Stagehands Matter.

That's a really big door.

I’ve been working on the tech specs for the OAC. Just found a measurement showing the opening for the overhead doors leading into the scene shop should be 110’ tall.

And they wonder why I wanted proper as-builts and not scans of the bid-spec construction documents with handwritten sketches and annotations of things that have changed.

Baton twirling & handoffs

For the past few years, I’ve been unofficially recognized as the head of my high school technical crew. My presence has been the only constant in that time. Official authority has been handed over a number of times, many times to me. The students in the crew have come and gone. The equipment has been upgraded, and for a majority, completely replaced. Even the facilities in which the department has flourished have drastically changed, as the Oconomowoc Arts Center has been built, turning the OMS Auditorium into a closet and the outdoor theatre at Oconomowoc High School has also been built. On top of that, the OHS Little Theatre was entirely renovated. While I was at OHS, there wasn’t a show I wasn’t a part of, and only a handful of one-off gigs during my freshman year that I didn’t work on. My six years of devotion to the program, four in high school, and two in middle school, must now come to an end though.

The past few months have been difficult for me, as there are many changes being made, some that I agree with, and some that I don’t. Most importantly, it’s time for me to recognize that for the sake of the program and the people in it, I need to shut my trap and watch from a distance, and maybe speak when spoken to. It’s not that I would be harmful to the program; the program needs to make a forward progression under new management though. It’s important that I tender my full endorsement of the protégé who is to succeed me, and even more important that I let her make her own mistakes.

However, it would be unfair for her, and others, to not get the opportunity to learn from some of my errors, or at the very least see that I’m aware of my character flaws and working on them. With that in mind, here are 16 important lessons I’ve learned about managing a technical department. I preface this by denoting that the reason I learned these lessons is because I made all of the mistakes in the book, you will too, and so will the next person who follows in your footsteps. Everyone will slip up, but it’s important to be aware of it, and no, just saying that “you’re working on it,” doesn’t mean that you actually are.

Ask nothing of your crew, you wouldn’t ask of yourself.

The fastest way to make enemies with coworkers and friends is to have higher expectations for them than for yourself. Grunt-work is an inevitable evil when working in the live event industry. Cables will always need to be coiled, counterweight systems will need to be balanced, batteries will need to be changed, and dance floors will need to be rolled out. If you don’t share in those tasks, don’t expect those you manage to do so either. Yes, you’ll do weeks of work that they won’t see, and have your time card already filled, but that’s no excuse to assign someone to grunt work each day they come in to help out in their spare time.

Expect failures, but continue to aspire to perfection.

Live entertainment comes with the full knowledge that something can always, and often times will, go terribly wrong. I’ve had sound systems fall apart during shows, lighting systems take control and turn all 288 dimmers on at full(and not at the console…), wireless microphones break, lighting fixtures catch fire, and even had an audience member (also grandfather of a cast member) have a heart attack and die during a performance. It’s important to accept that perfect performances are a rarity, and things will go wrong. That’s no reason to not put forth your best effort though, because you will never have a perfect performance if you do always settle for leaving well-enough alone. On top of that, after each production you’ll probably find yourself saying, “If only I had more time, I could’ve…” BUT, you didn’t, you don’t, and you never will. There will always be something you’ll wish you had more time to add in or refine. That’s why it’s important to prioritize your time. Don’t waste time on something arbitrary like how the pages in your binder are organized, and then not do an effect because you didn’t have the time to set it up.

Understand that you will need to hand projects off to people who may not do it as well as you.

It can be really difficult, especially for Type-A personalities like me, to keep control-freak tendencies at bay. Handing off projects to people you know might not do it as well as you involves a lot of trust, and afterwards might have seemed like a terrible decision. But, your crew will never live up to your expectations if you don’t let them make their own mistakes, and let’s face it, you don’t have enough time to do every project on your own. You can certainly try; I have. Don’t pretend to be shocked and appalled though when you simply run out of time.

Provide crew members the ability to make decisions on their own, but only from a short list of options. This sounds like serious micro-management, but bear with me. If you give your crew no choices, and criticize each and every action of theirs, they will hate you. There’s no middle-ground, or soft way of saying that. They won’t sort of dislike you, or be a little bothered by your “interest” in their quality of work. They will hate you. My personal favorite is when I’ve seen people get into arguments about how to mop the stage floor. I’ve been on the receiving end of criticisms on how to mop a stage floor, and nothing is more demoralizing and causes you to question if you enjoy your line of work than someone yelling at you because you don’t swing the mop with the right amount of “swoosh.”

The polar opposite is just as bad though. If you give your crew too many options, or don’t even outline options for them, then nothing will get done. Suddenly you’ve given each crew member the ability to make their decisions, and now they each have to take time to reach conclusions, multiplied against the number of crew members you have, and now each minute task turns into a democratic debate on whether or not it’s kosher to use e-tape for cable management. It’s not even that people will make “wrong” decisions, it’s that an unreasonable amount of time will be wasted on decisions that one person could make, and everyone could simply abide by.

It’s important to find the balance though between being too critical, and not being critical enough. If your crew members are truly skilled labor, you should be able to trust their common sense on the majority of their decisions. As Randy Schultz says, “There’s a hundred ways to hang a light, and who cares if I hang it their way or my way, so long as it’s securely hung.” Now if your crew isn’t using truss condoms when they’re supposed to be or fixtures aren’t being tightened down enough, that’s a problem. If the light is plugged in before or after the color frame is inserted, is an irrelevant debate to waste time being concerned about.

Always say “Yes.”

The number one rule of improv is to always say, “Yes.” That doesn’t mean you actually have to say yes, but that you will always roll with the punches. It means when your acting partner in a scene forgets their lines, you don’t leave them hanging and to take the blame, but take responsiblity and carry them through the scene by hinting them through their lines. Saying “Yes” in an improv scene is all about saying “My new toaster is fantastic and those kitties you gave me are adorable,” when someone asks you, “How did you like that anniversary gift and the surprise for your children?” As soon as you say, “What the hell are you talking about?” the scene is over, the audience is completely removed from the illusion, and you’ve just single-handedly destroyed the moment you were having on stage.

This doesn’t mean it’s okay to become a yes-man (or yes-woman), because it’s not. But instead of saying, “No,” say, “I have a better idea,” or, “Give me some time to come up with a good solution.” You don’t want to say yes to anything potentially dangerous, or downright cheesy, but it’s critical to not be a nay-sayer. As a stagehand, especially a leading stagehand, it’s vital that to each problem or conflict you come to a solution. If someone asks for your help and you’re unavailable, see if someone else can help them. Being a stagehand is 96% about overcoming obstacles…and like four percent about eating some really delicious donuts before a load-in.

Don’t roll over on a decision of yours just because someone challenges it.

When your in charge, people will occasionally prod at a decision you’ve made. Sometimes it’s a power play from someone who blatantly disagrees with you, and other times it’s because a person walked into the room with a brilliant idea that you didn’t think of and is at least worth considering. I’m focusing on the first one. Sometimes you may not be in position to make the final call on a decision because it’s not your place, just as the lighting designer wouldn’t go and move the sound designer’s speakers, but other times it’s necessary to stick with your gut. If a director asks you to block a fire curtain, put a live flame on stage, use a prop gun with blanks, or use ropelighting to illuminate the backstage areas, sometimes you need to protect directors from themselves and stand by a decision you’ve made. Should they choose to bypass your educated decision after you’ve pointed out the risks involved, you may have to go higher up the food chain for the truly serious issues, or leave the disclaimer out that you will accept no responsiblity for any harm that may come as a result of their choices.

A friend of mine who used to work on air shows in Oshkosh, WI, has a saying, “A no-show is better than a bad show.” Would you rather have no effect, or have an effect that could potentially set your theatre on fire, putting your cast, crew, and audience members all in harm’s way? You especially don’t want to have not spoken up about a risky effect that turns into a tragedy, and end up with hundreds of deaths, millions of dollars in settlements, and multiple years of jail time hanging over your head.

Give compliments and kind gestures genuinely.

I spent four years working with technical supervisors who gave compliments to students for everything. If the show was terrible, cues were late, and feedback was prevalent, any young students to the program were still guaranteed a “Good job, tonight!” Well gee, if that’s good enough, why try any harder? It was tough on my crew members, but they knew I saved my compliments to them only after a truly spectacular feat of amazement, and when they earned a compliment from me, it was only because they truly deserved it. Now I’m not saying go and yell at your crew in place of the compliment they would’ve gotten until LQ58.2 came a line too early, but let them know that they’re on their way to becoming highly skilled, but the show isn’t perfect yet. It probably won’t be perfect ever, but when you see that they’re really applying themselves, and that the reason LQ58.2 was early is because the cast member was fudging their way through the entire scene and their lines were impossible to follow in the script, that’s a much better reason than they were texting a friend about their plans for after the show.

Young crew members will take what they can get, but this lesson especially applies to experienced crew members. I was always infuriated when I knew I had done a sub-par job, but still got “Awesome show, tonight!” from the technical supervisors afterwards. Your experienced crew members will begin to not trust your judgement, or think you’re acting like their kindergarten teachers if you applaud them for being able to tie their shoes so they don’t trip while carrying a fixture from one side of the stage to the other.

Manipulation may look good on paper, but don’t do it!

The moment you discredit yourself by blatantly manipulating your crew, don’t expect for them to trust you. The same technical supervisors from the above lesson once tried saying gaff tape costs $50 a roll so students wouldn’t waste it, and if you turned off the Express lighting console the wrong way, you could single-handedly destroy the entire dimming/control system, and orange extension cords are okay to be used for stage lighting fixtures, and aliens replug the cables on the sound system in the wrong place when the building is empty, and a lighting console should only have faders that control a single channel. Okay, I made that one about the aliens up. Now in their wake though, it’s difficult to find techs that aren’t afraid their going to break our Express console by pushing buttons. Then there are the more knowledgeable techs, who now couldn’t take those supervisors seriously ever because they were manipulative.

Lying to your technicians and not giving them honest reasons for actions only discredits yourself and harms your reputation. It also prevents them from being able to accurately navigate work with common sense. Not only with they be difficult to work with for yourself, but in the long-term they will be harmed professionally.

A certain woman amazed her husband by cutting off the corner of her roasts and baking it in a separate pan. Every time she made a roast she did the same thing. Finally, her husband asked her why she did so.

The wife said she really didn’t know why, but that her mother has always cut off part of her roast and baked it separately. She was only following what she had learned.

The husband went to his mother-in-law and asked why she had cut off part of her roast and baked it separately. The woman replied that she, too, didn’t know why, but that her mother had always done so. Even more determined now to find out why the women in his life were doing such a strange thing, he traveled to the grandmother’s house in another state for a visit.

There, he asked the grandmother why she would cut off part of her roast and bake it separately. She replied, “My roast pan was too small, and I had to cut off part of the roast in order to fit a roast into the pan.” When he realized that two generations of women had continued to follow the example that they saw, he laughed until he could hardly breath.

Lead by example, not by dictatorship.

No one will take your policies and practices seriously if you don’t follow them yourself. Sometimes you may want to not coil your cables because you’re tired and want to leave, but even occasional slip-ups can give your crew the impression it’s okay, and next thing you know, at the end of a strike every single cable you own in the theatre is in one huge flustercluck of a pile in the scene shop.

Establish a strong system for keeping organized, and trust your system.

Having a system for storing and organizing tasks and projects can be difficult, but when you find one that works, you’ll really notice a difference in your stress levels. If you write ideas and tasks down until you have time to tend to them, then you don’t have to keep badgering yourself about putting that choral mic up or that you have that meeting early tomorrow morning you need to prepare for. Once you stop badgering yourself about everything that pops into your head, then your mind stays more available for focusing on the here and now.

What I do is I put my iPhone to real use with an app, “Pocket Informant.” It lets me keep track of my to-do lists and calendar. The moment it’s on my calendar, I don’t have to worry that I’ll forget to show up for a meeting. As Merlin Mann says, it’s all about ubiquitous capture. “The moment you remember to buy toilet paper usually isn’t when you’re standing in the toilet paper aisle at the Safeway.” It’s about having a way to keep track of tasks and ideas as soon as they come into your mind. Once you have a system for storing all of your tasks in appropriate lists(e.g. work, home, grocery, etc.), then you don’t need to constantly badger yourself to remember to do something, all you need to do is remember to look at your list every so often.

The other important aspect of this system is not just for yourself, but for your crew as well. Imagine a world where you know when you ask a crew member to do something, you can trust that unless you’re told otherwise, it’ll be done on time and you won’t need to check-up on it, or bother them to make sure it gets done. That’s entirely possible. However, it goes both ways. If someone has to ask you twice to do something, you’ve slipped up. The key is knowing you can trust them with their responsibilities, and that they can trust you with yours. I’m just as guilty as is anyone else that on occasion I’ll say, “Well, they haven’t bothered me about _____ again, so it must not be important.” The moment you succumb to that, your system is broken.

If you still don’t know where to start, head over to 43 Folders and learn more about personal productivity from Merlin Mann. I highly recommend his podcasts on iTunes. There’s a lot of awesome advice on how to stay organized that really speaks to people like stagehands who often have crazy schedules and thousands of tasks to and goals to keep track of.

Don’t let your personal feelings threaten the success of a show while keeping loyal to the people you are responsible for.

I’ve only ever walked off of a show once. In short, the same technical supervisors I’ve referenced before started tearing the crew apart one member at a time over another crew member’s poor choices. I was the stage manager, and couldn’t stand to watch an innocent eight or so crew members be punished for something they had absolutely no fault in. Shortly after being yelled at in front of them for trying to step in and resolve the situation quietly, I tossed my script on the ground and told them I was done. I stormed out. The rest of the crew left quietly that evening in tears.

Two nights later the entire crew had been reprimanded, but it didn’t matter because nearly all fifteen or so of them refused to work for these supervisors at this point. The show opens in less than a week, and the crew is torn apart. To my surprise, I showed up to the tail end of rehearsal to see how things were going, and was greeted by the entire crew and a number of cast members who wanted to give me hugs and begged me to come back. So, three days after the conflict I returned on my own terms for the sake of the production. My intentions were hardly to ruin the show, but I did just enough damage that the supervisors realized they couldn’t stomp on my crew members, many of whom wouldn’t have been able to stand up for themselves otherwise. The show did eventually go off without a hitch, and I had made my point to the higher ups, but they equally made their point about my lack of professionalism to me.

I don’t recommend this solution though, not even for the truly desperate. Do that professionally and you’ll probably never get hired again. In the theatre community, don’t be surprised if people are willing to make phone calls all over the country to ensure you don’t get work ever again. Nobody cares about details, or who was right or wrong; they only care that you nearly ruined a production with months of effort put into it. It doesn’t even have to be true. It could be a rumor, but thats all it takes in some places to be blacklisted until the staff turns over so much no one there has heard of you.

Maintain discretion; it’s not your job to create conflict.

To follow up that last point, when there are issues, it’s important to make sure gripes go up the food chain, not down. Gripe to the person above you, who can either resolve the issue or send the gripe up the food chain to the next higher up, and so on. Taking your complaints and spreading them amongst your crew, especially when you have design disagreements with the director, only divides and conquers your production. When your crew begins to doubt your director, then whining starts, and eventually when word spreads back to the director, someone will be removed from the production without question. Nobody wants a person around who isn’t a team player, especially in the entertainment industry when all it takes is one person to bring down an entire production.

Notice that even as I share experiences and discuss people who have been unpleasant to work with, I’m leaving names out. Sure, a few people close enough to me might know who I’m talking about, but it’s not my goal to make other people upset with them. Even other articles in this blog that point out companies or people I don’t like working with remain nameless. If anyone digs deep enough, they can find the names and info, but I’m not about to say, “________ sucks,” and likewise, wouldn’t want anyone else to post on their website about how they hated working with me.

Your crew knows you’re in charge; don’t remind them.

Reminding your crew who they’re supposed to take orders from is usually perceived as arrogance. Sometimes it’s necessary to point out that it’s not the director who calls the cues, and just because a director asks for a lighting cue to be changed, that shouldn’t happen without going through the proper authority, but otherwise don’t play the “I’m your superior,” card, because people will lose trust and respect for you.

Represent your client both on stage and off.

Similar to the above, don’t bad mouth your client unless you want to become unemployed. I’ve seen it happen. It takes one poorly placed comment for people to be blacklisted from entire regions of the country. When an arts center opened recently in the area, a couple technicians pointed out how much they think is wrong with the building, and had obviously been spreading bad rumors in the community about a facility that was funded by just that, community taxes. The second the administrative staff got wind of that, they were almost completely blacklisted despite nearly thirty years of work for that group.

In the end, accountability is personal, but responsibilty is global.

Individual crew members are particularly responsible for certain aspects of a production. However, all crew members share in the responsibility of working on the show. If something goes wrong, or is dangerous, or could become dangerous, it is not at all acceptable to say, “Well it’s not my fault; I wasn’t in charge of that.” The moment a crew member recognizes a hazard, it becomes their responsiblity without question. If they aren’t going to handle it on their own, then they should immediately make it known to someone who can handle it. If the prop gun goes missing, it’s not acceptable to assume the cast member who needs it has grabbed it and it has not been tampered with. If a batten is coming in dangerously fast, just because your managing props doesn’t mean you shouldn’t call out “Heads!” to everyone on stage. One person may be accountable for something going tragically wrong, but everyone remains responsible for putting forth their best efforts in preventing a mistake of releasing a rope lock on an unbalanced lineset from turning into the tragedy of how two cast members were killed as a result.

“Don’t do stuff that seems profitable, but potentionally messes the reason that people like you.” (Merlin Mann)

Theatre isn’t profitable. Arts centers don’t make money, and stagehands might make enough to get by. If you’re in theatre because you want to make money, you’ll be unhappy. The people around you will notice, and they’ll be unhappy with you as well. The moment you focus on making money, you won’t be able to approach situations with the same motivation, initiative, and dedication as someone who is in it for the fun of it. If you stick with theatre though, there will be dozens of opportunities that will present themselves to you because of it, and qualities in your personality that will develop that might have not otherwise. For me, the huge quality that I improved upon was my ability to forward-think and prepare to avoid distant obstacles before they are a problem. Sure, now it might only mean that I can turn on lights in an unfamiliar space without flipping circuit breakers, but down the road that might prevent me from having to spend $100,000 on an unforeseeable obstacle as an electrical engineer.

What Would Morgan Do?

One of my employers, Morgan, is the kind of person who will rough someone up a little bit if he’s unhappy with the quality of service he’s getting. From what I’ve seen, it’s not in the form of screaming or anger, but communicated more in heated conversations and obvious disappointments. The other day, a moment presented itself to me where I had a “What Would Morgan Do?” moment.

It’s 1:54PM on a Wednesday, and we’re in the middle of loading a show in. We have Wednesday for setup, Thursday for a morning rehearsal and a tweaking, Friday morning for a rehearsal and performance, and another show on Saturday. I’ve just dropped a set of legs in so we can alter their widths, while two people are saving the face on them, and the last person to be accounted for is paging through some paperwork on the apron. Suddenly as I’m flying out our third lineset, I hear, “clunk, whiirRRRRRRRRR,” see the aircraft cable running out of the box containing our fire curtain winch, and proceed to utter some unkind words. You know, the sort of words that no matter how quietly you mutter, always carry to the last row of the theatre.

Now the fire curtain is shooting in, I’ve got people on stage who are about to be standing right in it’s path, and have no foreseeable reason that it’s decided to join our party. There are worse things to plague a show than a fire curtain coming in two days before opening night though, so aside from my displeasure in having to winch the curtain back up, everything is otherwise alright.

1:56PM, my first phone call goes out to the theatrical contractor who installed the system 9 month. This is a polite phone call wondering why our fire curtain would come in. I’m put through to their service tech, who is not a rigger, who brainstorms ideas with me and says he’s going to get in touch with their rigger who installed it, but who is also on a work site an hour away and is only getting patchy cell phone reception. That said, he might be with us in an hour, or in three. Either way, we’re twiddling our thumbs because we decided we didn’t want to touch the rigging before having it inspected, and focusing lights is out of the question because the fire curtain is in the way.

2:13PM, the situation takes a downward spiral. We’ve just found out to operate the winch for cranking the fire curtain back up, we have to move the ropes for our first lineset out of the way, and literally unbolt the rock lock for that lineset to get the winch handle to make a full revolution. This is the point where I’ve become uncomfortable with the situation because I don’t enjoy the idea of dismantling portions of a rigging system to fix a separate problem with it, and therefore decide to call the contractor again. This phone call is my “What Would Morgan Do?” moment, where the receptionist says he can put my concerns through to the voicemail of a staff member who isn’t even in the office that day. Our setup has just been crippled for the show that will open our first season, and the company who should most understand the necessity for our show to go on, is now not taking us seriously. By now, I’m doing what I imagine Morgan would have done, which is rather than roll over for the contractor, make my unhappiness well known and point out how seriously bothered I was that they couldn’t support the system they installed for us, and we were going to be in trouble because of it. Then, after a few minutes of explaining how critical our problem is to this obviously clueless receptionist, which may have involved an exchange of impolite accusations and unkind tones of voice, I suggested the novel idea that he try calling someone on their cell phone. You know, given that now we understand that we can’t even hoist the fire curtain back up on our own because our our first lineset has to be dismantled to do that. At the end of the phone call he reiterates how he’s only the receptionist, and passionately described his role to me. At least, I think that’s what he was trying to do when I hung up.

2:17PM, their rigger calls me. He’ll be here in 40 minutes. Did contacting him have to really be so difficult?

A side note on their rigger. He’s ETCP-certified, and if you ask me, the only sensible person in the company. This guy knows rigging, is walking encyclopedia of theatre tricks, and is a really fun guy to work with. My personal opinion on the matter is that I’m upset he’s not a part of their design process. More on that later.

He proceeds to recalibrate the system, replace a spring, removes a check-weight, performs his inspection, blah, blah, blah. He walked on site and the first thing he says is, “There’s always a reason for the fire curtain to have come in,” but leaves saying, “I couldn’t figure out what caused it to come in.” That’s not disturbing at all. If the fire curtain were to come in again, let’s say for argument-sake before a performance, that could cripple the theatre and force us to provide refunds or put the show on a 30-minute hold.

So now everything is back to normal and happy, and just in time for us to finish our setup, but we’ve lost precious time and were forced to stay there until 11:30PM, with a 7:30PM call the next morning. I can’t imagine how late we would’ve had to have stayed if the receptionist had left us to voicemail.

Back to their design process though. I learned on my first project with this company that the people who do the designs and the people who do the installs are definitely not the same people, and don’t appear to even consult one another. So on my first project with them, thousands of dollars went into purchasing trussing. Then, the installation day comes, and this rigger shows up, and says we could’ve accomplished the same thing by welding in 2” Sch40 pipe, for literally a fraction of the price, and would’ve even been more stable than this trussing we were now stuck with. Great.

On my next project with these guys, I was smarter! I made sure to have the first design meeting include the rigger. They even said that all of their respective head cheeses, plus their rigger, would meet me on a Friday afternoon at 1PM. That Friday afternoon, only one of the four showed up, and it was certainly not their rigger. Let’s not forget they showed up nearly two hours late without calling, and had he shown up literally a minute later, I would’ve been out the door and gone.

Do companies like this really think they can walk on their customers like that? We’re not talking even about a few hundred dollars of purchases; each project with them could be $15,000, or $750,000 of revenue for them, and yet they fiddle diddle around like it’s a perfectly acceptable business practice. I can’t even get their systems designer to contact my electrician to tell him which wiring to run in the conduits, and then when I call them out on their disrespect, they treat me like some third grader and tell me how I’m out of line, then call out another person on my team to act as the mediator, further tell me I’m wrong, and then continue with business. For those reasons, I’m actually very okay getting down and dirty with them. Especially because now aside from having them support their existing installs, I’m avoiding all business with them. That’s no way for a company to be run, and I refuse to advise another group to throw thousands of dollars towards someone who will ignore phone calls, downplay critical service needs, and make install choices that are a complete waste of money. In the meanwhile, I’ll continue to ask myself, “What would Morgan do?” when they continue to disappoint me.

That'll be an indefinite hold!

Nine houselights are out now and more than 3/4 of the audience is still in line for tix; oh, and the show starts in a few minutes ago. That’ll be an indefinite hold as the patrons have yet to start taking advantage of a regular box office schedule and online ticket ordering.