Dancing With the Stars

Fall television has started up again and I have to admit, I'm a little overwhelmed. You know, if I didn't have to work for a living, it would be a LOT easier keeping up with all my shows. And I admit, there are quite a lot of them:


NCIS
CSI
Dancing with the Stars
So You Think You Can Dance
Grey's Anatomy
Glee


not to mention the others already in progress:


Top Chef
Project Runway
Say Yes to the Dress


and the most exciting one yet to come:


LOST


Needless to say, it takes a serious DVR schedule to stay on top of it all. Most difficult for me is Dancing With the Stars, simply because it is such a HUGE time commitment. We're talking 2 hours for the competition show, followed by another hour for the results show. You can pretty much bet on the fact that I will not be blogging about it nearly as regularly as Project Runway. Due simply to the time commitment required, I rarely watch DWTS in real time. I DVR it and then watch it at my leisure, often both the competition show and the results show in one sitting!


In addition to the dancing, what I love about DWTS (and So You Think You Can Dance), are the costumes! Saw that one coming, didn't you? One of my absolute favorite things to do is to design and make dance costumes. Movement in a garment is to me one of the most important qualities and while I always encourage people to wear fitted clothing, I think it's just as important for your clothes to have movement to them. On DWTS, the movement can be a long, flowy skirt for a Vienniese Waltz, or the shake and shimmy of dangling sequins and beads. No matter what it is, I almost always LOVE it. In my dreams, I'm often working in the DWTS wardrobe room! I'm forever impressed by how perfectly every costume not only fits but flatters both the pros and the celebrities. Each costume is custom made week by week and that alone is really impressive to me. I've made a few dance costumes in my day, but they pale in comparison to what I see each week on DWTS.

These were pretty simple to make and they looked fabulous on stage. The picture really doesn't do the green velvet justice- it looks almost black in the photo, but trust me, they're a gorgeous, lush green with rhinestones applied in a snowflake pattern. It's also difficult to see the rhinestone snowflake on the hat, but trust me it's there. Another favorite, for a swing/tap number was this little number:

I loved how each girl got to have her own color, but my favorite detail of the costume were the spectacular spectator tap shoes!

Unfortunately, they've been discontinued and trust me, it was no small task finding the sizes I needed for this one number. If you ever come across a pair for sale, please let me know! These particular ones are the Capezio brand. Savion Glover has a pair that is almost identical, but they run about $200/pair and that's generally a little too rich for my show budget. They are really nice shoes, though!

Ok, enough about the shoes, back to the dance costumes. Last Christmas, we had a ton of dance costumes and I had a blast working on them, but I can't seem to find a photo of my favorite one! It was a red glitter dress with super long fringe down the front & feathers at the shoulder- very latin, very fun. And of course, no Christmas show would be complete without a Rockette-style outfit:

The amazing thing about these outfits is that the dancers went from this outfit...

...directly into the red Rockette outfit in literally about 4 counts of 8. No joke. That was a serious quick change nightmare! (BTW, the military costumes are from Curtain Call Costumes based in York, PA. They make some really cute stuff over there!)

While Christmas shows are always fun for building dancer costumes, perhaps my favorites that I've done while working at AMT are these "Bushel and a Peck" costumes from the 2007 production "Broadway's Best" a revue of 100 years of Broadway song, dance and comedy.