- In 2019, a costume shop in Canada closed that inventory wound up in a 17,000 square foot warehouse owned by Sarasota Opera.

Now, the local arts venue has the largest rental costume business in North America.

(performer singing opera) - I always refer to opera as the all-encompassing art form.

It is a musical form.

It's also a dramatic form.

It contains singers, orchestra, chorus.

It also has visual elements like sets and costumes.

So it's all of the pieces that create this wonderful art form.

- Costumes and sceneries set you to the time and place.

- We have tens of thousands of costumes in our warehouse, and we do alterations on them for the particular person.

If we don't have a costume for a particular part, then we build it, or we make it right here in the costume shop.

So we do both.

- For many years, Sarasota Opera had been renting costumes from companies throughout the North America, but our primary source was a company in Toronto called Malabar.

They were the largest and probably the best collection of rental costumes available for traditional opera productions.

Our costume designer, Howard Kaplan, worked with Malabar for a long time.

He also had designed specific productions for Malabar to build and rent.

- And I became very close with the department managers and they said, "Oh, we've seen your sketches, sew Luigi your sketches."

And then Mr. Speca commissioned me to design "Pirates of Penzance" for Cleveland Opera.

- When the owner of Malabar, Luigi Speca, decided he wanted to retire and slow down, he first came to Howard knowing that Howard had the same aesthetic and that Sarasota Opera would be a good steward of this incredible collection that he created.

- We purchased the collection the fall of 2019, and it moved down in 10 tractor trailers during that time.

We paid basically $33 a costume.

- We were lucky to be able to find a warehouse in a nice clean space.

Actually, before we used it, it was a volleyball gym that we were able to build out, and it's about 16,000 square feet.

We were able to house these costumes.

We now have about 50,000 complete costumes.

That's about a hundred thousand pieces when you count every coat, every pants, every shirt.

Sarasota Opera purchased this collection to use for their own use.

But a significant part of what we are doing now is renting these costumes to other opera companies, theater companies, universities, and we've actually done some work in film.

We've had some of our costumes featured in a Netflix feature.

We've also... A Kia car commercial, used some of our costumes.

- [Howard] The Kia people called us because someone had booked every 18th century costume in the whole city for a, I don't know what it was, some pirate movie they were doing.

So everything was on reserve.

They were desperate to find 18th century clothing.

(dramatic music) - One of the things that we were surprised when we got these costumes from Malabar, a lot of them have name tags and had the names of singers who've used them over the years.

Yeah, this one was worn by Mr. Pavarotti and has his name still in the label.

And we have other great singers as well.

People like Luciano Pavarotti, Beverly Sills, Placedo Domingo, Marilyn Horne.

So it's great to have not only the wonderful costumes that they used, but also a little bit of history with them.

- Everything is organized by shows or productions.

So there's a "Tosca" aisle, there's a "Carmen" aisle, there's a "Triviata" aisle.

- These dresses are made to be altered.

By that, I mean the inseams are three or four inches.

The hems are maybe six or eight inches, so it can go up or down or in or out, but there is a lot of flexibility there to fit other people in that same dress.

- When working on a production, we'll first read the libretto, listen to the music, and then we'll move forward with sketches and purchasing of fabrics, going through our huge stock to see what we can use for that production.

"Golden Cockerel," I would say is one of my favorite productions, and we did it years ago, "Alzira," which was a kind of an Inca opera.

There was a Inca art exhibit, art and textile exhibit up at the St. Pete Museum.

I was able to purchase replicas.

They were like tea cozies or something, you know, copper plates and stuff you'd hang on the walls.

And then we were ended up being able to put 'em on the front of the armor and stuff, so they really looked like real Inca copper pieces and gold pieces and stuff.

So that was kind of fun.

(performer singing opera) - One of the things I think is great about opera is that the stories are timeless, and the music is so engrossing.

Many of our audiences are longing for that live performance experience.

And I've been really heartened by the fact that in the post-Covid era, we've seen huge numbers of new first-timers coming to the opera.

- I love the challenge.

I love the dedication that the artists have to their work.

They have to learn their music, they have to learn the language.

Every opera is maybe sung in a different language, and so it's a very dedicated profession, and I appreciate that.

I enjoy being around that.

I love it.

(dramatic music) (audience applauding) - [Narrator] Visit sarasotaopera.org to learn more.