“I need to know who has underwear and who doesn’t!” yelled costume designer Erica Hohn.
It was three nights before the opening of “A Nude Hope: A Star Wars Burlesque” at Gorilla Tango Theatre, and Hohn had been sitting quietly in the front row for about a half-hour, sewing a pastie.
The costumes, which include a hairy minidress for Chewbacca and a gold lamé pointy bra for C-3PO, were still in varying stages of completion that Wednesday night. Hot pants, fishnets and bras are a staple of the wardrobe, but only a few of the eight girls had pasties, and Darth Vader was accidentally eating her blond hair underneath the helmet.
With each girl playing at least one character — except Diva La Vida (the cast goes by their chosen burlesque names), who plays a hilarious and strangely sexy Obi-Wan Kenobi — quick costume changes were also a challenge that director Timothy Bambara and the cast were trying to figure out. In one scene, for example, Zoe Drift as Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon and Stella Cheeks as the Death Star do a dance to Styx’s “Come Sail Away,” and then Drift needs to change quickly into her Stormtrooper get-up, which includes a tight corset and long black gloves. She came onstage with a glove half on.
“I need a corset putter-on-er!” Drift said.
It’s these timing issues that the team had been working on in the final weeks before the show opened Saturday.
“We’ve been working like crazy, especially the last two weeks, to get everything together,” Bambara said. “Essentially, we’ll have developed and opened the show in 40 days. I would say that a lot of the groundwork for blocking and lines was set first, and then we have been spending a lot of the last few weeks on fine-tuning the choreography and comedic bits for the show.”
The script, written by Mary Catherine Curran and with input from the entire cast and crew, allows room for improvisation. So do the dances, choreographed by Rachel Singer, but there are also a few group dances that require a bit more timing consistency. Some, like a dance to disco favorite “Do the Hustle,” include the entire cast dressed in hot pants.
The woman all seem completely comfortable with the lack of clothing.
“I certainly did some confidence building exercises before my first show,” says Diva La Vida (Obi-Wan). “But at the end of the day, it’s just another costume, albeit, a very small one.”
She has been in other Gorilla Tango Geek Girl Burlesque shows as well, performing in “Boobs and Goombas” on Saturday nights and in “Fellowship of the Boobs” on Thursday nights.
In “A Nude Hope,” Diva La Vida not only gets to do burlesque dances and wear sexy clothes, but she is also the only person in the cast who gets to wear facial hair.
“My favorite part of that costume is definitely the beard,” she said. “My Obi-Wan really clicked into place once I put that bad boy on.”
See “A Nude Hope” Saturdays at 9:30 p.m. through August 27.
