When "Getting Taken to the Cleaners" is a Good Thing

BY Kerry Reid

Goodman's A Christmas Carol has 27 actors playing multiple roles in period costume.

You think you have wardrobe issues over the holidays? Consider Heidi McMath’s situation.

The longtime costume shop manager at the Goodman pulls double duty in the fall, designing the clothes worn by 27 actors and musicians (many playing multiple roles) in the theatre’s annual production of A Christmas Carol. With 57 performances during the run, the cleaning stacks up.

Fortunately for McMath (and her counterparts at Lyric Opera, Chicago Shakespeare, and several other performing arts companies in the region), she’s got a reliable ally in Mark Lorts and Key Club Cleaners of Blue Island.

Key Club, started by Lorts’ father-in-law in 1961, has been the drycleaner of choice for many performing arts companies for over 30 years. Over the years, Key Club’s employees have learned to work closely with costume shops to help guarantee that actors will have clothes on their backs at each performance.

“They can do a fast turnaround and make sure our pieces are there,” says McMath. “I can’t even think of a time lately when a piece has gone astray. Knowing you have that relationship is great.”

Key Club picks up the costumes weekly every Monday, cleans them, and delivers them back to the costume shops the next afternoon. But in addition to the routine rush work, Lorts notes, “We do a lot of [fabric] sampling. If [costume designers] are constructing something and they want to know how it’s going to look after two or three cleanings, they’ll send a little swatch and I’ll show them. ‘This is one cleaning, this is two, this is three,’ and they know what it’s going to look like.”

The more elaborate the costumes, of course, the more headaches for designers and cleaners alike. Maureen Reilly, the costume director for Lyric Opera of Chicago, recalls a production of Salome several years ago that used an intricate system of beads and strings for the famous “Dance of the Seven Veils” dress.

“As you pulled the string, the fabric disappeared. Whatever the beads were made of, they melted at the cleaners [after the first cleaning]. We had to frantically reconstruct the costume for the next night.”

Lorts notes that “in the old days, everything was hand-sewn and the beading was usually glass. Nowadays there are a lot of things that are plastic. And we’ll see hand-painted stuff where somebody wanted to change the color of a button.” All these details need to be shared with the cleaner in order to make sure that the costume survives the process.

Lise Stec, the head draper at Chicago Shakespeare, says that letting the cleaners know ahead of time about the amount of “distressing” used on a costume is important. “[Key Club] is very good. They’ll call us up if there’s a weird stain. We’ll tell them at the beginning, ‘This is a very distressed show.’ We have to let them know when stains are supposed to be there, as opposed to, ‘Please get this out.’”

Charles Mee's Big Love gave Goodman costumers lots of trouble.

When they’re not using the drycleaners, the costume shops do a lot of laundry with onsite washers and dryers. But that, too, presents challenges. Stec says, “We have to deal with actors with allergies. We had an actor in [the fall production of] Cymbeline who is very allergic to detergents and perfumes so we had to use special soap for that.”

Alicia Turner, assistant costume shop manager for Chicago Shakespeare, says that one of the biggest changes she’s noticed in her nine years with the company is that many more costumes are now built, rather than being rented from other theatres, a change she marks from the time the company took up residence at Navy Pier. Though construction, of course, requires more work, it also guarantees higher quality.

“We’ve had stuff come from rental houses that once upon a time was a pretty dress, but it’s old and now the thread is starting to go. You find interesting fixes, like duct tape on the hem.”

Anyone who’s ever had to scrub Great-Aunt Emily’s pancake makeup off their collar after Christmas dinner can relate to the woes facing many costume shops. Reilly cites yet another production of Salome (that minx causes a lot of problems!) at the Lyric. This one involved a resplendent cream-colored Fortuny gown for the title character—a gown that always ended up bedaubed with the exaggerated blue makeup worn by the male lead.

“Mark had to pick up that dress and drop it off again the next day after every performance,” says Reilly.

While everyday pickups aren’t the norm, Lorts cites a couple of special challenges.

“Stage blood, once in a while, depending on how it’s constructed and what type of material you’re dealing with, is sometimes tough. Sometimes it’s paint that they put on stage. That’s a tough one. As far as treating spots and that kind of thing goes, when they go down on the floor, sliding on their knees, all of a sudden you’ll get a hole in the knee. You can get premature wear in a costume if you get aggressive going after certain spots.”

The Lyric’s Reilly says one trick for dealing with stage blood is to concoct it in a way that includes liquid detergent for easier cleaning.

“Blood is the one thing that all wardrobe crews fear,” says McMath. But when she and her crew worked on Charles L. Mee’s Big Love at the Goodman a few seasons ago, they found a true bete noir—the show included a climactic bloody fight that also involved demolishing a huge wedding cake.

“There were men with tuxedoes with blood and icing ground into their wool coats,” recalls McMath. “I’d like to think that if I’d set up the costumes, I would have insisted they not be wool. [The show, directed by Les Waters, was part of a regional tour and the costumes came in with it.] The show was two hours and maintenance took three hours after each show. We were running that at the same time as A Christmas Carol, so there wasn’t even room for everyone in the costume shop. The wardrobe crew was sitting out in the hallway scraping icing off the coats and thinking, ‘You know, blood isn’t that bad.’”

Lorts, who also has worked with Victory Gardens, Northlight, Writers’ Theatre, and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, is a theatre fan as well, not least because going to shows lets him see his firm’s handiwork in action. “There are a lot of times when I’m sitting in the audience and you hear people talking about the costumes, and they don’t have a clue about what it takes to maintain those garments.”