The Production Manager's Toolkit, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 11Opera

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808174-15

The major thing that differentiates opera from other disciplines is its scale. With opera, the production manager needs to manage a larger-than-average amount of people, things, and sometimes, even places. A large opera can have over 100 performers onstage, 80 musicians in the orchestra, and 60 technicians behind the scenes. Though one can equate the day-to-day duties of an opera production manager to a theatre production manager, the jobs differentiate when one factors in the scale of the productions.

“Opera is a large, expensive art form involving many people. Our production budget alone is larger than the entire operating budget of many small and medium-sized theatres, and there are regularly ...