Costumes

Amazing Grace: The True Story will employ approximately 40 actors, including men, women and children demanding well over 240 costume pieces. The professional Costume Designer has competing interests which can make their lives interesting. There is the demand for realism: audiences want to be swept away into a world very different from their own and the costumes are a key ingredient to drawing them in. There is however a separate goal for costume design: to make it easy for audiences to recognize the characters and tell what stage of life, social strata or occupation they belong to. This can create conflict with the need for realism particularly when the fashions of a bygone era differ substantially from our own.

For instance, Royal Navy officers did not have an official uniform in 1742. If we were to accurately portray their dress, there would only be a few subtle differences between the officers and men, ones not visible from the audience. So the officers must be clad in uniforms that were introduced almost a decade after Newton’s naval experience. The audience’s expectations must be accounted for in every area of a stage presentation and this is true of costumes as well. Another such case involves the fact that modern audiences think of enlisted seamen as wearing blue and white, but in Newton’s era they commonly wore red and grey; only in the mid-eighteenth century did blue become the dominant color. Should we risk audience confusion or remain true to the historical record? Come and see how the costume designers deal with such dilemmas, all the while dazzling us with their attention to detail.