In the costume shop in the basement of LaGuardia High School, a team of technical theater students was hard at work on Wednesday assembling costumes for the school’s upcoming production of “Sweet Charity.” The show opens December 7, and the students still had to finish sewing enough sparkling blazers and pants to outfit an entire 16-person marching band.
It’s a daunting task that would have been impossible with the old, overused, broken-down sewing machines that used to be the students’ only option.
“We probably had three maybe-working machines on a day-to-day basis, which we were spending tons of money on with repairs,” said Alexa Zelliger, a senior at LaGuardia. “They were all over the place.”
Repairing and replacing the old sewing machines cost money that LaGuardia High School—which recently underwent a $300,000 budget cut—could not afford to spend. But luckily for the costume shop, sewing company SINGER recently donated four sewing machines and four irons, all of them shiny and brand new. Now, with the addition of the SINGER machines, the LaGuardia costume shop can function more efficiently than ever.
Efficiency is crucial in the LaGuardia costume shop, since the students’ workload goes far beyond the normal expectations for high school.
“I worked in wardrobe on Broadway for five years, and the level of production that happens here mimics that,” costumes director David Quinn said.
Zelliger said that the school’s productions have been increasingly more elaborate, and so the donation from SINGER could not have come at a better time.
“Let’s talk about how fantastic that was,” Alexa said excitedly, in regards to the donation. “When Singer made this donation, it helped us so much with everything we really needed. The shows became bigger and bigger as we developed our costume shop, scene shop, props shop, and electrics studio, so the demand for costumes and the demand for actors became much bigger, so we really needed something to sustain the amount of work that we were doing.”
Christine Denham, a parent volunteer in the technical theater department, stressed that a public school like LaGuardia absolutely depends on relationships with companies like SINGER.
“For a working shop, we need ten machines in here,” Denham said. “Our view is that we’re going to need brand new machines every two years. The machines that we’re getting are solid-state machines, which are great, but you can’t fix them—you can’t open them up, you can’t repair them. So that means that we’re going to go through them. And we are really looking for a partner that’s going to keep us in equipment.”
Denham’s hope is that SINGER “adopts” LaGuardia’s costume shop, and saves the department from having to constantly search for funding that just isn’t there.
“Public schools cannot survive without private industry partnerships,” Denham said.
In the past, other companies like Lowes, W.W. Grainger, and N.Y. Presbyterian Hospital have made helpful donations, like the one from Singer. The students working the scene shop, for example, were cutting all their wood by hand until Lowes graciously donated a number of electric saws last year.
The costume shop staff insists that when private companies make donations to LaGuardia High School, it’s a win-win situation.
Quinn said, “As a corporation they are going to be doing charitable giving, and so it works out for everyone.”