This season I am beyond excited to work on Taming of the
Shrew and MacB. Each
production we do provides its own set of complications. As a stage manager, I
love being able to solve problems and work out solutions! One of a Stage Manager’s largest fears
is having something happen that is beyond their control, I know because it is a
big fear of mine. During an unrehearsed production as soon as the whistle
blows, the game is on and anything can happen.
Last summer during our final production of Romeo and
Juliet the weather decided to take part in
our show. Minutes before we were
ready to go, after fight call and dance call and our stage walk thru, the
heavens let loose. I am not
talking about a little bit of water, I am talking about a monsoon that came
upon us, I think the gods thought we were doing The Tempest. So we
had to pick up our actors tent, our backstage tent, and all props and costumes
to move under the giant yellow tent provided by the park. When I say pick up the tent that is
exactly what we did. Our wonderful tent crew took a corner of the tents and
carried them under the large tent. While they were moving the tents the costume
crew was trying to safely and dryly move the costumes under cover and the props
crew was trying to safely move all props and armory under cover. While this was
going on, the audience was trying to stay dry under the same tent. Once we were
able to get everything moved under cover we had to begin sorting it all and resetting
everything for pre-show. Like we
say during our curtain speech, during Shakespeare’s time there was no such
thing as electricity or spot lights or house lighting, this is why we have our
shows in the middle of the afternoon or the early evenings during the summer.
This day however, the monsoon brought with it dark ominous clouds that covered
the light.
So lets recap – We had gallons of water coming from the sky,
winds whipping, thunder and lightening, props to be saved, costumes to be
saved, 2 tents to be moved, darkness taking over the sky, a full house, and the
show must go on. Our cast was made
up of incredibly hard workers who all joined to get everything reset and in its
correct place. So the cast began
to get redressed into their first costumes and recheck all their props, and one
of them comes up to me “My costume has a large tear on it, can you help?” Without skipping a beat I grab my
emergency sewing kit from my stage managers kit and began to sew the tear. This
is when I realized just how dark it had become, so I grabbed our emergency
lanterns and hung one up back stage and then had my cellphone light set up so
it was shining on my hands and the tear.
While this is going on, the wind began to pick up again. I don’t know
how familiar those of you reading this might be with portable clothing racks
but they are far from sturdy especially when about 25 costumes are hung up and
it is windy. The racks began to
blow over, in the mud, with all our beautiful costumes hung up, and I had a
needle and thread in my hands. Our
costume crew did their best to catch the costumes (we only ended up with a few
casualties) our props crew was trying to catch our paper props from blowing all
around and our tent crew was trying to stake the tents into the ground. It was
mad chaos all around. Backstage
was like a beehive, everyone with a job, everyone rushing around, and everyone
helping out.
After everything was set and we were ready to go, we
realized that we needed to do another fight call in our new playing space,
after the move we were a lot closer to the audience then before. So the
audience was able to watch how smooth of a machine we really were. A few things posed a problem at this
point, one happened to be that the rain was so very loud that the actors had to
shout to be heard. Projecting became an art form. We tried to hold off as long
as we could in the hopes of being able to hear! After what seemed like 45 minutes or so we only ended up
starting the show 15 minutes late.
Only 15 minutes late, with everything that happened. It was incredible
to see how wonderful our company worked to accomplish moving a mountain!
- Charlene Jacka, NRTC Company Stage Manager
