“You should have been here Sunday night,” says Kitayama, shaking her head. Sunday was the first dress rehearsal, always the most nerve-wracking event for a costume crew. Kitayama and her students outfitted a cast of 29 for As You Like It. Some of the actors have five or six costume changes. Fittings alone take one hour, and each cast member has two. The crew had three weeks of construction time for the show. Before that, there’s researching, sketching, budgeting, and coordinating the costumes with the “world” created by the set and lighting designers. The entire process began last May.

Now it’s November.

The first dress rehearsal is like a birth. Until that moment, everyone on the crew—not just in costuming, but also in scenery, lighting, sound, and props—has been working on the idea of a production. Suddenly it’s a reality. And it’s fragile and messy and marvelous.

IN THE HOUSE “Michiko will never tell you this,” says theatre department chair Vince Cardinal. “But on Sunday night after the rehearsal, she redid all the costumes for almost all of Act II. She saw the overall look and said, ‘It just could be better.’”

Cardinal stands in the empty house—an aging theatre built in 1946—and surveys the stage, the set, the lights. Three crew members are preparing the stage for the arrival of spring, which happens mid-play. Flowers will “bloom” from the traps, and Touchstone (junior Nathan Schuster) will lower himself into a bath inset in the stage floor. The water in the traps must be emptied and refilled before each performance. A student bails the stagnant water with a large plastic bucket, which he hefts through the Ring’s side exit and empties into a storm drain. Cardinal looks on like a proud father. “I love these kids,” he says.

The University’s theatre program offers undergraduate degrees only, so the students aren’t competing with graduate students for roles and crew positions. It’s unusual for undergraduates to get such intense professional training. “Undergraduates have a different kind of energy,” Cardinal says. “They’re more excited because they’re discovering everything for the first time.”

Since arriving in 2001 from Ohio University, where he was director of the School of Theatre, Cardinal has harnessed that energy. In any given week, every student is rehearsing or working on a show, whether it’s one of the six main stage productions, one of 30 shows in the 45-seat Hecht black-box theatre, an off-campus performance like the one at The Ritz-Carlton on Key Biscayne last November—or commencement. Upon her arrival at the University, President Donna E. Shalala put the department in charge of the set and lighting for the commencement ceremonies. Ditto for the dinner that launched the Momentum fundraising campaign. This is a big change in the way the University views theatre arts, and one that fits Cardinal’s vision—to have the department be part of the school’s fabric. Plans are presently being developed for a new performing arts center on campus that would provide a new home for the theatre program.

THE GREENROOM “Ten minutes till curtain,” says a disembodied voice through a speaker in the ceiling. The actors start buzzing. Literally. They walk through the greenroom making motorboat sounds with their lips to loosen up. Orlando (senior Matt Harrell) jumps in place several times and then leans over, his hands on his knees, and pants from his belly. This will help him project his voice, something he’s been working on with director Stephen Svoboda. Le Beau (sophomore Jose Luaces) sits on the couch, legs crossed, wearing black lace gloves, slapping his knee with a handkerchief, rolling his eyes, and practicing his French. Touchstone pops out of the men’s dressing room in tights and a bejeweled codpiece.

WOMEN'S DRESSINGROOM The dressing room is lime-sherbet green everywhere you look, even the exposed pipes overhead. The women are along a mirrored wall lined with Hollywood-style globe lights. There’s the sound of a running blow dryer and the smell of hot curling irons and face powder. They are doing their makeup and hair. And getting giddy.

“Five minutes till curtain.”

Celia (Kate Huffman) and one of the women in the ensemble begin singing “Build Me Up, Buttercup,” opera style and very slowly, cracking everyone up.

BEHIND THE CURTAIN Every prop is in place. If they aren’t on stage, they sit right behind the curtain on a table sectioned off with masking tape. Each section is labeled: “dead birds,” “antlers,” “disposable cameras,” “Adam’s bucket,” and so on.

The performance starts. Celia and Rosalind are on stage drinking imaginary champagne. Touchstone is backstage, listening and waiting for Celia to say, “ ’Tis true.” That is his cue.

He paces silently, hands behind his back. The feather in his hat quivers with each step.

CONTROL BOOTH “Stop the fog!” Tom Recktenwald, stage manager, shouts into his headset. He stands, never sits, behind glass.

Fog is filling the stage. Much too much. Much too early. It is supposed to appear as Celia, Rosalind, and Touchstone enter the Forest of Arden in winter. Instead, it’s billowing into Oliver’s house. The problem is that the person operating the fog machine can’t see the fog emerge because she’s backstage. And she has to prime the pipe in advance by filling—but not overfilling—it. Now Rosalind and Celia are entering the forest, but they are shrouded in thick mist.

“Aghhhh. We’re never going to get this fog right,” Recktenwald says to Stephanie Olson, the freshman who sits nearby, operating the lights. By opening night, it will work perfectly.

THE GREENROOM The fight trainer, junior Jodi Kuhlmann, grabs Oliver’s (Nick Velkov’s) right shoulder and shoves him, hard. She’s showing him how his body reacts when shoved. Kuhlmann is more than an on-stage coach for Charles the Wrestler. She is actor-combatant certified. Gone is the cute makeup. Her eyes are smoky with black eyeliner that swoops toward her temples. She wears a leather bustier, skin-tight pants, and black patent leather platform heels, like something from Austin Powers. She shoves Oliver again. The rest of the students ignore them, monitoring the performance via a speaker that broadcasts into the room.

Derek Betts, a sophomore ensemble member, pores over a coffee-table-sized book on Pompeii for archaeology. Something Eli Sands, assistant director, said earlier comes to mind: “If you devote all your time to performing, you’re always waiting.”

Sands, a senior, has done everything there is to do in theatre—acting, dramaturgy, set building, and more. He much prefers working off-stage because he loves seeing a performance come to life.

Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time plays over the speaker in the greenroom. It’s one of the performance’s many modern sound cues. Hearing it, Betts looks up from Pompeii and says, “I wish we could just sit and watch this.”