Post 558 - January 9, 2024

Two years ago, give or take a couple of months, Michael and I worked on a production of a new musical based on the 1980’s movie, The Karate Kid.

Before the pandemic, we had done several readings of the show as it developed as well as having done a fully staged workshop in a New York rehearsal studio. That is the normal path for a new musical.

The last time I had been on that journey was with Summer: The Donna Summer Musical. There had been a few readings. We did a full workshop in the Off-Broadway Signature Theatre that was only shown to industry people and friends and then we did its first production for a paying audience in California at the La Jolla Playhouse. Changes and tweaks happened all along the way including between the La Jolla tryout and its eventual Broadway opening. In the case of Summer, the tweaks turned out to be not enough and the show closed after only 289 performances, never having found its audience.

Unlike many of my contemporaries, I have worked on relatively few new Broadway shows in recent years. This was because nearly twenty years ago, now, I was part of a new show called Jersey Boys. The pre-Broadway trajectory of Jersey Boys differed from the others in that there were no readings or workshops beforehand. We went straight into rehearsals in La Jolla. Straight into rehearsals, mind you, without a finished script. All I had to work off when we started was a vague 60-page outline.

That should have been the kiss of death for the show. At the time, I don’t think that any of us in La Jolla thought that we were going to have jobs following the run at the Playhouse. We were happy to have the gig there, and we were all planning on looking for our next one after we closed. Instead, when we finally all were given warm, freshly printed copies of the script on the first day of rehearsal, we all knew we had a hit on our hands.

We were all there for different reasons. Few in the cast were seasoned, most of those had turned the show down. I was there because I had always wanted to work in La Jolla and I had always wanted to work with the director, Des McAnuff. Luckily, for me, his usual stage manager wasn’t available, so he had to take a chance with somebody new.

While I was going to College in New York back in the 1980s, I had, with some trepidation, crept all the way downtown to Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre on Lafayette Street. The New York of then was not the New York of now. There were plenty of places back in those days you simply didn’t go to for fear of getting mugged. I didn’t know the city well enough yet to know where you could go and where you couldn’t. I had no idea what to expect down in the East Village.

The reason I trekked down into that terra incognita was to see a musical called The Death of Richthofen as Witnessed from the Earth. Something must have inspired me to go, but for my life, I couldn’t tell you what it was. I just went. I sat there in the small theatre, and as it unfolded, I became mesmerized.

I had never seen anything like what was happening before me. It was ostensibly the story of the death of the World War I German flying ace, Baron Von Richthofen. To be fair, I have no idea what it was really about, I just knew that I didn’t want it to end. I have only had that feeling a handful of times in all my theatre-going experiences. The whole show was written and directed by a guy named Des McAnuff.

Des didn’t just use the floor of the stage to block the actors; he used the entire space all the way up to the proscenium. Something was happening everywhere you looked. People flew through the air while below others crept around in foxholes. Time magazine called it, “incredibly self-indulgent, pretentious, inane, murky, and interminable.” For me it was anything but. It was the signpost pointing me to what I wanted to do with my life.

Needless to say, when I was faced with an offer to work on a show Des was directing, I jumped at it. Never mind that it was a stupid idea (a jukebox musical about the Four Seasons) or that there wasn’t a completed script. I wanted to work with Des. To give you an idea of how unappealing the prospect of this show was to the rest of the world at large, Des’s usual stage manager didn’t want to leave the Broadway show he was doing. He would have made far less money in California. Rather than work on Jersey Boys, he stayed with the sure thing, another Des-directed production called Dracula, The Musical. Never heard of it? Yeah, well…

I’ve worked on fewer shows than some of my contemporaries because Jersey Boys, of course, was a juggernaut. I’ve probably done just as many if not more shows than many of my cohorts, they were just often the same show.

One of the myriad jobs of a Broadway stage manager is the calling of the show. A stage manager sits at a console replete with monitors showing not only every angle of the stage but also the conductor and throughout the evening, verbally instructs the lightboard technician when to hit the button for the next light cue.

When you watch a show and an actor flips a switch on the set of a house and the lights come on, that’s the stage manager and the board electrician doing that, not the actor. The light switch is fake. The stage manager watches the actor and when their hand is a split second away from hitting the switch, the stage manager says, “Lites thirty… go,” and the electrician, who can be sitting anywhere backstage or out front, hits the button and, presto, the lite goes on. Not only does the onstage lamp or sconce turn on, but other lights filling in the general area of the lamp come on to create the illusion that it’s a real lamp. All of this has been programmed into a computer. Hopefully, the stage manager has timed their call so that after they’ve said, “Go,” and the button has been pushed, the lights come on the second the actor flips the fake switch so that it looks like they did it themselves.

Sometimes the cues are called based upon the actors moving from one area to the next. The lights go down where they were and come up where they end up. In a musical, lights often happen on specific beats of music. In that case, again, you need to anticipate when you want the lights to come up to make them turn on at the right time. Different electricians have different reaction times. You need to be able to micro-adjust how you call based on which electrician is on the board for that performance. The skill inherent in the job lies in the ability of the stage manager to call a clean show. Saying “go” a fraction of a second before an actual musical beat is more nerve-wracking than it sounds.

I was also one of the stage managers on the Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance. It was a very long, very talky play. Over the course of well over three hours, there were only about eighty light cues. One of them was, indeed, turning on a light switch. Elaine Stritch had a very long entrance down the staircase onstage and when she reached the bottom she flicked on the lights. The scene before it was interminable without any cues at all. After hearing it thirty or forty times it was hard to keep focused. My mind would wander. More than once, I snapped out of whatever reverie I was in only to look up and see Elaine at the bottom of the stairs flicking the switch on and off. And staring directly at me with a look of utter disdain. “Oh, lights, go!”. Ah well. They can’t all be gems.

In Jersey Boys, on the other hand, there were well over a thousand light cues. The calling stage manager never shut up. In addition to that, the scenery moved and, again, it was the stage manager’s job to make that happen. Usually, a move is verbally warned and then a small light that the automation operator can see is turned on. When the stage manager switches the light off the operator pushes the button on their console and the set piece moves. On Jersey Boys, we had nine cue lights and they never stopped switching on and off. Some cued the operator who ran the computer that controlled the pieces on the deck of the stage, and some cued the other operator who ran the pieces that flew in and out. The rest cued the people who had to fly some of the pieces in and out manually. Backstage on a Broadway show, there are literally people yanking on counter-balanced ropes to bring backdrops and, in the case of Jersey Boys, fences, in and out.

To make the job even harder, while the lights required you to say, “go” say a half second before, the reaction time for the automation was ever so slightly longer – say a second and a quarter. Often, you’d end up doing them slightly off as in click, “go”. For difficult sequences, it was possible to program a micro delay into the light cue so that if you did both the clicking and the go-ing at the same time, the result would line up.

In the old days, I’m talking while I was still at university, there were still theatres that had gigantic resistance dimmers that controlled the lights. These all had to be operated by hand and took a small crew to carry out the cues. There was a company called The Equity Library Theatre up near Columbia that did revivals of classic plays and musicals. I worked on a crew for a production of A Raisin in the Sun for them.

There were three or four of us in a tiny little room, high above the stage, filled with these enormous dimmers. The dimmers gave off a lot of heat so the room would sometimes get upward of 120 degrees. We all wore bathing suits. Each light had its own dimmer. If you were only moving one light it was more or less easy. They were heavy but you learned to pull down or push up on them steadily so that the changing intensity of light on stage ran smoothly. You could see the teeny tiny stage miles below you and watch how you were doing.

You never were, though, rarely moving only one light. You and your companions often had three or four apiece to move at the same time. And at different speeds. You’d end up spread-eagled over several dimmers sometimes intertwined with the person next to you. Your right foot could be on a dimmer that had to be pulled down over a count of five and your two hands were on dimmers four feet away that had to be pushed up on a count of two. It was like a hot, sweaty game of Twister. I only ever crewed like that on one show. It was brutal.

A Chorus Line was the first Broadway show whose lighting was completely computerized. A Chorus Line opened while I was still in Junior High School. Soon, computerized lighting became the norm. By the time I got to college, Equity Library Theatre may have been the only space left in the city still using those gargantuan dimmers. A whole generation of electricians who could operate them perfectly found themselves with a useless skill set after only a very few years.

Technological innovation moves forward very quickly. When we first did Jersey Boys in 2004 and again in 2005, LED screens were rudimentary, at best, and prohibitively expensive. We used projectors for the onstage images that were part of the design. By the time we got to mounting the First National Tour in 2006, LEDs had improved in quality and dropped in price, so we were able to use them. A few years later, we retrofitted the Broadway production with the newer tech.

Most of the cues in Jersey Boys were called verbally. On Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, we started using an innovation called time coding. What time coding does is computerize the calling of the light cues.

Imagine that the musical score of a show is like a clothesline. When you program time code, you place a cue on this virtual clothesline so that it always fires at the same time. Summer had several thousand light cues. The stage manager would call the first cue of a song and then the computer would take over. Summer was a show about disco music after all. Say what you will about the show, but the lighting was amazing. It was still a very difficult piece to call, but it would have been impossible to achieve all those lighting effects verbally. Nobody can speak that fast.

The Karate Kid: The Musical took timecoding even further. As more and more cues were added to the clothesline, there was less and less for me to do. I fought to be able to call specific cues but for the most part, everything was taken away from me. Unlike Summer, The Karate Kid was a show that was easily called verbally. The designer of the show was younger than the designer of the other two shows by a full generation and he wanted the precision of a computer executing his cues.

One of the cues that I fought to call myself was for a light that moved quickly downstage with an actor. The actor, in this case, the lead, would run downstage in the middle of a song and the light would go with him. It was impossible to set this on time code because the actor didn’t always cross at the same time. He always came down on the same beat of music but sometimes he was a microsecond early and sometimes a microsecond late.

The lighting designer wanted me to get the actor to be consistent and I refused to do that. It wasn’t achievable. Nor was it necessary. The actor wasn’t a computer, and we didn’t want him to be. He needed to be able to react honestly to what he was feeling at the time. As a human being, I could tell when he was a bit over-energized or a bit sluggish, but the computer couldn’t. After the light missed him a few more times, the designer finally relented and gave me the cue to call. The light never missed him again.

Like the guys who operated those old-time lighting resistance dimmers, my skill set is becoming obsolete. I do understand why designers want their work done by computers. For the most part, it is extremely accurate. You can do a far more impressive display in a splashy musical number. Of course, a computer’s mind also never wanders leaving a legendary actress stranded center stage with a light that doesn’t work.

Tinkers, cobblers, blacksmiths, weavers, sewers, potters, and chandlers have all seen the need for their abilities wane and disappear. Sure, some still practice those trades, but they don’t have to. Quicker and cheaper ways have been devised to create their products. There are still craftspeople who still make the things that are now in the hands of machines because in the hands of a master, they can do it better. Not more efficiently. Never more efficiently, but, quite often, better.

The recent SAG-AFTRA strike was largely about this same thing. Even actors are beginning to see their work become automated. What everyone on those picket lines was fighting for was nothing more than the continued existence of their jobs.

One of the factors that fuels technological innovation is simple economics. One LED wall can replace an infinite number of hand-painted backdrops. No labor, other than the programmer, is required. Whole teams of painters and riggers are now without jobs. For the producers, that means fewer people to pay. That doesn’t mean tickets get cheaper, it means that investors pocket more profits. Likewise, an AI actor is not anywhere near as costly as a flesh and blood one. Can Artificial Intelligence act better than living, breathing performers? Not yet.

When lighting became computerized, career electricians lost their jobs. You still need a few of them to run a show, just not as many. Similarly, in the world beyond theatre, as automated factories took over production, countless craftspeople soon found themselves either having to learn a new skill or risk becoming superfluous.

I can’t quite picture a world where a theatre piece could run without any stage management at all. I can, however, see a time when it is a job that anyone could do because it will only need somebody to keep an eye on things. The position will no longer require any training or innate ability.
This is going to be the next generation’s problem more than it is going to be mine. These days, I am happy working on one-off concerts by Broadway performers.

Mandy Patinkin and Patti LuPone are both still resolutely old school. No timecoding here, thank goodness. Mandy once said to me that what he wants in a stage manager is somebody who can breathe with him. Meaning, that somebody, who, regardless of what it says on the page, will adjust the calling of the cues to where he is and what he’s doing. That, I think, is what is at the heart of the craft.

I know that technology will progress. It won’t all be bad. I can, however, see what it will mean for the job that I have spent much of my life doing. Thankfully, the one thing that automation can’t do, is breathe.

Yet.