Kaelyn Benoit
Staff Writer
Katrina Fink, better known as Kat to her friends, always knew she loved theater. The only problem? She did not like being the center of attention. She did not like having lines and she definitely did not like acting. However, never one to back down from a challenge, Kat set out to find a way to remain involved in the world of the stage that she loved so much.
“Around COVID, I was trying to figure out what my niche was in theater,” Kat said, “Because I loved theater, but I was not a very good actor.”
Finding a passion for sewing at the age of nine and spending her early days knitting with her grandmother, Kat realized she loved making costumes for herself, particularly enjoying the art of crafting Halloween costumes and character cosplays. The ability to create a character out of fabric scraps called to her, and thus, her niche was found.
Enter: FSC’s Technical Theater BFA, with a focus in Costume Design.
Now, halfway through her fourth year within the program, Kat has picked up many helpful tips and tricks from her times spent behind the scenes. Currently serving as the co-costume shop manager, Kat also serves as a seamstress in the costume shop, and has done wardrobe supervision and costume crew for many past productions in her time at FSC.
Now, she is currently serving as one of the costume designers for FSC’s upcoming production of “Legally Blonde: The Musical.”
Scrolling through multiple spreadsheets and Pinterest boards, Kat has been hard at work prepping for the anticipated costumes needed once the production begins.
“The first thing that you do is read the script. You just read it to read it. If it’s got music, you listen to music, but the number one thing is try to avoid looking at other productions until you really need to, because you wanna get your thoughts out first,” Kat said.
On this spreadsheet, each character is listed out, along with all of their entrances and exits throughout the script, to ensure each costume and change is accounted for.
Now a week out from “pulling” costumes (going out to find the physical pieces) for Legally Blonde: The Musical, all of the prep work has been completed. Fink started out by researching early 2000 fashions and asking herself multiple core questions to find the heart of what each costume should look like.
“So when I’m looking at a script, I like to look at those connections between characters to see how we can use the colors they’re wearing to show their emotions, their growth their friendships and their love, all of these things.” Fink said, “Or like sometimes a show will mention that a certain color means something. And so you might see that color pop up somewhere that’s signaling to you that you should probably pay attention to that person.”
This attention to the little details is what has allowed Kat to thrive. “Legally Blonde: The Musical” features 136 entrances and exits across all actors in the musical and accounting for each person every step of the way will allow her work in the production to sparkle.
With hopes of taking her experience on the road or rather the seas-post graduation, Kat hopes to work with a wardrobe department for a cruise line.
“I want to get to travel, but I also know that cruise lines have a lot of fast-paced theater and performance-related environments. So working as wardrobe or crew would really give me a lot of good experience and let me meet a lot more people that I could get to work with in the future,” Fink said.
Kat’s work can be seen moving into her final semester at FSC, working either as wardrobe supervisor or training the wardrobe supervisor for FSC’s upcoming production of ‘Carousel’.
