Sewing machines are whirring away in the background, rows of long, romantic-style tutus finished in layers of tulle hang on a rail, and shelves are filled with large bundles of neatly rolled ribbon in a rainbow of colours. Behind a desk, in front of which hang two pink Swarovski crystal studded men’s fabric biker jackets, sits Mary Mullen.
This isn’t a typical office in the middle of Glasgow but then Mullen doesn’t have an ordinary job. The wardrobe mistress at Scottish Ballet’s HQ in Tramway on the south side is charged with managing and overseeing every shoe, accessory and item of clothing dancers will wear on stage in the winter production Cinderella.
The palms of her hands, and those of one of her assistants, are claret red, the result of ballet shoes which are proving particularly tricky to dye. Meanwhile, seams have to be sewn, costumes fitted and crystals attached to the blinged-up wardrobe of the production originally created for Royal New Zealand Ballet in 2007 and now preparing for its European premiere, choreographed by Scottish Ballet chief executive Christopher Hampson.
The company’s Christmas show, with Beth Kingsley-Garner and Christopher Harrison in the principal roles, is always the most bold, extravagant and fun-packed of the year. Though acclaimed New Zealand designer Tracy Grant Lord’s luxurious costumes and extravagant sets have been shipped to Scotland, there are tweaks to be made to meet the meticulously high standards of Scottish Ballet’s team behind the scenes.
“I think I have 60 pairs of shoes to dye. The sisters have green flatties and they need dyed, and for the ball scene they’ll have coloured shoes. The corps girls are in pointe shoes. In this production there are more characters for the boys, so they have more changes and different coloured shoes. In fact, each boy probably has about four or five pairs of different-coloured shoes,” says Mullen.

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Mary Mullen

Scottish Ballet spends more than £20,000 on shoes every winter season, and each pointe shoe is handmade to the individual dancer's needs. With the demanding choreography dancers can go through three pairs in one performance. That all adds up to a staggering 2000 pair of shoes needed for the winter season.
With the costumes already made in New Zealand, Mullen’s team have had the task of adjusting them to fit Scottish Ballet dancers. “A lot of their girls are smaller than ours. And we’ve had problems with some costumes that are really wrinkly in areas, so we’ve had to open them up a bit and pull them down. They were maybe shorter in the body than our girls so we have had to lengthen them,” says Mullen, who trained in tailoring before coming to work at Scottish Ballet in the early 1990s.
The practicalities of the costumes are vital: can the dancers move in them? Will they be comfortable? Once the production is on tour, starting at Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, and moving to Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness, Mullen’s team are constantly repairing and fixing.
“If there are injuries, someone has to step in that place so you have to refit them, or through a tour dancers tend to lose weight so we’re taking things in. We have had the first show after Christmas when a dancer will say, ‘This doesn’t fit me’ and the next day it’s fine. Generally you never need to take a costume out, but you might need to take it in,” she says.
During the show, Mullen and her assistants stand at the side of the stage, helping dancers in and out of quick costume changes. That didn’t go quite according to plan during the last tour of Cinderella in 2010.
“In Aberdeen the wings are tiny, and Cinderella had a quick change, as did the father at the same side. She went on wearing her tutu but she actually had his wig attached to the bottom of it. It fell off and then someone quickly pushed it to the side,” grimaces Mullen.
“You get things like that but it’s not often. You hear about girls going on with their legwarmers. I’m sure that has happened more often than you think.”
If you had to pinpoint one person whose role it is to put the bling into this particular production of Cinderella, it has to be stage manager Sheelagh McCabe. When I put my head round the door of her office, an assistant is meticulously attaching, one by one, hundreds of crystals to a ballet shoe while McCabe wrestles with theatre dressing room plans.
McCabe has countless plates spinning at one time. Lokta paper, for example, made in the Himalayas, is being sourced to make Cinderella’s invitation to the ball which is ripped up on stage every night. “So we have to create 50 of these – one for each show,” says McCabe, holding up the beautifully printed invitation. “And the sisters roll them up and put them down the front of their dresses so they may need to have new ones every night as well. Now we have 150 invites to create.”
The facts and figures of a spectacular show like this clearly stand out and it takes an incredible amount of planning and organisation to produce such a theatrical wonder.
McCabe was deputy stage manager for 10 years before taking over the department in 2010, working on every big Christmas production from Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella to several Nutcrackers. “Hansel & Gretel two years ago was hilarious. We had bun fights all over the stage, which is unheard of in ballet,” squeals McCabe with laughter.
“Usually you can’t create a mess on the floor unless it is right at the interval when the crew can clear it up. It was a bit like a panto, we even had custard pies. Which meant we had to research how to make custard pies. You hardly ever do this in ballet. I found a sort of edible shaving foam, although I think probably the dancers would disagree with that description. They had to have a whole custard pie right in their face. There was a big food fight on stage and that’s really tricky.”
As well as blinging up Cinderella’s sparkling ballet shoes, McCabe and her team have added their magic touch to a stick used on stage by the Grasshopper. “We’ve re-blinged a lot of things,” she grins. Unfortunately this particular prop keeps breaking.
“It’s the way it is used, because it has a handle and he is giving it to the sisters as a bar and they have to go round en pointe and then he has to pull it. One held on too hard and he did too and it broke. That’s fine if it happens in rehearsal but not if it happens on stage. We have five sticks but how do you get a back-up on stage? Do you just fling it on? It’s really hard.
“We rehearse with the props as often as we can so that we can find all the blind points and fix them. These things happen all the time. One of the dancers was slightly over-enthusiastic with his hammer the other day and one of the shoemaker’s lasts broke.”

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Sheelagh McCabe

Ballet shoes seem to be proving a problem in one way or another in every department. Downstairs in a room off the vast production workshop, chief electrician Matthew Strachan is looking at a pretty pink pointe shoe dangling from a rooftop cable. It is pivotal to what is referred to as “the shoe drop” scene: Cinderella’s blinging shoe is hanging from a wire on stage while the shoemakers are trying to copy it. Then the prince comes on and says, “That’s the shoe I want.”
“We have to find a way of delivering the shoe to him. Royal New Zealand Ballet did it with a switch off stage, so it was mechanical rather than electronic. I’m just trying to simplify the drop because the trouble with anything mechanical is there is the chance it can catch,” explains Strachan.
As well as looking after the lighting, sound and props, such as that shoe, Strachan and an assistant offer a diverse range of skills to the backroom team, including making the large flight cases to carry their gear from theatre to theatre. “Nothing fazes us. We don’t turn round and say, ‘We can’t do that.’ We’re in a good place because we have spent a lot of time putting the infrastructure around ourselves. When we go into a theatre, because it is all our own equipment, if it’s not working it’s a very simple fix.
“We don’t have the flexibility of hours to sort anything out. It’s got to be there and then.”
The finalised lighting plan for Cinderella will only be put in Strachan’s hands four days before the trucks are loaded to take scenery, costumes and the rest of the set to Edinburgh. That’s the kind of deadline most would baulk at but ever the consummate professional, he shrugs it off, remembering even more challenging projects.
“The biggest one for me was when we did a piece by Ashley Paige called Cheating, Lying, Stealing and they wanted a sofa to go on fire. It had to light up, to illuminate, to have dancers sitting on it and then when they move away from it, it goes up in flames and mechanically switches itself off. Then the dancers have to go back and sit on it,” he says, describing what sounds like an idea likely to tax even the mind of 007’s genius inventor Q.
“We did it with pneumatics, a theatrical paste and a couple of ignitors like the ones you get on a gas hob. And then in A Streetcar Named Desire they wanted 28 lightbulbs to fly, four rows of seven on little winches. So we had to build a whole infrastructure up high to do it. Every bulb was controlled by the lighting desk.”
Matching the carefully rehearsed dance steps on stage is an equally well-choreographed sequence going on behind the scenes, overseen by production manager Tim Palmer. Wearing his trademark Hawaiian shirt – today a warm turquoise blue to brighten a particularly dreich Scottish afternoon – he stands with his arms folded, smiling and shaking his head every time I try to prod him with questions about disasters back stage.

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Tim Palmer

Quite simply, there is none. His confidence comes with more than 30 years of experience in the department, working his way up from stage technician. As calm and assured as an air traffic controller, he moves sets, scenery and entire productions around the country, like jumbo jets coming in to land. From liaising with the designer and the workshop that builds equipment to selecting a team to make the scenery, making sure it all fits into a lorry and then working with crews at each theatre to build it all then dismantle it before moving to a new theatre and doing it all again, every step is precision controlled.
Cinderella hits the road in four 45ft trailers, a logistical nightmare that would test the most skilled organiser. “It’s a lot of paperwork, a lot of thinking in advance, knowing the venues you’re going to and knowing the show. Particularly with the scenic elements you only get one shot to put it up. When you’ve got a huge great lump of scenery that weighs 400 or 500 kilos, you have to get it right first time,” he says.
“There are two in my team, for Christmas we’re taking on two freelancers and when we go into the theatre we pick up eight local staff. They know the venue better than we do. We know the show, they know where we’re putting it in.
“The timescales are tight. We move on a Monday and open on a Wednesday, so there’s a lot of stuff to do. In fact, in Glasgow we’re moving in on the Sunday and open on Tuesday.”
Always working a year in advance, Palmer is mentally and physically juggling the complexities of not only Cinderella but the spring 2016 tour of Swan Lake.
When the curtain goes up, Mullen, McCabe, Strachan and Palmer will all be in position behind the scenes. You won’t see them but once you are in your seat take a minute to consider the skill and effort that has gone into each show to present it seamlessly … right down to that single glittering ballet shoe hanging from a wire.
Scottish Ballet’s Cinderella runs at Festival Theatre, Edinburgh from December 5-31; Theatre Royal, Glasgow from January 12-16; His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen from January 20-23; and Eden Court, Inverness from January 27-30. Visit scottishballet.co.uk/cinderella