Fun Facts from the Wig Shop

Shannon Cochran’s lustrous red hair she wore during her run as Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes grabbed the audience’s attention from the moment she strolled on stage.

“I love her hair,” one audience member whispered to her companion during a performance.

Alas, Cochran’s deep red hair didn’t arrive at the theatre with her that evening. It was the artful product of the SCR Wig Shop, which is responsible for creating the wigs, any additional facial hair and even blood and tattoos sported or worn by the actors.

Our next stop behind the curtain takes us to the Wigs Shop. Here are some fun facts:

• SCR has more than 400 wigs in storage, as well as a stock of hair pieces and facial hair.
• Some wigs are purchased and the front remade by hand. Others are fully hand-made. The shop also makes toupees, eyebrows, goatees, beards, sideburns and mustaches.
• It takes two to three weeks to build a wig. Approximately 10,000 strands of hair are hand-tied into netting, two to three at a time in back and single hairs in front, to make a finished wig. A mustache takes about one hour to make.
• Three types of hair are used: human, synthetic and yak. We also sometimes make wigs out of things that aren’t hair at all. We have made wigs out of everything from foam to ribbon to yarn.
• The wigs are touched up for every show. A complete re-set and comb-out can take several hours. If a show has many wigs, it can take a full eight hours to prepare them for a performance.
• The wig and makeup department also handles things like blood, tattoos, scars, prosthetics, teeth and other special effects. Most of our tattoos are custom made and printed on a special color printer in the production office. To make them look more realistic, we even make the colors look like aged ink and blur the edges in Photoshop, so the tattoo looks set into the skin.