www.broadwayworld.com: Veteran Broadway Stage Manager Richard Hester (Jersey Boys) has just release "Hold, Please: Stage Managing A Pandemic," a memoir of the year Broadway went dark.
When COVID struck and the lights went out on Broadway at the start of 2020, Richard Hester went from stage managing Jersey Boys to sitting at home watching the news. In his habitual way, he organized his thoughts, and began sharing them on social media.
5 comments:
I think this is an important telling of what happened, especially coming from someone who is very familiar with being in the position of being looked up to for answers that nobody else seems to have. It is also important to consider that this is a narrative, not the narrative of how the pandemic has affected theater people. The excerpts felt very honest which I appreciated. It would have been easy to edit it all down to exaggerate or play down the importance of things. From what I could read, however, that was not the case. I don’t think the intention was to get political, but given that any measure taken at the pandemic (ghee what a surprise) is political in the united states, it took that direction. Not that is the wrong direction to take, but I do think should be something to consider if I/somebody else decides to give this a read.
I think this memoir is a very important story of how we as theatre makers have adapted and will continue to adapt to the ever changing world around us. There will always be another crisis, thousands of things that potentially could shift how our industry operates forever, and reading about how this stage manager continued his role as a leader through crisis inspired me. The article takes two excerpts from his book that are exactly a year apart, and seeing how he documented Covid was very interesting. In his April 16 2020 report, he discusses how the presidential administration at the time threw out an Obama-era playbook on how to fight infectious diseases like Covid. He pulls knowledge from both research and his own life experience to talk about the failures of the administration and how to move forward through it, just like a stage manager would. His April 2021 report looked much more optimistic, discussing the vaccine rollout and a hope for the future of the theatre industry. This writing is evidence of how we as theatre makers can pivot to serve in times of crisis.
It's almost comforting in a way to read some of a person's daily musings over the course of the pandemic, especially someone who is in the same profession I hope to go into myself. It can be hard to remember that everyone has struggled and stumbled through these past two years right alongside me. Even the most mundane things seem to become something more when you're locked inside all day long or facing an overwhelming amount of unknowns and uncertainties. You can clearly see a shift in feeling and mentality around the pandemic that was shared by the majority of the public, reflected in even just these three days worth of excerpts from the past two years. It started off frustrated, even angry at reports that we could have been prepared for this pandemic, but the preparation and lessons we had learned from the Ebola outbreak were just abandoned and left on a shelf to rot. Then it moved into wistfulness, almost depression, as we looked on at a pandemic that seemed without end after a full year of isolation and change. Finally, things started to restart, and a sense of hoe was renewed, although we could not yet completely forget the dangers that still lurked.
It's really weird to think that we're living in history right now. Like all historic events, when people look back at how everyone handled the pandemic and how 2020 went like, who lives through a pandemic and can just casually go about their life, especially in an industry that fully shut down. It's pretty cool that we have the author's perspective in real time of when things started to shut down on Broadway. Having historical context from like six years ago paralleled with similar situations not two years ago is endearing because that just means that we're actually going to get through it. Another poignant effort they made in the memoir was to provide the political background going on during each entry and I think it's a point to be made that just because we're considered "the arts" doesn't mean that we can just turn away from what's going on around us at the local, state, and federal level. The government could enact anything into law that affects us and we'd never know so we have to pay attention.
This article mentions an interesting concept in that many were looking “to their Stage Manager for guidance”. As someone who is not always the best at keeping up to date with current events, this is a concept that I can understand because I look to those I trust to tell me what is going on (and I will eventually do my own research). I am not surprised that the person many trusted was a stage manager because in many entertainment industries, they not only put out fires, but prevent them from happening, taking care of the cast and crew, building trust with everyone they work with so people on a stage manager’s team know they can always confide in them. In the excerpts provided, it is interesting to see the progression of what have now become social norms of what at first seemed odd but now is so common.
Post a Comment