Posted November 17, 2025

Behind the Scenes – Costume and Set Designer

Charlotte, you have a very impressive career that includes designing both costumes and sets for theatres across Canada. How did you first get interested in theatre design?

This is a childhood story. I grew up on a fruit farm, but my mom and dad both loved Shakespeare, particularly my dad. I have two older sisters, and when each of us turned ten, we were taken to Stratford to see a musical and Shakespeare. I saw Cinderella, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I think was the one with Christopher Newton and Christopher Walken, designed by Leslie Hurry. And those fairies! I was just swept away by the woodland magic that was going on onstage. I think that stuck with me for a long time, but I didn’t really know what I was going to do. I remember when I was fourteen or fifteen, phoning up all the millinery stores in Hamilton to try and get a job. Now, at that point, there were only three millinery stores left, and none of them were hiring because, you know, hats were disappearing. But I always did crafty stuff and sewed and painted. I’d get up in the middle of the night and make things on the kitchen table. And then in my last year of high school, I heard about Theatre Production at York University, and I went, “Oh, well, I better start taking some courses.” I went to Winona High School, and they did have art class, but I’d just taken one art class, and it was really a technical school. So I took three years of drafting in a single year. Anyway, I got myself into York University, and I guess the rest is history!

How great that you’ve gone on to do so much work at Stratford, and also Shaw, of course. What’s it like to work at a big theatre festival? Do you have a large team to work with?

I was still going to university when I first worked at Stratford as a costume decorator and costume painter for a couple of seasons. And then I went to Shaw, and I feel like I got my Master’s at Shaw because I was there for three or four years in a row; I started out as the dyer and finished as a designer. By the time I got to Stratford to design, I was used to that larger theatre thing where you’ve got people to do the dyeing, and you’ve got people to do the boots and shoes, and you have a team of cutters—depending on the size of show you’re doing, in Stratford you might have seven cutters with teams. Those Shakespeares, they really can add up, lots of armies and lots of characters! I think one of the most fun times I had at Stratford was when we did Ghosts by Ibsen. Not too many characters, and we got to do a kind of an abstract set with birch trees that we hauled out of the woods and something like eight costumes. So we could get really, really picky about trim and all that kind of stuff. If you’re doing a musical or one of those big shows, it is sort of like dressing an army. In these days of budget consciousness—which has always been there; we shouldn’t pretend that it was always lots and lots of cash flowing—there are trade-offs, if you’ve got a bunch of money for this, then you don’t have money for that. But it’s definitely a different experience than with smaller theatres, where budgets can be tiny. At Stratford, I remember we were building six or eight monks for The Brothers Karamazov, Russian monks. And the best fabric that we found happened to have a great quantity of silk in it, like 95%. My assistant and I looked at each other and went only in Stratford would it be the best possible thing to use silk for the monks, right? But it was that kind of rough silk, and it lights better. Silk really does light better, even with the, you know, new magic lights they have.

I would imagine that lighting greatly affects your work.

Yes, when the new LED lights were introduced, I had a moment of: “Why is everything a different colour? Oh, no!” This is talking out of school, but a lot of lighting designers are men, and there is a greater amount of colour blindness in the male population. So there are some lighting designers that I’m positive are colour-blind because costume designers end up explaining, “You see that? It wasn’t brown when we bought it, and it’s not meant to be brown.”

Do the large festivals have a lot of costume storage?

Stratford does, but they also have sales every once in a while. And there’s a certain point where after you’ve used a pair of breeches for, you know, half a dozen shows, you can’t use them anymore, although the theatres all stretch that. You always have to pull x percent of stock; that’s in your contract these days. You know, you might be required to have 65% stock. You sometimes think, “But I know there isn’t 65% stock there…” The same items tend to get used often, either because they’re neutral, or they have enough character that you go, “Oh yeah, I like this pair of breeches. It goes with this vest and the wig colour we were thinking of. It’s all going to work.” A certain piece might get used a lot because of its neutrality, or just that it’s a better costume than some awful pants where somebody chose the wrong fabric.

There’s a room in Stratford called “The Cage,” which used to be a cage where all the fabric was kept locked up at night. Now it’s a big room. But I remember going in there with Patrick Clark, and I found a bolt of fabric that I had bought for the first show I ever did at Stratford. And it was a bad choice, like a really bad choice. And of course, nobody had used the fabric—twenty years later it was still there! I said, “Patrick, do you think we could take this out to a field and burn it?” So as not have my mistake glaring me in the face every time I walk in for a piece of trim. I don’t know what possessed me to buy that yardage other than nerves. When you’re young, you make mistakes; you don’t realize how the hang of the fabric is so important, because it’s got to move. This particular bolt wasn’t flowy fabric at all. It was solid, nasty fabric. Anyway.

That’s how you learn, right?

It is. Gotta make a few missteps along the way.

Do you have any favourite costume eras? It seems like everybody’s wild about Regency now because of Bridgerton.

Oh, Regency is hard. You need skinny people to make Regency look good. Unless you’re trying to make it look comic. And then plump is fine. But I find the proportions are a little bit difficult in Regency for your average body. I really like just before the Regency, so like 1775, 1780. And I love the 1930s a lot. The late 20s, early 40s, and the 30s. I love the bias cut and the velvets of the rich people 30s, and I love the poor people 30s as well. You get the great denim that’s worn down, and silk that’s masquerading as cotton for a little farm dress. So I’d say those are my two favourites, but I like most of the periods. You don’t get to do certain periods often because they’re not very stage-friendly. There’s not a lot of hoop skirt shows. The party at Fred’s in A Christmas Carol, you get hoop skirts in there, and you do get that period in certain operas.

Have you designed for operas as well?

Not a ton of them, but some. Actually, my next project is going to be working with Michael Levine on the revival of Rigoletto, which we worked on before. (He’s busy opening something in Paris, so I’m going to I’m going to try to be him.) The outfits are done, because we did them the first time, about fourteen years ago. But we have to refit different people, and the set’s fairly busy; it’s got an awful lot of furniture and scene changes.

Oh, I wish I could see that.

It’s pretty good! And, you know, Rigoletto is a very popular opera, so you’re guaranteed a good house. It’s nice when you know that you’re working on something that’s going to be seen by a lot of people.

Charlotte, you also design sets. Do you often do set and costume together? Are there advantages (or disadvantages) to doing both?

I like doing both because you get the whole picture, and you don’t have to have discussions with anyone but yourself about colour choices or anything else. But depending on how the project is working out, and how much production time there is, sometimes it’s not possible. I’ve done a number of musicals at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, and you have to split the two jobs, because there just isn’t enough time to do them both. Musicals have a lot of fittings, so your days are kept pretty busy with that, and there’s no way you would be able to get out to go prop shopping or spend time in the shop and all the other things you’re supposed to do. A lot of times I will do just costumes.

And, you know, I hate to bring up the gender thing, but because I can do costumes, I get asked only to do the costumes more than I get asked only to do the set. Although there have been times that I’ve only done the set, but there’s very definitely a gender split: we’ll get the boy to do the set and we’ll get the girl to do the costumes. And some theatres are, are better at, you know, not doing that than others. But I’m not going to name names!

One last question: What are the qualities and skills that you think would be useful for an aspiring designer?

Well, it’s good to be able to get along with everybody and still get your ideas across and get people on your side. For example, you want the scenic artist to be as excited about the project as you are. So it’s good to be able to talk about your work. The designer always has to do a “show-and-tell” presentation at the beginning of the process, and I used to feel, “Oh, I don’t want to do that. I’m too shy.” I was in London one time getting ready to do a show-and-tell, and they had asked the board members to come. I was sitting beside this kind of heavy hitter lady, I can’t remember her name now, but she was probably in her early 60s. And I said, “Oh, I’m so nervous.” She said, “Hogwash!” (Or something like that.) “You know, you’re the only one that knows what this is, so just tell us!” And so now I have her voice in my head whenever I get nervous, and I think, “You’re the one. You know, and this is your big chance to tell everybody else.”

It’s really good advice. They can decide they like it or decide they don’t like it. But this is your only chance to let them know about it. So it’s not enough to just do the beautiful drawings—or the ugly drawings, if that’s what the show is calling for. You have to be able to talk about it, too. It is exhausting, a day full of talking about stuff. And a lot of times, especially if I’m out of town, I will find that I talk all day long—because you’re talking to wardrobe, you’re talking to the props people, you’re talking to the director, you’re talking to the actors. You have to go home at night and just order Swiss Chalet and have a bath or something!

You also have to have a certain amount of physical energy. Last July, I was leaving hurriedly, early in the morning, to catch a bus, and I missed the bottom step on my stairs. I’m still on a cane. I tore my meniscus; I did something to my DCLs, and I don’t even know what they are! At a certain point, somebody offered me a job, and I thought, “I can’t do it.” Because I couldn’t walk fast enough to shop for this show. It wasn’t the first time I’ve had injuries while working, but it was the first time I thought, “I’m not well enough to do a show.” I’m still feeling like I have to be a little bit careful. I’m going to Mark’s Work Warehouse to get ugly snow boots with treads on them so I don’t slip and fall on the sidewalk! It takes a lot of physical energy to do the work well—if you’re shopping for props, you’re maybe in an old barn somewhere finding the best chairs or if you’re working for a small company, you might be scene painting as well, or you might even be doing a little bit of building, although we try not to do that anymore. I got a much smaller car because I thought, “If I get a smaller car, I won’t be able to carry things from the store to the theatre.” It’s mostly worked, but every once in a while, it backfires!

What else do they need? A sense of humour helps. And you need the technical knowledge.

You have to be able to deal with people. You have to have the technical knowledge, how to draw, how to build things, historical knowledge. But you also have to have the theatrical knowledge about how everything’s going to be used, how everything needs to work together.

And we haven’t even gotten to the very specialized skill of wigs creation. Because wigs surround an actor’s face, they often become even more integral to a performance than the costume. That’s when you realize that a good wig person is worth their weight in gold!