I don’t know if this would have come as a surprise to me if it were not 2020-2021 when we went from the idea of doing Head Over Heels as a first part of Fall semester stage musical, to a film production taking up the whole Spring Semester and only premiering for streaming download this June of 2021 (final weekend of streaming is 6/18/21-6/20/21), but I did not realize until we were a week or two into filming that there was supposed to be a lion in this show. For a long time I did not have a script (while we were getting the OK for making a film) and I did most of my designs only having seen a “Slime Tutorial” of a production taken from dodgy angles before putting pen to paper. So when I was asked a week into filming what the Lion costume was going to look like, my reaction was “What Lion Costume?”

The Lion is a very brief moment that is crucial to the plot, but so short it is easy to overlook it. So, after finding that the scene that would include the Lion was not set to be filmed for another week or two, and knowing purchasing fake fur, fabric, (or much of anything) had become a weird paperwork nightmare this year, I decided we should make it of bits and pieces. The most important fact is that the Lion must be able to be “beheaded”. Conveniently the one bit I owned ready-built was an amazing mask by notable Berkeley mask designer Annie Hallatt which had been created for a performer, Gene Lynch, quite atypically out of Celastic, (and which I had bought used on eBay like most of my personal mask collection on my walls at home.)

In order to avoid the dreaded paperwork hell of a 2020-21 purchase, I then dug through assorted stock and materials and came up with a leotard and unitard, fabric scraps, garden gloves, tennis shoes, some raffia, pool noodles, and spray paint. I used this and the collective brains in our costume studio to design and create a cohesive costume around this great mask. This is what we did:

Here we have made an extension to the mask out of raffia, and a shoulder-cape “mane” covered with more raffia. The sleeveless unitard is worn over the leotard, and some pool noodle slices are glued to the gloves to make claw shapes and a row of raffia sewn to the cuffs of the gloves for the first fitting.

I pre-made a tail before the fitting out of a pool noodle (attached to a big flat oval of ethafoam sheet with hot glue) and decorated it with more raffia at the tip. The small cuts and hot-gluing that make the tail shape are what allows it to stay stiff and erect and stable. In the fitting we popped a section of the back seam of the unitard open to stick the tail through (tip first) so the ethafoam disk would hold it in place:

Next, we put the costume onto our female paint mannequin “Miss Esposito” in our loading dock:

To keep the mask safe, it is removed, and the remaining parts are sprayed with Rustoleum 2X spray paint in yellow and orange:

Meanwhile Saoirse sews up fabric scrap spats covered in Raffia to a design by Joanne Martin:

Joanne made little snap on bracelets of ostrich boa scraps to hide the gap from the sleeves to the gloves… I add black spray paint to the clothes on the form, to visually suggest the bent shape of lion legs:

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The mask added to the ensemble brings it together. Then pool noodle toes and claws are added by Joanne Martin to the tennis shoes, and painted along with the spats.