Tutus spritzed with vodka, and other secrets of the ‘Nutcracker’ costume shop

It’s hard to figure out where to focus your eyes when you step into the textile feast that is the Charlotte Ballet costume shop during Nutcracker season.

There’s a cluster of mice heads on a sewing machine table waiting to get their whiskers painted.

Sugar plum fairy tutus sit neatly in a stack, and the larger-than-life heads of the Mouse King and the Nutcracker stare down from a shelf.

For Charlotte Ballet and countless other city ballets across the country, the Nutcracker is a big perennial undertaking, but one that’s essential to the financial health of the ballet.

Because audiences love to buy tickets to the Nutcracker. So much so, that Charlotte Ballet will offer 19 Nutcracker performances between Dec. 6-23, with around 150 dancers taking the stage in every show — including more than 100 child dancers from Charlotte Ballet’s youth academy.

To keep the show visually dazzling, Charlotte Ballet relies on costume shop manager Katherine Zywczyk, wardrobe supervisor Anna De La Cour and assistant wardrobe supervisor April Woerner to create, maintain and organize every inch of what dancers wear - from the tights and tutus to the tiaras.

The wardrobe trio put down their sewing needles for a few minutes on a recent morning to share some secrets behind the Nutcracker costume magic.

• Laundry and daily costume maintenance are a huge deal. (And the reason costume shop workers are the first to come in and the last to leave on show days.) At 8 every morning of a Nutcracker performance, the costume staff reports to the Belk Theater to gather all of the tights, leotards and other washable costume components and toss them in washing machines in the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center. Costumes that can’t be washed are inspected and misted with a spray bottle filled with vodka and a dryer sheet. “(Vodka is) one of the best fail-safes we have for maintaining the costumes,” Zywczyk says, adding that vodka has antibacterial properties, is colorless, odorless and evaporates quickly. Cleanliness is especially important because many costumes are shared by different dancers from night to night.

• The sharing of costumes means Zwyczyk and her crew must make sure different bodies can fit into the same costumes. The key? Rows of adjustable bars and hooks on the backs of bodices to allow them to fit tighter or looser, and snap-on pant cuffs to make pants longer for a taller dancer. Some dancers lose weight during a Nutcracker run, due to the calorie drain of so many performances in such a short amount of time. The costume managers make sure some dancers always have an extra row of bars and hooks so their costumes can tighten if needed.

• You won’t see a costume older than 2016 anywhere on the Nutcracker stage. That’s because former Bank of America Chairman Hugh McColl gifted the Charlotte Ballet with $1 million in 2016 to create all new sets and costumes. He made the donation in honor of his wife, Jane Spratt McColl. All costumes created in 2016 have a special tag sewn inside honoring the McColl donation. (There are a few new costumes this year, however. There’s a new Snow Queen costume being made, and a new costume for the female performer playing the lead Chinese dancer role. That role has been performed by a male in recent years, which is why there is a need for a new female Chinese costume.)

• Fast backstage costume changes are common in the ballet world, and in the Nutcracker, the quickest one happens to Clara. She’ll have less than 60 seconds to pull off her party dress and step into her nightgown at the beginning of the show in a little booth just behind the curtain. She’ll have help: De La Cour and Woerner are always backstage during shows, along with a couple of stagehands from a local union. (Fun fact: Clara’s nightgown is put in place backstage at least 30 minutes before the audience hears the first note of the Tchaikovsky score.)
  
  
• It takes at least 10 “gondolas” or giant wooden rolling wardrobe boxes, and a myriad of hampers and other rolling vessels to get costumes and wardrobe equipment from the Charlotte Ballet headquarters on North Tryon Street to the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center the week before the Nutcracker performances begin. Mice costumes for children are moved in giant rolling hampers, and there’s a 5-foot-tall “wardrobe box,” or moving closet, big enough to hold sewing machines, laundry supplies, sewing supplies, and hair and makeup supplies.

Want to go?

The Charlotte Ballet Nutcracker has 19 shows at the Belk Theater between Dec. 6-23. Tickets are available at tix.carolinatix.org.

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This story was originally published November 25, 2019 at 6:00 AM.