Stratford Festival costumes, props are up for grabs
Rare sale of nearly 50,000 items give fans opportunity to own a piece of history
Hundreds of pieces of this city’s cultural history will go on sale this weekend during the Stratford Festival’s seldom-held warehouse sale.
Over the past few months, warehouse staff, design staff, and student interns have worked tirelessly to sift through the Festival’s nearly 50,000 stored costumes and props from performances gone by in a bid to make room for newer pieces.
“We only have a finite amount of space,” warehouse supervisor William Schmuk said from the festival’s two-storey storage facility in Stratford.
“It doesn’t happen often that we do a costume sale — we probably haven’t done one in eight years — so it’s a big deal. And we have lots of things here. I was a design assistant here in the ’80s, and there are costumes from the show I worked on. We did a prop sale two years ago, but this is the first time we’ve done a costume and prop sale in a while.”
Though the festival reuses and repurposes many of the costumes and props used in past shows, some have reached the end of their usable lifespan — from the perspective of the theatre, anyhow. But for schools, community theatre groups, or individuals looking for costumes, collectibles, or home-decor items, Schmuk said the warehouse sale is the only opportunity they will have to own a piece of Stratford Festival history at an affordable price.
And with Halloween coming up, the period, fantasy, and super-hero costumes that will be up for sale, along with some of the creepier props used onstage, offer a unique opportunity to score some professionally designed show-stoppers for that costume contest. “There are period costumes, head-to-toe, full Elizabethan things,” Schmuk said. But there are also some less traditional costumes.
“Some pretty wild things,” warehouse assistant Michael Piscitelli said. “Like the big, kind of garish, colourful outfits from Kiss Me, Kate (in 2010) are going on sale. There’s some stuff form Alice in Wonderland, which was four years ago.”
And though there will be fewer props available than costumes — a little more than 100 — Dona Hrabluk, the Festival’s head of props, has been working around the clock picking a strong selection of pieces, old and new, for the sale. “There are things up there that haven’t been touched in quite a few years, or are broken, or the Fiberglas disintegrates, or the foam disintegrates, but they’re really cool. Even if they can’t be used (onstage), they ’re really great pieces of art,” Hrabluk said.
And because some of the pieces at the sale mean a lot to the Festival staff and actors who worked with them on stage, Hrabluk said she and her colleagues will be in line on the weekend, just like everyone else.
The sale will take place between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Those who make purchases will have the option to take their items home right away, or arrange to pick them up on Monday.