Behind the Scenes on Broadway: What a Stage Manager Really Does

0:00I love it. It's a big show, like, say, Hello Dolly, which I did. The sets are mammoth and huge and very complex. You have to figure out how you're going to get from one scene to another and it can be incredibly complicated. Hi, welcome back to How Much Can I Make, the podcast about jobs and careers. I'm your host, Miravu Zeri. Today we are with Billy who has a very sexy job. He is a stage manager. How are you loving it? It sounds like very sexy. Thanks for, by the way, willing to share your experience with us. That's fantastic. Let's start by learning how did you get into stage management. How I got into it non-professionally was I did theater in high school. I was attracted to it from seventh grade when I was in a production of the Sound of Music. I played one of the kids. I was hooked.

1:00In high school, in order to be in the productions, we had to work backstage. We had to work on Saturdays. We had something called Work Parties. We would work on sets, costumes, props, putting the show together, mainly building the sets. In that process of doing that and then being on stage, I developed this awareness of not only what it was like to be a performer, but what it took to create the stage and the lights and the props and the costumes and wigs and everything that it took behind the scenes. Was it a dream to be a performer? Yes. Yes. That was my dream to be a performer and to be a star on Broadway or a rock star. I wasn't picky. I just wanted to be a star. So I went to school for music for one semester and then I switched to theater because I was

2:02a singer too. In university settings, first one was a state university and the second one was a private university. Part of your requirement when your performer is to work backstage and to work in the shops and learn how to not only build shows, but run shows, run lights, run follow spots, run carpenter cues on the deck. You learn all that in university settings. Sometimes it's very divided. In my case, the school I went to, which was a state university of New York, at Fredonia, everybody did everything, just like my high school. So it was just kind of like a carryover. And I would get on cruise up shows and I was performing in shows. But the thing that even always when I was performing, I was always aware of that it wasn't just me up there with the audience and my fellow actors that there was a whole infrastructure backstage that was kind of allowing us to be there and for the show to be effective.

3:03And then I went to New York. I was waiting tables doing kind of theaters of hobby. But I was in a lot of productions. They just didn't really pay me anything. And it asserts... I was in production as a performer or as a stage manager. As a performer. And at a certain point, I started to get a little frustrated with the life of an actor. You're only as good as your last audition. You can be fabulous in the show. And everybody can love you. You're walking to an audition and they may love you. And then they'll say, yeah, but you're just not right for this show. And I just got sick of hearing that. So I was taking acting classes. They were doing some readings and the director needed a stage manager for it. And basically what he needed was to schedule people's availability around their work schedules. I did that for a couple shows and he was very impressed with my ability to do that. So to schedule... What does a stage manager actually do?

4:03Well, what doesn't the stage manager do is probably a shorter answer. But basically, you're running the show. You're making sure the rehearsals happen as scheduled that the director and the actors have what they need in the rehearsal. To rehearse meeting. Do they have a floor plan of the set? Do they have props that they can handle? Do they have costume pieces that they may need? If they need a sword, you got to have a sword there. If they need cup of tea, you got it in the scene. You got to make sure all that's there. So they can rehearse in a barebone fashion. If it's a musical and they need piano and drums, you got to make sure they're there. If you need to make sure the rooms are ready and available for these rehearsals to happen. And then once the rehearsals happen, you keep them on schedule. You call the breaks. You make schedules for every day. And you not only rehearse in the room with the actors and the director,

5:04you're also talking to the designers saying, I need to have a costume fitting for this person, for this role. When are they rehearsing tomorrow? I only have this window of time to use. I need to do shoe fittings. I need to do wig measurements. I need to do wig fittings. Any other kinds of things that may pull them out of the room. So the stage manager is scheduling all that stuff. And then making sure that the production is proceeding on schedule so that you can get to the first performance. And before you get to the first performance, you move from a rehearsal studio, typically, onto the stage of the theater with a crew that hasn't been in rehearsal most of them. And you start to put the cast on stage in their costumes, going scene by scene, working with the lighting designer and the sound designer to light the show, do the sound cues, get the set on and off.

6:05If it's a big show, like, say, hello, Dolly, which I did, it's the sets are mammoth and huge and very complex. You have to figure out how you're going to get from one scene to another and it can be incredibly complicated. Who is overseeing you? You're working mainly as the right-hand person to the director. Directors relying on you to make sure that the rehearsals can happen and things stand scheduled. If it's a musical, then there's also a musical director who's teaching them music and then they have to learn all that. And then if there's a musical, there's usually a choreographer. So you've got to be rehearsing all these things in and eight hour day in, like, say, three different rooms and all things going separately and then coming together and things can go wrong. And if you're the stage manager and you're watching the show and the sets are moving the way they're supposed to, but the lights are doing something crazy and the lighting electrician has to figure out what's going on

7:08and the stage manager has to say, OK, we need to stop because the sets not moving right or the lights aren't moving right or the sound is not working or the mics have gone dead. So somebody has to be at the helm to sort of make sure that that the show continues and if it can't continue, you get an announcement to the audience and say, ladies and gentlemen, do a technical issue. We have to interrupt the performance. There's happened to be many times. Really? Yeah, of course. And it's very, there's a lot of complicated, a lot of moving parts. Sometimes the moving parts are on people's bodies. I mean, I've had actors get seriously injured during a performance and you have to either stop or get them off stage, get an understudy in their costumes and send them back out. The hope is you can do it without stopping the show. But sometimes that's a big out.

8:09So while the show goes on, you have to be on all the time. Look at it. You have to be watching the show. If you're calling the cues of a show, you're still watching it like a hog. If it's a musical like Hologdali, which has 30 plus people on stage, you're watching everything. If it's a play like, say, art, which I did, there's only three actors. And the lights don't change much and the sets don't change much. But you still have to watch in case the lights start blinking or an actor messes up a liner and actor starts to get sick and walks off the stage. So you have to be present. Somebody has to be calling the shots to make sure the show happens. If you have a theater of 1,200 people and something is going wrong and there isn't the feeling that someone is in charge and telling you what to do, it would be chaos. I've had people have heart attacks in the audience during a performance. What did they do?

9:10And you have to hear something going on. You say to your assistant what's going on and that the EMS are coming and then you say ladies and gentlemen, due to a medical emergency, we need to interrupt the performance. Cass, please come off the stage. But we ask you to please stay in your seats and we'll resume the show as soon as we can. But in the perfect world, the lights go down. The actors come out, the curtain goes up. All the cues happen in the right order. Everybody says their lines and the audience gives a standing ovation. And that happens, you know, 90% of the time. Probably more. So it's a very stressful job and it can be very stressful and it can also be incredibly monotonous because if some of the shows I've been on ran for hundreds of performances, year and a half, you know, and you have to be there every day. And you have to be there every day

10:10or you have to have trained somebody to be in your, be there in your place to take vacations and stuff like that. But a team of a stage management team be that two people, it's usually two people, sometimes three or four, but there has to be a full stage management team at every performance. Tell me some shows you worked on. Hello, Dali, which I mentioned. The original productions of Love, Valor, Compassion, which one of Tony for Best Play, Master Class, which was Tony for Best Play, Art, which one of Tony for Best Play, take me out, revival of Glen Gary Glen Ross, with Leav Shriver and Alan Alde. I did a revival of you from the bridge with Scarlet's Johansson. I did the first Broadway production of Three Days of Rain, with Julia Roberts, Paul Rodden Bradley Cooper. Oh my God, you did a lot. How many years have you been in the business? I worked on Broadway for 30 years and I worked on Broadway before that. How much money can you make as a stage manager? 1988, I think I was making $292 a month.

11:14A month? A week. $192 a week. So you started as a $299? Oh, I started less than that. Well, I don't know what it is now, because I don't, but you are going to be making peanuts. It varies so much from venue to venue. I mean, sometimes it'll be like some localities, I'm looking for stage manager to rehearse and do the show for four weeks, downtown, and I have $1,000. And if you love it, you'll do $1,000. $1,000 for the whole thing. For the whole week. Yeah, for the end of rehearsals. Or you can, somebody may be getting $600 a week, or $800, or $1,000 if they're good. But if you're up to the level of working as a production stage manager on Broadway, the union minimum contract is $4,000 a week. So you can easily, if you are on a hit show like Book of Mormon or Wicked or Hamilton or you're pulling in 200K a year,

12:21plus you're getting money put into your pension, you're getting health insurance, and you're getting money, dedicated money from us, producer to go into your 401k. So it's a sweet deal. And I worked on Broadway for 30 years, and retired with a rather substantial pension. You have to be artistically ambitious to get to a point where you're gonna be making the 200K a year, because that's Broadway. And that's, if you're not ambitious, you're just not gonna make it in any field on Broadway, because aren't there many people that make a living on Broadway? So if somebody wanna start, and they have no theater experience, but they love the theater, how can they start? I don't know how you really love the theater if you have no theater experience. You may, you may love seeing theater, and you may love the idea of watching a play. But if you have no theater experience,

13:22and you love theater, you need to get yourself backstage on a show somehow to either at a community theater in your college, or by sort of making contacts somehow to see what it's actually like. Because the idea of the thing of sitting in a theater and watching it and being backstage and doing it are two very, very different things. So volunteer intern. Yeah, get in your high school drama club. If college has a theater department, volunteer, they're gonna want you. Anybody could always want extra hands to do all kinds of sort of painting or sewing or just making coffee for people backstage, just get in the soup of the production of a show somehow. Because there's community theaters everywhere. For regional theater, they take more professionals, right? They wouldn't take a beginner. You could, if there's a regional theater in your town,

14:24just say you wanna volunteer, say you wanna, I think if you have no theater experience, you're gonna have to volunteer. You're not, this isn't something you're gonna make any money. What would you say are the most important skills for somebody who wants to become a state manager? You have to love theater. You have to love theater. You have to not be afraid to get your hands dirty. You have to love the process of putting things together, putting a show together, working with a lot of people to, because it's a very collaborative theater by definition. You have to be willing and able to collaborate. And if you're the stage manager, you gotta be, you gotta check your ego. Because you're gonna be dealing with a lot of people with egos because they're the ones that are out there on the High Wire Act.

15:26Acting for a living or even as, even as a pastime is a very, very vulnerable place to go. So you have to be, because you're going out into the dark, you're going into the light in front of a room full of strangers in the dark, hoping that they like you. And it's just on a personal level, that's tough. You're there to support the other artists in the room. Did it ever happen to you that you were Starstruck? Yeah, I was... Who were you, Starstruck? I was Starstruck all the time when I first started. I was working with John Patrick Shanley, who had won an Oscar for Moonstruck. And I was completely Starstruck by him. And he was just the writer and the director. And then I was very Starstruck by Dolly Parton, except she puts you right at ease. I would be too. I would be Starstruck with Dolly Parton. But she's been immediately your put at ease. That's the thing is, in my job,

16:26I'm your Starstruck when you see their name, that you're going to be working with them. It's like, oh my God, I'm working with Julia Roberts. Oh my, what is this guy? I mean, this one's, you know, she was a big star. Or I'm going to be working with Scarlett Johansson. You're going to be working with Bradley Cooper. I'm going to be working with Laurie Metcalfe. I mean, but my sort of outreach to them is two or three weeks before rehearsal start. And I send an email and I go, hey, I'm Billy. And, you know, this is the script. This is the schedule. This is how we're going to roll. You know, is there anything you need in the room when you rehearse? So my dialogue has already started them generally. Weeks before I meet them. So at the time I meet them, it'll be like, hey, Laurie, I'm Billy. Oh, Billy, oh yes. Thank you for all your emails. So you're sort of comrades. And they know that you're running the room.

17:31Did you collect signatures of those famous people on playbills? No. Not professional. Sometimes I have posters from shows that are signed by people. Some of them very personally, some of them just signed. So yeah, in that sense, I've collected signatures, but I don't ask for their autographs. What would you say is the biggest challenge of the job? If you're going into this as a career, the biggest challenge is the schedule. I would, for me, you are going to do a shows a week. You're going to work six days a week. You're going to, and you're going to be on call 24-7. Wow. If you can walk out of that theater on a Saturday afternoon and think, one more Saturday night in my weeks over and get a call that somebody fell and they're in the hospital

18:32and you've got to have an understudy ready for that evening's performance and you've got a couple hours to make sure that person can slot into the show and do the performance. Or you get a call on your day off as Monday and you get a call Monday at four in the afternoon saying, you know what, that brain we had? The theater's flooded. The costumes are soaked. We don't know what we're going to do. So it's a big, again, it's very organizational. It's a big game. It's a chess board. Yeah. What would you say is the biggest reward of the job? The biggest reward is when you retire and you have a big pension. No, I've had a lot. Everyone has issues with unions, but I am very, very grateful to the union that they kept that pension. So beside the reward of the money, what else would you say? Oh, the reward of it is watching things come together to watch all the elements come into place

19:35and be a part of that because you see everything. There is no department that you're not involved with. So you feel like you're a part of, you're in the middle of, if it's a successful show, you're in the middle of having created something great. And the best thing is it's like for an actor, is you hear that audience respond and laugh and applaud and stand up at the end. Or you hear the show's name called at the Tony Awards. And you know, I mean, all of those moments are really, really rewarding. Did you work on the flop? Oh, yeah. Yeah. What was that like? I don't want to say. I don't want to embarrass. Yeah, I've worked on some shows that ran. They must have been depressing, no? A couple of weeks. Yeah, it's sad. It's sad. We're talking a lot of flops. I got luck, I'm brought by most of the things that were done. We're Tony winners. Ran for a while. Now Tony winners this, but they ran for a while. Some of them don't.

20:36And you may find yourself working for a couple of years on a show that you thought was maybe going to run for a couple of years and it runs for three months. So what happens in between shows as far as income? Unemployment? You can get unemployment, which isn't much. I certainly use that to bridge the gap. You save while you're working. And hopefully run your life in such a way that you can do that. There's a lot of job insecurity in this profession. It's like freelancing? Yeah, it is totally freelance. And you go from union contract to union contract once you get established. But when I started, I didn't know. I had also continued to do restaurant work between stage management gigs. They're sometimes during stage management gigs. Wow. They didn't pay enough for me to kind of pay my rent and eat. Pay my bills.

21:37There are gaps where you're now working and you got to do something. And now that you're retired, do you miss it? No. Do you still go to the theater? There are people. I go to the theater a lot. I actually just sort of reignited my love of theater because I read about something and I go, oh, I think I'll go, as opposed to reading about something and thinking, oh, I wish I could go, but I have to work. So there's a freedom in being retired. And I do love theater and love seeing it and I've loved working on it. And I think that that's a requirement. I have a friend who stages management together a lot. And she said, when you work in theater, if you don't get that little sense of thrill when you walk into the theater, you walk through the stage door, you're in the wrong business

22:37because there's so much about it that's difficult and hard and it's a hard profession to survive in and to thrive in. And there's a lot. There's not that many jobs. So you really have to love it because you got to put up a lot of downtime, a lot of times when you're not working, working for little money, working ridiculous hours, even if you're not like sort of physically there, you're still on call, you still... Your phone calls, your emails, your paper, or you're doing stuff hours after you leave the theater. If you love theater and you work a holic, it's the place for you. It's the job for you. You meet a lot of different people. You work on a show for maybe six months and then there's a new batch of people and doesn't get boring in that sense. Is there a difference in pay I would assume there is between Broadway and smaller production? Sure. Even though you have a union behind you? Yes, there's all different kinds of contracts

23:38based on where you work. The pinnacle is Broadway. That's the only job where you're going to make 4,000 a week is the production stage with the lead stage manager on a Broadway musical. And what happens on a play it's less. If you're the first assistant stage manager, it's less. If you're in a regional theater, it's less. If you're in a regional theater on Broadway like Manhattan Theatre Club Lincoln Center, round about second stage, it's less. If you're working off Broadway, it's less. It's considerably. When you say less, what would that be? Like a thousand? I don't really, I don't want to speak to that because at the moment, I don't know the different contracts, but it can be significantly less, like a quarter of the salary. If you go on a musical tour, Broadway show that is on tour, do you make the same amount that you would make on Broadway? It depends on what contract the union is

24:39to go straight with the producers. It can be less. It can be more. On tour, you get pretty in. So depending on how you handle your living expenses on the road, you can make... Nice money. You can make really nice money. And the thing about a tour is typically it's booked. So when you sign that job, sign that contract, you know you're working for 18 months. I mean, did you ever go on a tour? No, I was on one tour that I toured for. I think it was a year and a half. It wasn't a particularly long. Did you like it? I like things about it. I like the show. It was hair. So, and I like the show, and I like hearing the music, and I like being around the energy of that show. It was fun. And it was show that I've been listening to since high school. And there's something about it that's great. There's something... If you're liking the people you're working with, it's a blast. It's a great place for partying,

25:40because you grow out of it. You're in a hotel and you like me for a drink at the bar, and it's fun. Well, it sounds like a real fun job. You know, you meet stars, you're in the theater all the time. I mean, it's fantastic. You would you say you loved your life in London? Oh, I did. I did. I loved it. I loved it. A lot of times I got to sleep late. I didn't have to be to work till 6.30 at night. You know, it's, yeah. And the thing that I miss most about it, and that I love most about it, is the people that I met and the people that I worked with. They're not just the stars. I mean, just... They're just a great families that spring up around a show, and you're involved with a lot of really interesting people. Having their lives and doing this thing together. It's your part of a team. I always love it. Well, thank you so much for doing it. That was so interesting. Oh, good. Great. Thanks a million.

26:42This is it for today. If this is not the right career for you, maybe there's a better one waiting. Take the five-question career quiz on my website. How much can I make that info? And learn about careers that fit the lifestyle you want. No email, no registration, just five questions. And don't forget to give us a like. It really helps. Thanks. I'll see you next week.