Our production involved a cloak similar to the other respondent, but we kept the witch in the same "witch-y" makeup throughout -- mainly consisting of prosthetic fingers and a prosthetic nose, with most of her face hidden inside the hood. In the transformation scene, I didn't keep her lit all that long as the "young witch," either -- which helped our actress get backstage for the Act I finale and slap a little foundation on.
For the prosthetic face pieces, we bought a standard Halloween nose-and-chin kit, with both pieces attached by spirit gum. Knowing she'd have to remove them, we tried both, and the chin piece bothered the actress, so we went with just the nose and not much else on her face besides some aging accents. For the fingers, we bought age=wrinkled fright gloves (again, prosthetic, Halloween -- cheap stuff) which were too big for the actress's fingers/hands. Instead, we have someone involved in productions who knits -- and she knit these awesome fingerless gloves (think Dickensian orphan), into which we attached the fingers from the fright gloves (we literally just cut them off).
At the transformation, the actress turned to the extreme USC portion of the stage, doubled over -- as everyone reacts, she's removing the nose and the gloves, she turns around to reveal in time to the musical sting, and we blackout pretty quickly after that.
Worked great for our purposes.
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Russell Paulette
Rappahannock County Public Schools
Washington VA
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Original Message:
Sent: 02-15-2015 06:15
From: David Springer
Subject: Into The Woods witch make-up
I'm looking for some ideas from those of you who have done Into the Woods. What was the most successful way to do the witch's Act 1 make-up in order to do the quick change on stage?
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David Springer
Shelby Twp MI
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