring out the fast changes.”

When Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice wrote the show in the early 1970s, it was meant to be an entertaining children’s piece, a way to make a classic Old Testament story come to life. Webber wasn’t thinking about costume changes — or Broadway — when he wrote the score.

But his playful approach gives Regan and her costume crew creative latitude. The tunes cover a wide range of styles: calypso, country-western, French cabaret, ballads, Elvis and straight-up 1970s rock ’n’ roll. Costumes take their cue not just from the Bible but from the contemporary music as well.

“This is one of our greenest shows,” Regan said, referring to how many costume pieces she has recycled from a disparate range of past playhouse shows: “South Pacific,” “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” “The Will Rogers Follies,” “Leader of the Pack,” “Hair” and “The Cocoanuts.”

Those last two shows featured creations by Regan’s assistant designer, Lynne Ridge, such as large puppet-style heads of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon for “Hair” and undersea creatures for a blacklit dream sequence in “The Cocoanuts.”

This time Ridge, who has experience building figures for parade floats, created a dromedary by building a frame of plastic piping and draping fabric over it. Two actors in platform shoes will be the camel’s legs. They’ll also wear football shoulder pads.

“The framing is built so all the weight of the camel’s body goes on the shoulder pads,” she explained.

Regan took her cue for the amazing technicolor coat from the playhouse’s opening show, “Quilters.” The dazzling coat is pieced like a quilt, in a rainbow of bright colors.

“There are patches in patterns the quilters will recognize,” she said. A matching cape for the final scene includes more than a hundred yards of fabric.

And those fast changes?

“We figured out ways to make the costumes so actors could get in and out of them fast or could wear one over the top of another,” Regan said.

As if all that weren’t enough, the show includes a large children’s chorus. Nearly a hundred kids, ages 9 to 18, who participated in the playhouse’s three summer theater camps will form three choruses, each of which will do two shows a week.

The logistics of keeping track of all those kids will be more daunting than their costumes, said Melanie Walters, the playhouse’s director of education and outreach. They’ll wear bluejeans and Nile blue T-shirts, sporting an Egyptian eye, that were issued to all camp alumni.

Director Carl Beck said he’s been making daily excursions to the costume room as he counts down to opening night.

“They are absolutely spectacular, truly fun,” he said of the outfits. “It will take a fleet of dressers backstage to get them all changed in time, but we’ve had the dressers at rehearsals. And they will get it done.”

Contact the writer:

444-1269, bob.fischbach@owh.com

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