Stage Management, 10th Edition

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Making Things Run Smoothly

 

Stage managing is like riding a bicycle.

If you don’t keep moving, you fall down.

—Elbin Cleveland

 

 

The cast, staff, and crew of live theater work together toward a common goal: a good performance. Theater is necessarily a group effort in professional, amateur, and educational theater. It is a collaborative effort. However, it is never a group effort of vague fellow committee members, but of associated autocrats: a playwright, a producer, a director, a stage manager, designers, and, above all, actors. Each accommodates the other and may overlap others in function when necessary, considering the variety of differing conditions for each show and every kind and level of theater. But each autocrat assumes distinct ...