I’m saying yes to a vintage dress
Back when I was a vintage clothing-loving teenager, coveting a bona fide flapper dress, there was one thing I didn’t figure on: old-fashioned fabrics aren’t so breathable.
In present-day Toronto, attired in a dream of a 1920s dress, I am mortified to realize as I resume my place for the umpteenth take of a dance scene in Frankie Drake Mysteries that the sweat smell I detect is coming from me.
And I’m not even one of the dancers.
The premise of the scene was a dance marathon being held at Toronto’s Palais Royale. I was invited to be a “background performer,” playing a spectator to the competition.
My involvement covered only the opening two minutes or so of the episode (airing Monday at 9 p.m. on CBC), a process that ate up about seven hours of my time one evening in late May. If you look to the left when the camera pans to the back of the room (a set dressed up to look like a ballroom), you’ll see a couple of women in hats and orangey-gold-hued dresses shimmying along to the music. I’m the short one.
A couple of observations: the room was smaller than it looks on TV and it was hot as Hades, which is where the sweat comes in. Between takes the extras would line up at a water cooler, stand in front of a hose blowing cool air or apply ice packs.
I felt particularly sorry for the men, who were dressed in shirts, vests, ties and, in some cases, jackets.
And many of the dancers — plus the main actors — were preparing to shoot another ballroom scene when I left the Etobicoke studio around midnight with my scene partner, Shedoesthecity’s Jen Mcneely.
“It was really hot and the days were really long,” agrees series star Lauren Lee Smith after the fact.
My onscreen debut came at the invitation of publicist Adrienne Kakoullis. Luckily I declined her offer to try out my dance moves in the scene; I never would have kept up with the trained dancers playing marathon participants.
Instead, Mcneely and I were instructed to move around to the recorded music and look like we were having the time of our lives so, for take after take after take, we grinned and swayed along to the jazzy track.
Smith doesn’t consider herself a dancer either, even though she took ballet, jazz and other lessons as a child. But she credits “incredible choreographer” Paul Becker, and her partner, Canadian ballroom champ Anton Belyayev, for helping her to convincingly cut a rug.
“Everyone’s little choreographed bit really, really worked out,” said Smith of herself and co-stars Rebecca Liddiard, Sharron Matthews and Chantel Riley, who has the most dance experience, having starred for four years as Nala in The Lion King on Broadway.
Becker, who’s known for projects like Disney’s Descendants and Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, said it was a pleasant surprise that the actors could dance, which isn’t always the case on TV projects.
“It turned out to be a fun episode,” he said.
That was true from my point of view, despite the long hours on set. Much of that time was spent waiting around with the other extras in a cavernous room full of tables and chairs, curtained-off changing areas and makeup stations.
I was given smoky eyes, red lips and red nails, and then a curling iron was used to touch up my hair, which was declared a perfect length for a ’20s look, and my highlights were dark- ened. Poor Mcneely had to hide her longer hair under a wig.
The most exciting part was the tuck-pleated and buttonbedecked silk chiffon dress, a rental from Montreal.
“It fit you perfectly,” recalls costume designer Noreen Landry. It had been worn before by actress Charlotte Sullivan, who played the wife of a famous aviator in the Season 1 episode “The Pilot,” but I don’t mind sharing.
Landry and her staff of eight provide about 75 costumes per episode.
Most of the background performers’ outfits are rented; some 1920s originals and some reproductions.
It’s about 50/50 for guest stars while about 75 per cent of the lead actresses’ clothes are made from scratch or repurposed from new items.
“Body shapes are so different today that in a lot of cases it was easier to make it or put on my 1920s goggles and go shopping,” Landry said.
Smith hadn’t had much expe- rience with period drama before booking Frankie — other than a German miniseries called Hindenburg: The Last Flight that she says no one in North America got to see — but she was eager to delve into the world of 1920s Toronto, which she says was a partic- ularly liberating time for women. “The minute you walk into those sets, and the minute you put on the costumes and have the hair and makeup, you walk differently, you move differently, you talk differently,” she said.
“It’s really being able to dis- appear into a character, which is something for an actor that is really exciting and fun to get to do.”