When Costume Director Jennifer Carroll created a set of ruby-red slippers for the character of Dorothy Gale during the Kansas City Ballet’s first run of “The Wizard of Oz,” she knew they had to dazzle the audience.
They needed to catch the light, she says, and they need to be seen all the way up in the back row of the balcony.
Eight years later, as the Ballet prepares to open its latest production of the show on Oct. 16, Carroll’s creations will still pack the same punch.
“Red shoes are red shoes,” Carroll explains. “What makes them the Ruby Slippers is the sparkle.”
To accomplish the task, Carroll uses a long pair of tweezers to painstakingly glue 144 tiny glass rhinestones on each pointe shoe — 1,728 stones in all. The show is double cast, and each dancing Dorothy gets three pairs, so Carroll has to produce 12 stage-ready slippers.
“The main trick is keeping a hold of the rhinestone with the tweezers,” Carroll says with a laugh.
Each pair takes a couple hours to decorate, and Carroll has to be careful where she places each and every stone because pointe shoes are specially reinforced to help a dancer rise to the tips of their toes.
“There are no stones on the very toe of the shoe, where they would go up on pointe,” she says. “I figure out a line so that I don't go past that, otherwise they could slip on the rhinestone and fall.”
While Dorothy’s dazzling footwear is the sartorial star of the show, Carroll and her staff have also hand-painted close to 200 pairs of other shoes in 23 colors, including 6 shades of green. A brand new set has been created for each of the show’s productions.
This isn’t the first time Carroll has used rhinestones on pointe shoes. In 2023, she crafted glass slippers for the Ballet’s production of “Cinderella.” But Dorothy’s shoes outshine them, she says.
“For ‘Cinderella,’ it was just a few stones on the top of the toe to give it that crystalline look,” she explains. “But since these shoes are supposed to be Ruby Slippers, there are stones all over the shoe.”
Rhinestones, not sequins
In L. Frank Baum’s children’s book “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” published in 1900, Dorothy's magic slippers are silver, “tinkling merrily on the hard, yellow roadbed,” he wrote.
For the 1939 Technicolor movie adaptation, they were changed to red to stand out against the yellow brick road, according to The National Museum of American History. And Judy Garland wore shoes that were covered in sequins, not rhinestones.
Carroll says rhinestones catch the light better because they have more facets, those small, angled surfaces cut into gemstones to help them reflect. They’re also safer for the dancers.
“Sequins also have a sharp edge to them,” she explains. “There was a fear that the edge of a sequin might catch someone and cut them.”
A grandmother’s munchkin
When the Ballet performed “The Wizard of Oz” five years ago, dancer Gillian Yoder was just a trainee. Now, at 23, she’s playing Dorothy as a member of the company. This is her first lead role.
“I felt like it could have been my wildest dream to ever do this, and here we are,” she says. “So I’m really excited.”
Yoder was raised far from Kansas — in West Palm Beach, Florida — but she says watching the Judy Garland movie was a family tradition.
“I had a grandmother that was obsessed with the movie, and she called all of her grandchildren her little munchkins,” she remembers. “I grew up watching this movie, every time I saw this grandmother, she always watched this movie, so I know the movie very well.”
With the audience’s eyes glued to her glittering shoes, Yoder says she’ll need to be on her toes.
“They’re so sparkly and I almost feel like I have to be careful when I'm wearing them,” Yoder says. “They're so beautiful, and I think they highlight your feet so much that I'm really thinking about my footwork and everything, because when you see a red shoe on a pink tight, it really stands out.”
The world premiere of the production was held at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in 2018. Since then, it’s become a regular show in the Ballet’s repertoire.
“It's one of those shows that just strikes at the heart of your sentimentality about this part of the country,” Artistic Director Devon Carney says. “This show has gone all over the world, but it started here with our community here in Kansas City, and I'm really proud of that.”
But without those iconic shoes, Carney says, “The Wizard of Oz” wouldn’t be the same.
“Those ruby-red slippers are synonymous with the story,” he says. “It's impossible to do the story without them.”
Kansas City Ballet presents “The Wizard of Oz” from Oct. 16 to Oct. 25 at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, 1601 Broadway Blvd., Kansas City, Missouri 64108. More information is at KCBallet.org.
The Kansas City Ballet is a financial supporter of KCUR. Our journalism is editorially independent of funders.
