Life as a Stage Manager

As the Stage Manager of Fragment Theatre Company I am ensuring that I know the show inside out. This means arriving early for every rehearsal and ensuring I am making detailed rehearsal notes as well as keeping mental notes for myself so that I am able to answer any questions posed to me about the practicalities of the show or schedules or deadlines that I am in charge of creating.

My job as Stage Manager also consists of booking and running weekly production meetings to ensure each part of the production team is aware of what needs to be done and by setting deadlines in these meetings I ensure everything to do with the production is kept on track. All production meeting notes (that can be found in the Production Documents page) that I create after each meeting will get posted on our private Facebook page so everyone has access to them and is aware of all the deadlines that have been set. For the first few meetings, I prepared a list of things to discuss to keep the meetings on track. However, I quickly realised that a more efficient way of running the meetings was to create an agenda each week and make that available to everyone a few days before so each member can be fully prepared for the meeting, an example of which you can see below.

Figure 1 – Screenshot of Production Meeting Agenda for Friday 17th February 2017 (Workman, 2017)

The first few weeks of this process have been focused on devising material to put into our show, so the need for rehearsal schedules and rehearsal notes has not been necessary until this point. Now we have started getting our show off the page and on its feet, I will be posting weekly rehearsal schedules to our private Facebook page. This will ensure each member of the company knows when and where they need to be for rehearsals. All Rehearsal Schedules will also be posted in the Production Documents page on our blog.

I will also be creating rehearsal notes where necessary so that all discussions about props, set, sound, lighting and costume for each section of the show will be all in one document and easily accessible to whoever may need them. These rehearsal notes will come in handy particularly when members of our company with production roles are not needed for rehearsals, as they can read through the notes once they have been typed up and take the information that relates to their production role.

As a professional theatre company, we are required to provide a technical rider to the theatre, encompassing everything they need to know about the show before we arrive on Tech Day. This document outlines any set, props or lighting we will need them to provide for us, including any other technical requirements we may need. This, alongside all our other technical documents will be posted on the Technical Documents page on our blog.

Our company had a production meeting with Martin Rousseau, Stage Manager at the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre (LPAC), on Tuesday 14^th March to discuss our initial ideas for the show and preliminary technical requirements for our show. This required me to translate our concept for the show into practical terms and communicate that to Martin clearly. I did this by creating a draft technical rider (as seen below) clearly outlining everything we will require from the LPAC. This draft document then formed the basis for our final Technical Rider, as I added and removed things as our show progressed.

Figure 2 – Screenshot of Draft Technical Rider (Workman, 2017)

Figures

Figure 1 – Workman, L. (2017) Screenshot of Production Meeting Agenda for Friday 17th February 2017. Lincoln.

Figure 2 – Workman, L. (2017) Screenshot of Draft Technical Rider. Lincoln.