An afternoon in the life of a wig stylist

 So last year I worked on Iolanthe and had to touch up the Lord Chancellor's wig.  The company owns 3 or 4 but they all looked pretty sad and squashed after being crammed into a bin for storage.  Here are 2 of them (I don't have a "before" picture of the third):

I picked the least uncurled of the 3 I pulled from storage and wet-set it to redo the rolls.  That process took 3 hours and 99 rollers.  (If I were to do it again, I'd stitch pairs of rollers together to avoid the gaps I got between rollers in each row.)

Here's what that wig looked like as it dried:

It was worth the work, though; it looked much better on stage than it would have if I'd done nothing to it.

The rolls still got messy on the ends but it looked good from the audience.

Making irreversible changes

OK, nothing so dramatic as the title might make it sound.  I'm designing hair and makeup for a stage adaptation of Pride & Prejudice and several of the actors will be wearing wigs.  We ended up ordering a wig for one of them; right texture but wrong shape.  Merely pinning it won't work because there's too much volume in the back & sides; trying to pin it smaller would merely leave it looking matted.  The challenge is to take this:

and trim it to approximate something like this:

Wish me luck!

Did anyone miss me?

I just realized I haven't touched this blog in 2 years!  I may take it in a new direction.  I've been doing a lot of hair & makeup design lately, so this might be a good place to record what I work on and track my progress.

I finished The New Moon about a month ago.  Set in 1790, so just about everyone wore a wig, and one utility ensemble member had three!  I had a few false starts with some of the wigs, so I ended up styling close to 40 of them.  No, I didn't have anyone to help, so although I was also supposed to be makeup designer, I was so busy doing wigs that makeup got very short shrift indeed.  

I was styling wigs right up to opening night, and ended up restyling one of them because I wasn't too happy with how the first attempt turned out.  Fortunately, the singer, the director & I were all happy with the 2nd attempt.

The men's wigs were largely queues and braids; easy.  It's just that there were about 12 or 15 of them.  The challenge was the women's wigs.  They were all variations of the Georgiana, Adele and Matilda styles from 18th Century Hair and Wig Styling.  They took a LONG time - about an hour just to do a wet set of each one (though by the end I think I got it down to 45 mins), using close to 30 rollers each.  Then the wig had to sit & dry, then I had to take it apart and style it; usually good for another 30 mins to an hour.  (For these styles I definitely recommend the (discontinued, sadly) Lioness style wig, by Mona Lisa, if you can find one.)  Multiply that by 17 or 18 and you get an idea of how very much time it all took.