How do you dress a mouse? Well, if the mouse isn’t a real one, that’s actually not difficult. Personally, I wouldn’t want to try dressing a real one. What is a trickier question is how do you dress a person to look like a mouse? Tony Walton faces just such a challenge in doing the costume design for the upcoming musical production The Great American Mousical. Fortunately, Tony has imagination and creativity beyond that of most people. He has decades of experience in costume design and set design. (The sets for Mousical will be tricky, too, with the changes in perspective between mouse and people theatre, and between mouse theatre and various locations in New York City.) I can’t help wondering what he’ll do with the costumes. Will the mice have ears and tails, or will the audience simply have to imagine they do? If they do, how will that be achieved? When speaking of mice, I almost hate to mention another production that involved animals, but in Cats, the actors were fabulously fantastically feline. I suspect the actors also spent a very long time having their makeup applied prior to every performance. Will Tony go that route? As you can see from the photos on my post about Stages Theatre Company’s production of Llama Llama Red Pajama, they went a fairly low-tech route in creating their llamas, but one still knew they were llamas! Masks, or headdresses and facepainting, a la The Lion King on Broadway, are also possibilities. ~~ I hope everyone in the cast and crew of Mousical is safe, and that they are able to get back to work doing what they love to do. ~~ If you were designing costumes for this production, how would you achieve mousehood? TICKET INFORMATION: All being well, The Great American Mousical will be on stage at the Norma Terris Theatre, Chester, Connecticut, from November 8 to December 2, 2012. Tickets may be purchased by phoning the Box Office, 1-860-873-8668. THIS IS THE LAST POST BEFORE THE GIVEAWAY: As with all the Wednesday Mousical posts this month, any comment on this post will be entered into a random draw to be held November 7th for one of three copies of Julie’s and Emma’s middle grade novel The Great American Mousical. (Full disclosure: these are remaindered copies, and have a small mark on the lower edge of the pages, which doesn’t interfere with readability at all. They are hardcover copies.)