Stage Manager

This was the first time I have taken on the stage manager role from the start. A big learning experience, and a curvy one at that. My woodworking skills are lax and this was a good start at building them up. With only two hired in cloths, due to the other two not being available in the correct size, I decided to create some set pieces to complement the cloth that would be used the most (the couryard) to try and differentiate the scene locations in the script: Palace Courtyard, Palace Gardens, Town Square in the palace grounds. The director asked for a house to be in the palace gardens so that it could be used for a small line within a scene which has smoke coming out of the window, I complemented this scene with a trellis full of flowers. The town square scene was originally planned to have two market stalls flats at the back, but I changed this to have one market stall, and a truck with market crates. This was eventually reduced to just a market stall. The other cloth was used for the sewing room scenes, the first of which had a single loom (built by my DSM Natt) as the set piece that had an actor standing on it for the song. The other scene had the full complement of set pieces in the loom, two chairs, a dress makers mannequin, and a spinning wheel.

The show week itself ran relatively smoothly, with only 1 scene being cut from the tech run which was run as a full run through with a few stoppages for dance blocking and marking set positions. I had a good crew behind me who were more than capable of running the show so I mostly spent my time reading the script and cueing rather than taking part in the scene changes.