Scissors click out a rhythm as Christina Santarelli cuts through some muslin fabric and tries to explain what she does for a living.
“Once I told someone I make costumes for a living, and she thought I made, like, Santa suits and Easter Bunny costumes,” she says. “And if told someone I was a draper, they assumed I made curtains.”
Santarelli, 25, is not a draper as in drapery, but a draper as in draping clothes over a dress dummy. The Surry County native manages the costume shop for Triad Stage, working with costume designers to make sure every actor appears on stage wearing properly fitting apparel appropriate to the era and tone of the play. Sometimes she tracks down vintage clothes, but often she makes clothes herself.
“My job as the shop manager is to take all the items that we need to build and make sure we can get it done in the set amount of time we have before the show opens,” she says.For the next Triad Stage production, the Reynolds Price trilogy “New Music,” which begins Feb. 12, Santarelli has had the privilege of working with one of the people who inspired her to pursue a career in costume design. Triad Stage contracted with UNC School of the Arts instructor Bill Brewer to design costumes for “New Music” and the last two plays in its 2011-12 season, “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” and “The Illusion.”
On a rainy Wednesday afternoon, Brewer has dropped by Triad Stage’s costume shop on Holbrook Street near the Greensboro Coliseum. He wants to make sure the “New Music” cast is all set for a publicity photo shoot coming up later in the week. “New Music” takes place in three different decades — the 1930s, ’40s and ’70s — and Santarelli puts down her scissors and sits down at a computer with her old college professor to look at a website for a business that sells vintage clothes. They’re trying to determine whether the shop has a pink-lapel seersucker suit that will fit a particular actor.
“Now here’s the deal: I’m not even sure he’ll even be wearing this jacket — he’ll be carrying it,” Brewer says.
“Like slung over his shoulder?” Santarelli says.
“Yeah. But as soon as I say it …,” Brewer begins.
“Then they’ll stage it so he needs to have it on,” Santarelli says. “That’s usually how it goes.”
She has to prepare for all sorts of eventualities. For “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” a comedy “tour de farce” staged in the Upstage Cabaret at Triad Stage last fall, Santarelli and her assistant, stitcher Kathleen Ludwig, had to make evening gowns for two large men. For the first play she ever worked on at Triad Stage, “Picnic,” Santarelli had to figure out how to deal with a character having wet hair.
“So she has to be wearing a wig, or maybe her hair isn’t soaking wet, it’s just wet enough so that it appears wet and then it can be dry by the next scene,” she says. “Which is supposed to be like the next day, so of course her hair still wouldn’t be wet.”
While she was growing up in Dobson, her grandmother helped her sew clothes for her dolls. Santarelli took art classes in high school and volunteered at the Andy Griffith Playhouse in Mt. Airy. She went to the School of the Arts planning to become a set designer, but fell in love with designing and making costumes, thanks in part to Brewer’s lessons in dyeing fabric and making clothes look worn.
“I’ve always been interested in costumes, just from watching movies and behind the scenes on DVDs in high school,” she says. “Mainly I just knew I wanted to do something artistic — something where I could make things. Because I was always the child that had a pile of beads in the floor, or Popsicle sticks, like anything that I could be making.”
Santarelli is now in her third season with Triad Stage, following summer work in college with opera companies in Chataqua, N.Y., and Santa Fe, N.M. She also makes custom clothes as a side business and sells them online.
“I think I’m addicted to sewing,” Santarelli says. “Because even if I weren’t doing it as my job, I would do it at home, all the time. I’d still do it. I still sew all the time. My husband thinks I’m crazy.”
Contact Eddie Huffman at 373-7335 or eddie.huffman@news-record.com
