Tag: stage management lessons for life

On finishing work

I am definitely a “last minute” kind of person – I tend to procrastinate and then finish projects just in time. I think it comes being a Questioner (of Gretchen Rubin’s four tendencies). I like to keep asking questions, wanting to have to have all the information in place perfectly before I can start a project. I used to wait until we had staged every scene in an opera to start my show running paperwork, thinking that I wanted the complete picture of the show before starting. I’ve come to realize, though, that I don’t need to have everything in place to start my paperwork- I can start my paperwork with what I know and – gasp!- adjust when things change in rehearsal.

Two things I read recently have shifted my thinking of waiting til the last minute to finish things.

The first was a recent post by Seth Godin. I really love how Godin can distill ideas down to their essence, and one of his recent posts really was an “Aha moment” me:

The second was on a blog Headset Chatter, written by a stage manager Karen Parlato. In their FAQ they answer a question about dealing with deadlines:

I like to do things right away. Stage management is all about juggling many balls. I like to get the ball out of my hands as quickly as possible so it’s over and done and I can move on to others without losing track of anything.

These two ideas really shifted my framing about workload and deadlines. I didn’t used to see the value of finishing things early, wanting my work to be as accurate and finessed as possible before distributing it. And even when I did start projects with plenty of time to spare, I found myself still working up til the deadline because I wanted to fuss and adjust and re-phrase. The work was done, but I was not done with it.

For example paperwork for backstage – all the information for the stage crew will be in the paperwork, but I continue to make slight adjustments in fits of self doubt – maybe if I adjust this margin, the crew notes will be clearer to read. Maybe if I write Stage Left rather than just SL it will be less confusing. Maybe if I put this picture just this way or that it will be clearer how the tea try is to be laid out of for the singer. The possibilities are infinite.

But my time is not infinite.

Godin’s and Parlato’s posts, helped me realize that finishing something early is not an excuse to keep futzing with it – the value of finishing something early is that that it gets it off my plate and pushes it to other people so that they can start to do their jobs. Holding on to something does not diminish my to do list. Getting things done just in the nick of time is not necessarily a virtue.

I really like Godin’s idea that those last sixty seconds can be a moment of peace before submitting something, time to savor and enjoy completing a task. It goes hand in hand with the idea that “Finished is better than perfect.” Sometimes as I endlessly change margins and adjust image sizes, I just need to tell myself to stop, and just be done so that I can celebrate having planned an executed something well.

Stage Management thoughts in real life: “That’s just the show they get”

I was talking to a dancer in rehearsal the other day about onstage mishaps. She was telling me about a moment during the last show we worked on together, when she was in the middle of a huge fight scene, and her skirt fell off. She couldn’t get it re-fastened, and spent the rest of the scene clutching her skirt to her body while trying to scratch someone’s eyes out.

Hearing her story brought back many memories. I’ve definitely had my share of onstage mishaps:

-There was the time that I was doing a show and a giant chalkboard was supposed to fly in from above during a crucial moment of a scene. Well, we had been doing a different show the night before and in order for the set pieces of that show to fit, they had to fasten the giant chalkboard from my show off so that it wouldn’t swing. Welp… after the last show, the crew forgot to untie it for our show. So when I called the cue for the Giant chalkboard… nothing happened! There the baritone is standing with a giant piece of chalk, looking up, wondering if this huge piece of scenery is going to come in, all the while singing this very fast French patter music. The baritone, who is honestly one of the nicest people I’ve ever worked with, was so confused and a little bit angry.

-One show a the soprano was supposed to sit in a chaise to sing her big famous aria. Well in the scene previous, another character was thrown into the chaise in a fight, and the force of him collapsing in the the chaise shattered it. Afterwards he told me that he tried to figure out how to put it back together while staying in character, but it was futile. No one was going to be sitting in that chaise. The soprano ended up singing her big aria about love and life leaning against a desk.

– There was the recital I stage managed, of a husband and wife opera singing couple where the husband, who wasn’t feeling very well, walked offstage in the middle of their duet. “I can’t,” he muttered to himself, leaving his wife and the pianist standing on stage and the audience completely befuddled. We took a quick fifteen minute pause. The wife and the pianist looked through all the music they had with them and cobbled together a solo recital program. It still ended up being an evening of beautiful music. The husband and wife singers are no longer married.

-There was the time when the clarinetist for a show thought that the performance was at 7pm when it was at 2pm. By the time we realized he was missing he was too far away to come in for the show, so the conductor and the pianist re-orchestrated the entire show to cover for the missing clarinet.

– Last spring, when I had to step in and call the show for a colleague, I accidentally left the lighting channel turned off during a crucial moment. (The lighting channel is the headset channel that I use to talk to the light board operator. Usually I have different channels to talk to different departments so that people don’t have to listen to all the different departmental conversations at once.) Anyhow, I left the lighting channel off accidentally, so when I called for the stage to go dark so we could execute a scene shift, the light board op couldn’t hear me and didn’t take the light cue. So the stage did not go dark, and the audience got to witness the somewhat awkward sight of the crew coming onstage to push scenery around.

Luckily these incidents did not involve injury, just lots of awkwardness and a bit of fast thinking of how to triage the situation.

As I was talking to the dancer about her skirt incident, she mentioned that her boyfriend had come to see the show and he said he thought it seemed like she was holding on to her skirt awfully tight. We had a good laugh about how sometimes things happen onstage and the show isn’t perfect. It’s very very rarely perfect, in fact. Often even though it is mortifying or stressful at the time, it makes for a good story afterward. She said that she felt bad that her boyfriend didn’t get to see the perfect show.

“You know,” I told her, “It’s live theatre. That was just the show that they got that night.”

I think that’s one of the beautiful things about live theatre – it’s not something that is to be experienced the same way over and over again like a movie might be. Of course we aim for consitency, and for safety’s sake that’s the goal. At the same time, things happen, things that you can’t predict, even though you can learn and prevent them from happening again. (putting an extra stitch in that skirt hook, writing a Post-it in my book that says, “Lighting channel ON”…) Friday night’s show is not going to be the same as Sunday afternoon’s show, and that’s okay. For Friday night’s audience, that is the show that they get to see; that’s the unique experience that they get to have.

And as I said that to the dancer, I realized that this is true of life too. We can plan and plan and anticipate events, but sometimes things happen, and this is just the moment/day/month/life that we get. It might not be what we rehearsed, but it’s still can be a very fine moment.