sew-on and velcro

Nauvoo Pageant costume crew performs 'minor miracle' to clothe family casts

Herald-Whig Staff Writer

NAUVOO, Ill. -- Susie Geertsen used to believe a really large theatrical show cast might be 80 people.

After costuming the hundreds of people on stage for the closing scenes every night of the Nauvoo Pageant, "80 doesn't look so big anymore," Geertsen said.

"When you have 300 people on stage in costume, I'm telling you that is awesome," she said. "I still never get tired of it."

With a week left in this year's pageant run, Geertsen and her costume crew still pull off what she calls "a minor miracle" on a weekly basis to costume family casts of up to 200 people arriving every Monday and have them on stage by 5 p.m. Tuesday.

"Every Monday night we have a dress rehearsal. Every Tuesday we have opening night. In this run, we have five opening nights," Geertsen said. "What we do doesn't work in real theater. I know. I've tried."

But what they do does work -- and works well -- in the costume shop housed in one wing of Nauvoo-Colusa Junior High School, a few miles from the outdoor pageant stage.

Classrooms convert to closets housing 1840s-styled clothing grouped by color, style and size from newborn through men's size 54 pants and shirts.

Costumes are made from 100 percent cotton, chosen to help cast members stay as comfortable as possible and for easy laundering, but in period styles.

"Our silhouette is basically correct, but we needed to make it simpler to they could change easily," Geertsen said.

Using Velcro, for example, to connect the skirt and bodice of a woman's costume helps speed changes and "cut down on our alterations," she said. "If we did wedding-type alterations, nobody would be on stage Tuesday night."

Cast members are assigned an economic class, such as farmer or shopkeeper, and a color for "a variety of representations of lives in the costumes," Geertsen said. "Otherwise it would look like a baseball team times 100.

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