THPERF 343: Stage Management

Sources and References

Primary textbook — Lawrence Stern, Stage Management, 11th ed. (Routledge). Supplementary texts — Daniel A. Ionazzi The Stage Management Handbook; Thomas A. Kelly The Back Stage Guide to Stage Management; Peter Maccoy Essentials of Stage Management; Gail Pallin Stage Management: The Essential Handbook; Lisa Porter & Narda E. Alcorn Stage Management: Theory and Practice. Online resources — Canadian Actors’ Equity Association (CAEA) stage management handbook; Stage Managers’ Association (SMA) open resources; NYU Tisch stage management open course materials.

1. What a Stage Manager Does

A stage manager (SM) is the central operational and communicative hub of a theatrical production. The role is simultaneously administrative, artistic, and interpersonal: the SM translates the creative intentions of the director and design team into a reliable, repeatable performance while supporting the welfare of every performer and technician involved. Unlike a director, whose authority is primarily conceptual, the SM’s authority is procedural — they “own” how the production is rehearsed, called, and run, but not what it means.

Porter and Alcorn frame stage management as a practice built on three interlocking commitments: clarity, compassion, and curiosity. Clarity ensures information flows accurately; compassion maintains the human sustainability of the work; curiosity allows the SM to anticipate needs that others have not yet voiced. Stern’s classic formulation is more procedural, describing the SM as the person responsible for scheduling, recording, communicating, and coordinating every element that crosses a rehearsal or performance space.

Typical duties span the full production arc. In pre-production, the SM reads and analyzes the script, attends design meetings, prepares the prompt book, and organizes contact and scheduling information. During rehearsals, they run the room on the director’s behalf, track blocking, issue daily reports, and keep rehearsal moving on time. In tech and performance, they call lighting, sound, automation, and deck cues from a headset, manage actor calls, and file show reports. Throughout, they are the production’s institutional memory.

The personal characteristics that matter most — emphasized by Kelly, Ionazzi, and the CAEA handbook alike — are steadiness under pressure, literacy with paperwork, tact, and an absolute commitment to punctuality. The SM rarely receives applause, but a production without a good one is visible to every audience as hesitation, missed cues, and exhausted performers.

2. The Production Book

The production book (also called the prompt book, bible, or calling script) is the SM’s master document. It consolidates everything a replacement SM would need to run the show tomorrow: the script with blocking and cues, contact sheets, schedules, design paperwork, production meeting notes, rehearsal and show reports, scene breakdowns, costume plots, prop lists, and all relevant forms.

Ionazzi recommends a large three-ring binder as the physical backbone, though many contemporary SMs maintain parallel digital books in tools such as PDF annotators or dedicated apps. The script itself is typically printed one page per sheet with a facing blank page on the left for blocking and cue notation — this left-hand/right-hand pairing is the oldest convention in the craft, dating to nineteenth-century prompt copies.

Standard dividers include: contacts, calendar, scripts, scene breakdown, character/scene chart (often called the “French scene” chart), blocking key, prop list, costume plot, light and sound cue sheets, ground plans, production meeting minutes, rehearsal reports, and show reports. Every page is dated; nothing is erased — corrections are crossed out with a single line so that history remains visible.

Paperwork templates established early save enormous time later. Stern provides template forms that many programs still use nearly verbatim: the daily call, the rehearsal report, the performance (show) report, the accident/incident form, the sign-in sheet, and the costume and prop preset checklists. Maccoy emphasizes that the templates must suit the company — a university Shakespeare requires different paperwork than a devised dance-theatre piece — but the categories of information remain constant.

The discipline is to update the book continuously rather than retrospectively. A book that is current at the end of every rehearsal day is a book that can survive an emergency; one reconstructed from memory cannot.

3. Prep Week and Production Analysis

Prep week is the short window — sometimes a week, sometimes a fortnight — between contract start and first rehearsal in which the SM converts a script into a workable rehearsal plan. Kelly describes it as the period when “the show exists only on paper, which is precisely why it must be well-made paper.”

Production analysis begins with several focused reads of the script. The first is for story and emotional shape, read the way an audience would encounter it. The second is technical, noting every entrance and exit, every prop named or implied, every lighting or sound effect the text describes, and every location change. The third is structural, breaking the script into French scenes — units defined by who is on stage — so that rehearsals can be scheduled with only the necessary actors called. Porter and Alcorn add a fourth read focused on content warnings and intimacy moments, which the SM must flag for the director and, where relevant, for an intimacy director.

From these reads, the SM generates the core pre-production paperwork. The scene/character breakdown is a grid showing which characters appear in which scenes. The prop preliminary list, the costume preliminary list, and the effects list each become starting points for the respective design departments. A “distribution list” — the roster of who receives which paperwork, from producer to wardrobe stitcher — is set up so that rehearsal reports reach exactly the right people.

Casting information (contact numbers, conflicts, allergies, emergency contacts, measurements where shared with wardrobe) is gathered under privacy-respecting protocols. The CAEA handbook is specific that personal data must be collected only for production purposes and stored securely.

By the end of prep week, the SM should be able to answer any reasonable question about the script’s logistics within a minute. That readiness is what lets rehearsals begin on time.

4. Ground Plans and Taping Out the Rehearsal Floor

Before the first rehearsal, the SM must be fluent in the set designer’s ground plan — the scaled overhead drawing that shows walls, platforms, furniture positions, masking, and sightlines. Reading a ground plan means understanding the scale (commonly 1/4" = 1'0" in North America or 1:25 in the UK and much of Europe), the title block, the line conventions (solid for visible edges, dashed for hidden or overhead elements, dot-dash for centerlines), and the relationship between plan, section, and elevation drawings.

The SM then transfers this plan to the rehearsal floor in a process called taping out. Spike tape — narrow, low-tack cloth tape in multiple colors — is laid down to mark walls, door openings, furniture footprints, level changes, and any other feature that will affect actor movement. Stern and Maccoy both recommend a consistent color code kept on a legend taped near the stage management table: for example, white for walls, yellow for door swings, red for hazards, blue for furniture, green for secondary scenes. Using the set designer’s actual color scheme is acceptable but not required.

The taping process is itself a craft. The SM (often with an ASM) begins by establishing the centerline and plaster line, snaps a chalk line or uses a long straightedge to draw perpendicular baselines, and then measures every corner from those two reference lines using a long tape measure. Diagonals are cross-checked to verify square. Curves are approximated with short straight segments or scribed with a pivoted string. Accuracy within an inch or two is the standard; more than that and actors will develop habits that will not fit the real set.

Taping out is also the SM’s first physical encounter with the set’s spatial logic. Questions that emerge while taping — whether a doorway is wide enough for a group entrance, whether a platform edge is dangerously close to the wings — are exactly the questions a director will ask on day one, and the SM who has taped is ready to answer them.

5. The Prompt Book and Blocking Notation

Blocking is the actor’s path and posture through the play: where they stand, when they move, and how. The SM’s job is to record blocking in the prompt book so precisely that if the director were absent for a week, rehearsals could still review scenes accurately.

Notation systems vary, but the conventions Stern codifies remain the North American default. The stage is divided into a grid — upstage/downstage, stage left/right, center — with standard abbreviations (US, DS, SL, SR, C, UR, DL, and so on). Each character is represented by a letter or number tied to a legend. Numbered beats in the script correspond to circled numbers on the facing blocking page, and the blocking note for each number describes the move in shorthand: “3: J crosses DS of table to SR chair, sits.”

Many SMs sketch miniature top-down diagrams on the blocking page showing positions at the start of a beat, with arrows for movement. Lisa Porter’s approach encourages diagrams over verbal description because they survive revision better — if the director changes a move, the arrow is easier to update than a paragraph.

Pencil is mandatory. Blocking changes constantly through rehearsal, and the book must remain readable after dozens of revisions. Some SMs use multiple pencil colors (blocking in one, cues in another, notes in a third) to aid legibility; others prefer the simplicity of a single soft pencil and a good eraser.

Alongside blocking, the prompt book accumulates cue placements. Each light, sound, and automation cue is marked with a warning line (Q-light warn), a standby, and a “go” point, notated in the margin or on the blocking page with a distinctive symbol. By the end of rehearsals, the book’s margins are a dense forest of standbys and gos — the skeleton of the show as it will be called.

6. Running a Rehearsal

Once rehearsals begin, the SM’s daily rhythm is tightly structured. A typical rehearsal day starts well before the actors arrive: the SM opens the room, sets temperature and lighting, lays out rehearsal props and furniture in their taped positions, checks that water and first-aid supplies are available, and posts the day’s schedule. An assistant stage manager (ASM), where available, handles much of this setup.

The daily call — distributed the previous night — tells each actor when and where to arrive. The SM takes attendance against the call and notes any lateness factually and without judgment. The “half-hour call” before rehearsal and subsequent “fifteen,” “five,” and “places” are ingrained rituals that set the tempo of the day.

During rehearsal the SM sits next to or near the director, script open, pencil ready. They prompt actors who call “line,” track the pace against the schedule, enforce the union break schedule (for Equity productions, typically five minutes every fifty-five or ten minutes every eighty, depending on the contract), and record blocking continuously. When the director calls a stop, the SM makes a note of where work resumed so that the rehearsal log is accurate.

Stern stresses that the SM’s authority in the room is quiet rather than assertive. The director runs the creative work; the SM protects the time, the bodies, and the paperwork that make that creative work possible. Interruptions from outside — wardrobe arriving for a fitting, a producer with a question, a delivery — are filtered by the SM so the director’s attention is preserved.

At the end of each rehearsal the SM resets the room, writes the rehearsal report, drafts the next day’s call based on the director’s plan, and circulates both to the distribution list. Ionazzi argues that the discipline of closing out each day cleanly is the single habit that most distinguishes working SMs from struggling ones.

7. Rehearsal Reports and Communication

The rehearsal report is the SM’s primary written communication with the production team. It is distributed daily (or after each rehearsal session) to the director, designers, production manager, producer, and relevant department heads. Its function is to ensure that every department knows what happened, what is needed, and what problems arose — without anyone having to attend rehearsal.

Format is standardized. A header gives date, rehearsal times, location, scenes worked, and attendance. The body is organized by department — scenery, props, costumes, lighting, sound, projections, hair/makeup, production management, general notes — with each note written as a short factual paragraph. Notes are numbered and often cross-referenced to prior reports when they continue an earlier question. Stern and Maccoy both stress neutrality of tone: a rehearsal report records facts and requests, not opinions. “The SR door binds against the frame; can this be eased?” is appropriate; “the door is badly built” is not.

Good rehearsal reports are specific and complete. They record decisions made in the room that affect other departments (“the pocket knife will now be drawn from the left coat pocket, not the right”), requests for new or changed items, timing data (act run times, scene run times), and any injuries or incidents. They do not record creative opinions or private conversations.

The corresponding channel upward is the production meeting, but the rehearsal report is what allows those meetings to be short. When designers read daily reports faithfully, production meetings can focus on decisions rather than updates.

Porter and Alcorn extend this principle into a broader communication ethic: the SM’s job is not only to transmit information but to protect everyone’s attention. A rehearsal report that includes irrelevant padding wastes the designers’ time; one that omits a critical detail causes a missed build. The discipline is to say exactly what is needed, once.

8. Calling a Show — Cueing for Light, Sound, and Deck

Calling a show means giving the verbal commands — warnings, standbys, and gos — that trigger every technical event during a performance. It is the craft most closely identified with stage management and the one most visible to the rest of the company.

A cue is any scheduled change: a lighting state, a sound file, a scenic automation move, a deck track by a crew member, a fly cue, a projection change. Each cue has a number (LX 47, SQ 12, Deck 5, Fly 3, Q 28 in a combined numbering) and a precise trigger point in the script or action. The SM records these in the prompt book alongside the text, typically with a warning one page ahead, a “Standby LX 47, SQ 12” line a few beats before the moment, and a “Go” exactly on the trigger.

The headset protocol is strict. Before each call, the SM says “Standby” to put the operators on alert; operators acknowledge. On the trigger the SM says “LX 47, Go” (or whichever department). The department number precedes “Go” rather than following it, so that operators hear their identifier first and respond instantly. Simultaneous cues are called together (“LX 47, Sound 12, Go”). Kelly insists that “Go” is reserved for execution only — it is never used conversationally on headset during a show.

The rhythm of calling is itself expressive. A good caller matches cue timing to the acting: light fades anticipate a line, music swells meet a gesture, a deck cue lands in the silence of a breath. The prompt book marks the intention, but the performance varies slightly each night and the SM must read it live.

Different departments share headset channels according to production practice. Deck and fly often share one channel, lighting and sound another, with the SM on both. Training an ear to speak cleanly on the correct channel without stepping on other traffic is part of becoming a reliable caller.

9. Production Meetings and Team Coordination

Production meetings are the scheduled gathering of the director, SM, designers, technical director, production manager, and (depending on the company) producers and department heads. They typically occur weekly during prep and rehearsal, then more frequently as tech approaches.

The SM is responsible for scheduling the meeting, distributing the agenda, taking minutes, and circulating those minutes afterward. Maccoy advises that the agenda be assembled from the week’s rehearsal reports and outstanding items from the previous minutes, so that nothing important is forgotten. Standing agenda items usually include: director’s updates, department reports (scenery, costumes, lighting, sound, props, projections), budget, schedule, safety, and outstanding questions.

Minutes record decisions and assigned actions, not discussion. “Decision: the raked platform will be reduced from eight degrees to six. Action: TD to advise carpentry by Friday” is the correct form. A decision log that lives in the production book allows future disputes to be settled quickly and tactfully.

Team coordination extends beyond the meeting. The SM maintains open channels to every department throughout the day, fielding questions about schedule, fitting times, tech prep, and rehearsal availability. Porter and Alcorn describe this role as “information infrastructure” — the SM does not own the information, but they make sure it flows.

The ethics of this coordination matter. An SM who plays departments against each other, hoards information, or takes sides in a creative dispute damages the production. One who communicates evenly, respects confidentialities, and keeps the director and producer aligned earns the trust that makes difficult decisions easier to land.

10. Tech Week

Tech week (sometimes called “tech period” or simply “tech”) is the transition from rehearsal room to performance venue. Scenery is installed, lights are focused and programmed, sound is balanced, costumes are worn in full, and every technical element is integrated with the acting for the first time. It is usually the longest and most exhausting phase of a production.

The SM’s preparation begins well before tech week. The prompt book must be complete enough to call from; preset and shift lists must be drafted; the crew’s running plot — who moves what, when, from where, to where — must be written and rehearsed in principle. Ionazzi recommends a pre-tech production meeting dedicated solely to walking through the running of the show cue by cue with the full technical team.

Tech itself typically proceeds through several stages. A dry tech (cue-to-cue without actors) lets the board operators and SM establish the sequence and timing of cues. A wet tech or first tech with actors runs the show stopping as often as needed to solve problems. Subsequent techs become dress rehearsals, adding costumes, makeup, hair, and finally full continuity runs without stopping.

Equity rules impose strict limits on tech-week hours — for example, CAEA specifies maximum rehearsal hours per day and mandatory rest between calls. The SM enforces these rules even when under pressure to push further; Stern is emphatic that an SM who cannot say “we must break now” is failing in a core duty.

Communication discipline tightens. Rehearsal reports become “tech notes” directed primarily at the production team; headset traffic is minimized; actor calls are posted with extreme clarity because confusion costs more expensive time now than at any earlier stage. By the opening, the show should run with no tech stops, the calling should be internalized, and the SM should know the production’s physical world as well as any designer.

11. Running a Performance

Once the show opens, the SM’s role shifts from builder to guardian. The creative work is frozen — the SM is now responsible for preserving it. Each performance day follows the same ritualized structure.

The SM arrives well before the crew and cast (typically ninety minutes to two hours before curtain), unlocks, turns on work lights and ghost light status, checks presets and prop tables, verifies that the prompt book and cue lights are functional, posts the sign-in sheet, and walks the stage for hazards. When the crew arrives, they run a checklist — sound check, lighting test cues, automation home positions, deck preset verification.

Actor calls — “half-hour,” “fifteen,” “five,” “places” — are delivered on strict schedule through the dressing-room intercom or by the ASM in person. These calls are contractually binding in union houses; the SM logs them. Once “places” is called, the SM moves to the calling position, opens the prompt book to top of show, confirms readiness on headset from every department, and when the house manager signals the cleared house, calls the opening sequence.

During the show, the SM calls every cue, manages any actor emergencies (injuries, missed entrances, forgotten lines, costume failures), and makes real-time decisions if something goes wrong — whether to hold the curtain, stop the show, or ride through a problem. Stern and Kelly both treat the authority to stop a show as sacred: it exists, it belongs to the SM, and it must never be used lightly or withheld when needed.

After curtain, the SM writes the show report. Format mirrors the rehearsal report but focuses on running time (overall and per act), audience count if available, any performance anomalies, injuries or incidents, and notes for maintenance. The show report is distributed to the same list as rehearsal reports. A production that has run for months still has a show report filed every night — this is the institutional memory that keeps the show alive.

12. Stage Management Ethics, Leadership, and Safety

Stage management is an ethical practice as much as a technical one. The SM holds power — over schedule, information, and access — that can be used to protect people or to harm them. Porter and Alcorn’s Theory and Practice is the most explicit contemporary statement on the subject, arguing that stage managers have a duty of care to everyone in the room regardless of rank, role, or identity.

Practical ethics show up in small decisions: how breaks are enforced, how late cast members are treated, how confidentiality is kept around salaries and personal information, how intimacy and fight rehearsals are scheduled with consent and safe-word protocols. The SM is often the first person to notice when something is wrong — a harassed performer, an overloaded technician, a director crossing professional limits — and is frequently the person others expect to act.

Leadership style matters. Kelly and Ionazzi both describe the best SMs as “quietly commanding”: calm in crisis, firm without being harsh, consistent regardless of who is in the room. A stage manager who panics creates panic; one who treats each problem as solvable creates the room in which it is solved. Leadership also means delegation — ASMs, apprentices, and crew grow into the work only when given real responsibility and support.

Safety is the non-negotiable floor. The SM is typically responsible for conducting fire and evacuation drills, keeping first-aid supplies stocked, maintaining incident logs, ensuring that hazard tape and sightline-safe floor marking are current, and stopping any activity that presents risk. CAEA, Actors’ Equity, and ABTT all publish safety protocols that the SM must know. In North American houses, an SM who observes an unsafe condition has authority to halt work until it is resolved. That authority should be exercised without hesitation.

Ethics, leadership, and safety are not separable topics. Each night’s sign-in sheet, each enforced break, each calmly written report is an ethical act that accumulates into a culture. The SM does not run that culture alone, but they shape it more than any other single role.

13. Touring, Remounts, and Non-Traditional Forms

Touring and remounts demand a different discipline. On tour, the production moves between venues with different stages, wings, grids, and crews; the SM’s prompt book and technical paperwork are the constants that make the show reproducible. Touring SMs typically carry a “load-in book” with variant plots for each venue, cue lists that adapt to local infrastructure, and a contact list of host-venue technicians.

A remount — restaging a production some months or years after the original closed — uses the original prompt book as its foundation. This is why the book is maintained so conscientiously in the first place: a remount SM may be a stranger who has never seen the first production, and must be able to reconstruct it from paperwork alone. Ionazzi’s advice to treat every prompt book as if it were going to be handed to a remount SM captures the standard.

Non-traditional forms extend the core principles in specialized directions. In dance, where music rather than spoken text structures the performance, cues are called against bar counts rather than line cues, and the SM often works from a marked conductor’s score or a bar-count sheet. In opera, a large cast plus chorus plus orchestra plus a conductor and a full technical infrastructure makes the SM a coordinator of coordinators, with strict protocols for calling across pit and stage. Devised and ensemble-generated work changes the prep process — there is no finished script in rehearsal, so the SM documents decisions and generative materials in real time rather than noting against a fixed text.

Site-specific, immersive, and durational performance push the role further still. An SM on an immersive show may manage multiple simultaneous action streams across rooms, coordinated by radio and timed against a master clock. A durational piece may have no fixed cue list at all, only rules for response.

Across all these forms, what remains constant is the SM’s fundamental practice: record what is needed, communicate clearly, protect the people in the room, and make the performance repeatable. The tools change; the discipline does not.

14. Digital Tools for Stage Management

Digital tools have changed the mechanics of stage management without changing its craft. The Stage Managers’ Association, NYU Tisch open resources, and recent editions of Stern and Maccoy all survey this landscape in evolving detail.

PDF annotation tools (PDF Expert, Notability, GoodNotes, Adobe Acrobat, Drafts) allow a prompt book to live on a tablet with unlimited colors, instant backup, and search. Many touring and opera SMs have moved fully to digital prompt books for weight and reliability; others keep a paper backup because tablets can fail and batteries can drain. Apple Pencil or equivalent stylus is now a standard piece of SM kit.

Dedicated stage management apps include Stage Write (blocking and spacing with animated diagrams, used heavily on Broadway), Propared (integrated production management with schedules, contacts, tasks), and ProductionPro (a cloud platform combining script, media, schedules, and design documents). Each has tradeoffs in cost, learning curve, and collaboration features; the SMA and NYU Tisch resources publish comparative guides.

For calling and cueing, QLab has become the de facto standard for sound and media playback in small and mid-scale theatres, often operated by the SM or an operator on the SM’s headset. Larger houses use integrated show control systems that tie lighting consoles, sound playback, and automation together. The SM does not need to program QLab, but must understand its cue language well enough to read an operator’s screen.

Communication tools — Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Google Workspace, Dropbox — replace much of the paper that older texts describe. A company Slack with channels per department, a shared Drive for paperwork, and a calendar that every company member can read delivers what once required duplicated binders. Privacy protocols still apply: contact information and rehearsal reports may move through these tools but remain confidential.

The risk of digital tools is fragility. A corrupted tablet at places, a silent app update mid-tech, a lost cloud connection in a basement venue — all are plausible failures. The working principle across every reference in this field is redundancy: whatever the primary tool is, the SM has a paper or parallel backup of the information that matters most. The craft persists across media. The stage manager remains the person who keeps the production held together, calm, and repeatable, whatever tools the year provides.