Feminine
Force Works Off Stage for Rainbow
July 5, 1958 – Winnipeg Free Press Archives
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| VOLUNTEERS will be serving hot coffee to Rainbow Stage patrons and here Mrs. S. J. McKay gets some practice. She fills the cups of actors and production crew members taking a coffee break from rehearsals. Left to right are: Miss Frances Williams, Don McGregor, Miss May Ostapowich and Georges La Flache. |
Behind every
worthwhile endeavour it is quite usual to find a group of hard-working women.
The Winnipeg
Summer Theatre association which starts its season at Rainbow Stage Monday is
no exception. Behind the scenes many Winnipeg women are donating their
time and talents to the dozens of jobs necessary to ensure the success of any
theatrical production.
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| MRS. RALPH G. YOUNG creates a papier mache dog for a dance sequence in The King and I. The dance depicts the Siamese version of Uncle Tom's Cabin. A sculptress, Mrs. Young is working on the masks in her home on Somerset Avenue. |
Sewing for the
costume department is one of the really big projects the volunteers have
tackled and the women are putting in many hours at sewing machines in the
Strathcona Curling Club rehearsal headquarters for the Rainbow Stage shows.
Large papier
mache masts for the Siamese dance in The King and I are being created by Mrs.
Ralph G. Young, Mrs. Harold Stubbs and Mrs. John Holmes.
Rainbow Stage
patrons like their cup of coffee at intermission time so the women sell hot
coffee on the pergolas on either side of the theatre and the profits are turned
into the association.
Square dancers
who use Rainbow Stage for their dances sell programs and usher in the
customers.
There are many
other jobs handled by the women’s house committee and other volunteers – the
ticket blitz, which is most important, hunting properties or even driving the
costume department supervisor around the city as he gathers together his
materials.
It all goes to
make a good show.
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| THE SUMMER THEATRE Association needs women who are handy with needle and thread. There are many costumes to be sewn. Here, three volunteers lend a helping hand. Left to right they are: Miss Anne Stevenson, Miss Lorine Hodgson, chairman of the women's house committee and Mrs. Douglas McKay, founder of the women's committee. |
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It’s Skill
Behind The Scenes That Keeps The Play Rolling
A Story Of The
Rainbow Stage
By Jerry
Walmsley – Winnipeg Free Press Archives
July 12,
1958
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| From an old wedding gown and a red sash Bernard Polly styles a costume for Ziegfeld Follies queen Mary Wallis |
“The play’s
the thing” said Will Shakespeare.
Ah, but there
is more to it that just that, Mr. Shakespeare and we need go no further that
the Strathcona Curling Club to prove our point.
There, amidst
cardboard cartons, yellowed bridal gowns, greasepaint and musty frocks and
suits, the Winnipeg Summer Theatre association is creating the fantasy to weave
around the plays.
And key man in
that purposeful disorder is Bernard Polly, a lean, spectacled fellow with a
divine faculty for creating something out of nothing. He is the costume
designer and co-ordinator for the Rainbow Stage productions.
With a $600
budget to work with, Mr. Polly right now is designing and making 225 costumes
for one show – Hells-a-Poppin.
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WHERE DID he
begin?
Well, in the
first place Mr. Polly was a dress designer in a fashionable Los Angeles shop
for two years. He came back to Canada because he “likes working with
Canadians.”
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| Styling 1880 hats and feathers and not are designer Bernard Polly, his assistant Rocky Grant (right) and an unidentified helper. |
Until recently
he was a commercial artist in Winnipeg but he had a real soft spot for costume
designing.
Finally, the
firm he was working for decided that he couldn’t devote full time to costume
designing and it too, so they suggested that he might give the Summer Theatre
all of his time.
Because Summer
Theatre in Winnipeg had a financial setback and is struggling, Mr. Polly is
strapped to an almost impossible budget. So his first call was to the
Junior League Thrift Shop, which was closing for the summer months. He
cleaned them out of bridal and evening gowns, tuxedos, and tails and dress
shirts.
Next stop –
the Harlassah Bargain Centre. Then the Goodwill Industries where one
purchase alone included 65 evening gowns.
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MATERIAL from
three gowns provides the designer with the basis for one costume. Add to
this – lace, sequins, net beads and maybe feathers and you have a Polly
original.
There are 40
hooped crinolines with full bouffant skirts with three rows of six inch net
stitched around the 30 feet of hem in each skirt Mr. Polly has been poking
through the lanes of Winnipeg, stripping scrap steel off wooden packing cases
with which to make his hoops.
For four weeks
now they have been sewing down at the curling rink but Mr. Polly still needs
women who would happily donate some sewing time.
One scene in
which the cast does the song With a Little Bit Of Luck, requires 12 pearly hats
and a pearly suit. Close to 20 pounds of white buttons are being used for
this.
Another is an
extravagant sequence which might be termed the Polly Follies but actually is
referred to as the Ziegfeld number, which according to Mr. Polly stars 10 of
Winnipeg’s most beautiful and curvaceous women.
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| Nadine Kelly demonstrates eye makeup for Judyan Gustafson and Carole Cohen. The model is Lane Carswell a Ziegfeld girl in Hells-a-Poppin. |
UNDERNEATH the
big beautiful hats and the silk foppers are the faces of the singers and
dancers and a versatile school feather with a Schilizy hairdo is responsible
for them.
“Anybody here
seen Kelly?” is a common cry backstage in any of Winnipeg’s theatres. The
girl who answers to the call is Nadine Kelly, supervisor of make-up for the
Summer Theatre. Kelly has done makeup for so many theatrical endeavors in
Winnipeg that it would take a column to list them all.
But as every
actor in Winnipeg knows, Kelly is much more than a makeup artist. Kelly
has worked in every phase of the theatre. She’s been an actress, singer,
stagehand, prompter, wardrobe mistress and a shoulder to cry on.
“I’ve been a
baby sitter too, for adults, children, dogs and other animals,” she says.
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WHEN SOMEBODY
presses the panic button it’s invariably level-headed Kelly who untangles the
mess and puts things right.
In the Rainbow
Stage production of Annie Get Your Gun a worried dancer came off stage
screaming K-E-L-L-Y. Calmly, Kelly surveyed the situation. The dancer’s
tight fitting cowboy pants had split down the back. In minutes he had to
be back on Stage. Kelly put the young man over her knee and quickly
stitched up his trousers.
Whenever a
director is casting around for a bit character player he often puts the finger
on Kelly. In I Remember Mama last season, Kelly with bucket and mop in
hand, ambled on stage as a weary, old scrub-woman in a hospital.
Last winter
with Death of a Salesman was staged in the city, a cast member who was ill did
not show up one night. Kelly was busy making up the cast when the
director told her she’d be going on as the secretary. She did – for two
nights.
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KELLY IS
TRAINING the Summer Theatre actors to do their own make up as much as possible
because she knows if they go elsewhere to act they will be expected to do their
own faces. She is also training some assistants to help her out through
the three shows.
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| Hells-a-Poppin in WInnipeg - the next Rainbow Stage production - features Grant Cowan, Daphne Karol and Murray Senens. |
Makeup for The
Kind and I, with its Siamese setting is the biggest task Kelly has to tackle
this summer.
“Eyes are an
actor’s greatest asset” says Kelly, who likes to pay special attention to eye
makeup.
She says
people should remember that if they sit in the first few rows of a theatre,
actors may look overly made up, even to the point of being grotesque.
This exaggeration is necessary so that the people in the rest of the theatre
can see the actors facial expressions.
Rainbow Stage
presenets a difficulty that is not encountered in an indoor theatre – having to
makeup for daylight and artifical light both. But Kelly is equal to that
problem too.
Kelly probably
knows more faces than anyone else in Winnipeg. They pass her on the
street and say hello, and although she can’t always pin a name on the face she
knows at one time or another she made it up.
And when you are
out at Rainbow Stage taking in Brigadoon, Hells-a-Poppin or The King and I one
of those faces will likely belong to some panic stricken actor backstage,
roaring through the wings screaming “K-E-L-L-Y.”
