I can’t even believe it’s taken me this long to post about Willy Wonka! Well, to be fair to myself, I’ve been waiting for our photographer to give me the photos he took. I guess his slacking teaches me that I should just take my own photos when I can, but oh well.

This show was so colorful and I loved every minute of it. Everything available for rent around me was for a smaller cast size than I was working with so once again I pieced together the costumes from things I found online.

For Willy Wonka and the main kids, I stuck to the traditional looks. I splurged a little a bought an awesome purple coat from AliExpress for Wonka to wear since it was pretty important that he look fabulous and the rest I pieced together from our own stock and Amazon.

I was left with the challenge of Violet who needs to blow up into a blueberry on stage. We hit a few bumps in the road with this but in the end it worked perfectly and was an audience favorite! For more details about how I pulled this off, check out this blog post:

https://elisejackson.com/how-to-make-an-inflatable-violet-beauregarde-costume/

I did the townspeople in drab blues, browns and grays to contrast the colorful kids and chocolate factory workers. I used some of our orphan costumes from Annie and hit up my local thrift shops for the rest.

The Oompa Looompas were fun and colorful in white, green and yellow. The white pants were completely filthy by the end of the run (hey they’re just kids) but they still managed to look great from a distance.

One of my favorite, favorite, favorite costumes was the squirrels. They’re actually chipmunk onesies I found on AliExpress but they worked just fine and were adorable!

Check out the promo video to get a taste of the show!