The show has teched and opened and closed and I’m ready for summer. The weeks of work was an intense time. Now on the other side, I am amazed a what a big push it was for us to get through those two weeks of performing a large show in the time of COVID. I don’t pretend that putting up an opera is anywhere on the scale as organizing and army or surgery – in fact we often say “It isn’t brain surgery” when things feel overwhelming. But mounting an opera is a project that takes a couple hundred people to pull off, and there are 1500-2000 people watching every performance expecting to be entertained, so it does feel like a large undertaking.
This show, though, felt particularly daunting at times. One main reason was that part way through the run, I was asked to step in at the last minute for the stage manager, bumping up from my assistant stage manager role. Stepping into someone else’s track is not always easy, and being the stage manager requires a level of visible responsibility that can be intimidating for me. But someone needed to call the show and the company asked me, so I was nervously excited to do it. And turns out, when you are calling a show cold without rehearsal, people are really forgiving when you bungle a scene shift cue and the audience gets to watch a bit of awkward stage business that they really shouldn’t witness. Hah.
Everyone was super supportive and encouraging and I really felt lifted by that support. And the chorus, our wonderful wonderful chorus, gathered backstage around the stage manager’s console at the end of the first show I called and gave me a huge round of applause. Oh my goodness, I was so touched by the gesture, my heart almost exploded from gratitude.
When I stage manage a performance, I have a little ritual where I write some variation of the following in my notebook as I prep for the show to start:
Each line is kind of like a mile marker. As the show goes along, I will write the time next to each section when it starts – Curtain Speech, Orchestra Tune, Act 1 begins, Act 2 begins, etc… At the end of the evening, I can easily calculate how long each segment of the show was because I know what time they each started. Actually, even more than “easily” because I have an excel table that will calculate the time math for me – I just input the start times of each part. Time keeping is a big part of stage management – using it well and knowing where it goes.
I read an article recently that talked about the difference between routine and ritual being one of intent and mindfulness. The article quotes Mason Currey who wrote a book called “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work”, as saying that “Rituals create and mark a transition towards a different kind of mental or emotional state.” While a routine might just be a repeated action, rituals can help focus the mind to an upcoming task. Writing the mile markers of the show is certainly routine – it’s a task that has a practical function and needs to be done before every show – but I think of it also as a ritual, something I do methodically to introduce a calm to the start of my show. There can be many unknowns, but I do know that I will look at the clock at these points in the evening and it’s helps me mentally prepare to get there.
At any rate, the first time I had to call the opera I was subbing on, I stood at the console before the show and had my little ritual of writing down the points of time that I needed to note. Then I took a deep breath and, looking at what I had written, suddenly it all seemed very manageable. This huge show I had just been thrown in charge of…. I just had to get from “[Curtain] Speech” to “End [of Bows]”. What I had to do was laid out right there in black and white. So very doable.
For as much calamity that had been thrown at our show in the days, hours, and minutes before the orchestra downbeat, I realized then that there was an end point and I just had to get there. Simple enough. Indeed, I don’t know that I could very well avoid getting there. Sure, I could not tell the orchestra to tune, but that was a very unlikely as it would probably raise eyebrows and cost a lot of money. Looking at my list of mile markers brought a kind of “ah ha!” moment for me, a realization that the end of the show will happen- there is it, written in my notebook, as if it were preordained. It was like a road map, I just had to arrive at “End bows” and my job was done (mostly) and I could go home. There was a great sense of reassurance in knowing that I just had to focus until “End Bows”.
There is a saying, “Everything will be okay in the end. And if it isn’t okay, it isn’t the end.” I think of this a lot when things get hard, or even when I anticipate things getting hard. Work in the moment, but know there is an end. There are times I will even break things down even further and tell myself that I just have to get through the next ten minutes. After I get through enough ten minute sections, I will get to “End of Bows.”
Sometimes in life, when things seem daunting, I know when the end will be – “End Bows” for example- and sometimes I don’t – waiting at the hospital with my sick Father-in-law. Either way, it helps just knowing that there is an end point, a time when this show, this task, this moment of life will be finished and I will be able to look back and reflect and move on.