Opening Night, and the View from the Booth
We opened.
After a tech week of stopping and starting and looking and adjusting, La Bohème opening night went about as smoothly as an opening can go. The audience was warm from the first downbeat, generous in all the right places, and the show simply moved. There’s nothing quite like the moment when a production you’ve been building in a rehearsal room for weeks finally meets the people it was built for.
My job changes once we’re in performance, and it’s a strange and rather wonderful shift.
I spend the show in a booth at the back of the theater with a headset. I don’t even hear the room the way the audience does. There’s a speaker piping the singing in to me, which means I’m listening to a slightly flattened, slightly distant version of a performance happening a few hundred feet away. You get used to it.
Because that’s most of what I’m doing up there. Watching, and writing things down.
The goal is that every performance matches what the director last saw in the theater. Not identically, and not rigidly. Things settle. A cross finds its natural length. A laugh lands a beat later and somebody adjusts. Every evening should feel energized and alive and like it’s happening for the first time, because for most of the people in the house, it is. But there’s a difference between a performance breathing and a performance quietly inventing new blocking over the course of a run. Part of my job is knowing where that line is and making sure nobody wanders past it.
The other part of the job is being a pair of eyes on the stage.
During a show, almost everyone backstage is looking at something other than the stage picture. The assistant stage managers are running their sides, handling entrances, props, quick changes. The stage manager is in her score, calling cues, watching for the next light cue in a long sequence of them. Everyone is deep in their own track, which is exactly as it should be.
So I watch. If something falls, if a prop ends up in the wrong place, if a door doesn’t close, if something simply looks odd, I can get on headset and we can figure out what to do about it. Usually the answer is small. Sometimes the answer is nothing, and we fix it quickly. But somebody has to be the one looking at the whole picture.
Happily, opening had very few speed bumps. A good night to be mostly unnecessary.
We have the next few days off from performances, which means archiving the production and getting the paperwork in order while everything is still fresh. This is the quiet part of the job that makes it possible for the production to exist again someday. Blocking, props, tracks, all the decisions that got made in the room and then got revised in the theater.
Two more performances this weekend! Get your tickets now.
From left to right, Rodolfo (Jose Simerilla Romero), Schaunard (Jon Dirk Ross), Colline (Raúl Morales Velazco), and Marcello (Luke Sutliff) enjoy a final moment of brevity in Act IV. Photo by Don Ipock.