First Week, New Script

Saturday Night Fever rehearsals have officially begun. Now that we have finished the first week, I have a much clearer sense as to what this show will be like. It’s going to be groovin’ swingin’ roller coaster from start to finish.

The week before rehearsals started Vicky and David Pepin (our music director) had an industry reading in New York City for the writers and producers. Using a cast of mostly BW grads, they work shopped the show further fine tuning and redefining the script and score. Vicky forwarded me the stage manager’s script from the workshop that had all of the changes penciled in. Large sections of text had slashes through them, existing lines had internal changes, and there was some material that was completely new. It was clear that the script I had was far from being the final version and changes are going to occur throughout.

Our first two rehearsals consisted entirely of music, with David teaching the songs to the cast. The first thing that struck me was how much I had missed being in rehearsal. I haven’t been in rehearsal since October when I was stage managing Romeo & Juliet. While I had initially been apprehensive about starting Saturday Night Fever (because it is a much more challenging show than R&J) I suddenly felt at ease. SMing a show is like riding a bike, once you know how to do it, it becomes second nature.

It’s often said that the job description of the stage manager is: “The SM is responsible for everything. Period.” And that is actually pretty accurate. For example, when Vicky told me that we probably wouldn’t get an updated copy of the script from the writers for two weeks, it instantly became my job to change that. As stage manager I need to make sure this process goes as smoothly as possible. So that means the actors need paper copies of the updated script as soon as possible. So I took the original pdf of the script I had (from November) and converted it to a word document. From there, I took the scan of the NYC script with all the penciled changes, and manually made all the revisions. This was Wednesday, and Sunday was our full read through. And since printing services closes on Friday, it became clear I had to complete this all that night so I could send the new version to be printed and copied the next morning. So I stayed up till 2:00 in the morning revising the script.

This example shows the legwork and dedication that is inherent to stage management. To me, being a good stage manager means always going above and beyond. I could have simply printed and copied the messy NYC version, but it could have led to confusion in the long run. It is better to put in the extra effort to make sure everything is clear and everyone is on the same page.