Sunday, July 31, 2016
A Letter of Gratitude to Stage Managers
OnStage: Let me let you – the readers of On Stage – in on a little secret: Early on in my college career, I took a Stage Management class, thinking at the time that I wanted to explore as many areas of theatre as possible, and that this might be just one of many career possibilities in this industry that I could realistically end up pursuing.
However, after just a month or so of taking that class, I realized right away that while I could ultimately see myself doing many things in theatre after college, this was not one of them.
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3 comments:
While this letter is fairly interesting and very introspective of the author it doesn't offer any new information to stage managers and techies in general. Unlike actors we've known for a while that actors can't do the difficult jobs that we do, just like we recognize that we could not do the difficult job that actors do. While I believe this article does a great deal for creating a greater understanding between different parts of the theater world, It doesn't actually solve anything/
I really appreciate this article, and altogether this website—last week I read another article on it saying thank you to make up designer. It’s really a good attitude to pay attention to the good work people in different theater positions do. Also, I agree with the author that stage managing is really difficult to do. There are so many paper work, so many effort to put into in every rehearsal and every performance. Most of the time stage managers are half directors, but I believe that different people are good at different things. Just like an actor with a liberal, artistic instinct are hard to get super organized, it’s also impossible for some in-born stage manager to act. People cooperate with each other to get a good show done.
Though I have heard what he is saying before, I appreciate what this article is trying to do. I have often times heard that stag managers are just directors or actors that weren’t good enough to be onstage. While many stage managers do start out as actors, there is so much more work that anyone ever thinks that there is. I Assistant stage-managed a show recently, where one of the actors and I got into an argument about my role back stage. The actor insisted that my only purpose for being backstage was to do things for her, such as get her props, and make sure that she didn’t miss her cue. I kindly explained to her, that while that was part of my job, I was also in charge of making sure that backstage, the show ran exactly the way the director wanted. Some high schools do not even make use of stage managers. They just assign people that tried out for the play but didn’t make it to write down blocking in no really particular way. So, thank you to Anthony J. Piccione for thanking stage mangers.
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