#stage managing

Once I dreamed I was at a random school helping them clean up their stage and backstage.

The stage was HUGE. It was like half a football field.

And I was running around enjoying all the space and all the resources and telling people what to do.

I went over into the left wing and there was this giant river running through it because the school was underground and there had been so much rain recently an underground river had formed. 

And Joshua was like K what’re you going to do about it?

And I was like uuuh nothing? This is cool. If we follow the river down we have a back escape route. It leads straight to a town.

Then all of the people were playing in the river and the surrounding area and Sean showed up and I wanted to go talk to him but Matlak and Sean’s mom started talking to me and I had to help them find this girl.

I found the girl and she asked me to help her with this thing and I was like of course why wouldn’t I help!

Then I was cleaning up the backyard of my cousins house and I was talking to her dad.

I walked into their living room and her and her mom were trying on their wedding dresses and for some reason the dresses were nearly identical. It was weird.

Then I was backstage at the theater from the beginning looking for my best friend.

I decided to follow the river to this grocery store and he was inside looking at bleach.

And I ran up and gave him a big hug and he told me about how he was going to bleach his hair so that it was white/platinum.

Then he asked me to walk him to where he was getting it bleached.

This is a document I’ve had rattling around in my brain for a while but (to be completely honest) most of the musicals I work on move a bit too quickly for me to bother to get this detailed. Working on a Jr. script was the perfect way to actually put this together for the first time. 

I’d say about 98% of the shows (I’m not a mathematician) I work on use tracks in both show and rehearsal. And even if we’re working with a live pit for the show, I don’t always have a rehearsal pianist. That’s where a document like this comes in handy. Yes things are notated in my script but, like with all good paperwork, this is meant to be handed off to someone for a quick reference if me or my script aren’t available. Dance captain needs to work on a number in the other room? Here ya go don’t waste time scrubbing through tracks. 

Where this can get tricky is when major edits are done to tracks within Qlab (say we build a vamp into a song... or add several repeats that play straight through instead of playing out of a vamp... or splice a song into several pieces)... obviously that is not something I have run into with this particular document quite yet but I know it’s comin’.