Wizard of Oz - Beginning and End of Show....

[Frank]

All the principals except Dorothy have major makeup/costume changes to undergo, especially at the end of the show. How do folks handle this? How can the lion, tinman and scarecrow remove costume and makeup to reappear in a very short time?

thanks

 

[LXPlot]

Well, this is always very, very tricky. In the most professional seeming productions of this, the three simply were not in the last scene. The good witch and Wizard have considerably smaller changes, things that could be done rather simply during the times they were off stage. Since those two are the more important characters in the "Kansas" setting, it would work without them.

 

[chausman]

We had dorothy, the good witch, and the wizard be there and about six stage hands for each character, rub makeup off as fast as they could. Then the actors would come on as soon as they were ready. We also dragged some lines out to give them time.

 

[FACTplayers]

Use as much time as possible in the scene where Dorthy is meeting all of the munchkins. This worked for us, along with using a few stage hands to get make-up on as fast as possible. Plus, the lion and tin man don't appear for awhile, so do the scarecrow first.

 

[CSCTech]

It may not be possible for you depending on your cast size or you just might not want to do it this way, but when we did the show, we had two actors/actresses for those scenes. One night the 'Kansas' cast would stay in costume for the Kansas scenes and do some other background parts, and the 'Oz Cast' would stay in their parts. The next night the casts switched roles.

It worked great for us because it was a Jr. High show so we had a lot of sign ups.

 

[rochem]

The national tour production of Oz that came through here last year handled it pretty simply. The "Kansas" scenes were almost entire lit with low-angle sidelight from dance towers in each entrance - a shin, mid, and head all in a warm straw color. It was really effective at enhancing the differences between Kansas and Oz, but it also did a great job at hiding makeup imperfections. The Head Electrician just told us not to include the three male principals during the last scene, and it went over fine. I'm sure they had wardrobe offstage rubbing the makeup off as fast as possible, but because of the lighting choices, it wasn't a huge deal if they didn't finish, and they didn't really need to apply new makeup anyway.

 

[kiwitechgirl]

There's plenty of time to get the three made up between their exit as farmhands and first entrances as Scarecrow/TinMan/Lion - at least that's what we found both times I did the show. The end is trickier; I seem to remember that at least one of them has lines in the final scene, so leaving them out is difficult. Clever blocking is one way around it - have them facing upstage so you can't see their faces, or just have wardrobe standing by with makeup wipes to get rid of it as quickly as possible. I think we actually used doubles for TinMan and Lion at the end (it was a long time ago!) and had the principals say their lines from offstage - easy with radio mics. This was more for costume reasons than makeup - getting TinMan changed was a major operation and Lion wasn't much easier. Scarecrow was fine - I think we underdressed him for his last Scarecrow scene so all he had to do was take one layer off.