PROVIDENCE -- Dorothy's got a new pair of shoes.
This weekend, Fantasy Works Junior Company will present the musical The Wiz at Rhode Island College's Roberts Auditorium, but the cast will be clad in Lycra with the futuristic designs of 23-year-old Sara Seelenbrandt.
Seelenbrandt, who was the 1998 class valedictorian at Scituate High School and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design last year, is costuming her first production, which will run at 7:30 tonight and tomorrow night.
She said she had to get about 300 costumes together for the 98 cast members -- from the munchkins to the winkies -- in a matter of three weeks.
"We have a basement that I kind of turned into a studio," Seelenbrandt said. "It's so full of cloths ... I need to clean it up."
Seelenbrandt studied industrial design in college, which she said covers everything from "helicopters to space ships to the flatware on your table," but she has a passion for costume design.
"I know I don't want to build refrigerators and gadgets for old people for the rest of my life," she said.
Seelenbrandt's inspiration comes from her mother, Mary, who died when she was 17, and her high school art teacher, Tom King.
"If it weren't for Mr. King I would have never gone to RISD," Seelenbrandt said. "He pushed me so much to be creative and to look at things differently.
"It's weird how people come into your life and that's how your path is chosen."
Seelenbrandt's first project was when she was in the fifth grade. She had joined the Girl Scouts, but didn't like the organization's catalog of uniforms.
"All the skirts in the book were ugly," she said. "They were thin and yucka."
So she and her grandmother Anne decided to make their own uniform for Seelenbrandt.
Now, after making purses, shoes and a wedding dress for her cousin's bride, Seelenbrandt is on her way to bigger things, aspiring to work for companies such as Pink Inc., which assisted Fantasy Works with its production, or even operating her own fashion designing business.
Ann O'Grady, the founder of Fantasy Works, said Seelenbrandt's talents and creativity will take her far.
"Sara's costumes are Broadway quality," O'Grady said. "They're not average costumes."
"We've always had great costumers," said O'Grady of the company, which was founded in 1987. "But she has an edge to her costumes that are different from traditional costumes."
Seelenbrandt has spent the past few months getting ready for this weekend's production, and has her hands in everything from costumes to stage production to makeup.
And all the while, she's mentoring other students in the program, which is operated by high school and college students ages 6 to 18 years old, to do the same.
One of the interns, Amanda Pacitti, 15, said she's impressed by Seelenbrandt's work.
"They're really, really, really cool," Pacitti said. "They have an edge to them."
About the work she loves, Seelenbrandt says, "I'm just trying to pull on everything from the world and turn it into something marketable."
