Here’s what life was like for a Stage Manager before email and cellphones
- If you were lucky, you were part of a SM team so there was more than one person doing the work.
- No one had cellphones or laptops and there was no internet.
- There was a small SM office with a desktop computer, probably Apple, a landline phone, a slow ink printer with paper on serrated rolls (or the theatre upgraded to printers that would pull paper one sheet at a time), and mail cubbies. Some offices had copiers, but because of their size they were likely put in a hallway for office-wide use.
- The SM would type up the rehearsal report on the slow-as-molasses computer. If your SM was a slow or terrible typist, woe to you my friend.
- After the SM typed up the report they probably had someone go behind them and check everything, because spellcheck was not a thing.
- After edits, the report was sent to the printer and copies were made. Depending on how “fast” the printer and copier were and how many people got the rehearsal report, this could take anywhere from 5-20 minutes. If a mistake was found after the report was printed, you got to repeat the process again.
- The printed reports were then placed in the mail cubbies. If you were lucky, most of the production team was onsite or offsite team members were given a cubby of their own. You crossed your fingers that everyone was responsible enough to stop by their mail cubby early in the day for the report. If you had a particularly diverse team, sometimes you were asked to drop off the report at their hotel. Yes, you had to drive - sometimes out of your way - to make sure someone got a hard copy of their report first thing in the morning.
- Next would be the calls and rehearsal schedule for the next day. This also went to production as well as placed in key locations throughout the building. More typing, printing, and distributing hard copies.
- The company had a dedicated phone extension or phone number for the rehearsal hotline. Yes, a hotline. After the calls and rehearsal schedule were typed, printed, copied, and distributed, you had to record an outgoing message in the hotline, slowly read the schedule, and be sure to include the production name (because sometimes there was more than one production rehearsing and extra phone lines were $$$), the next rehearsal date, who is called, what time they are called, and all additional information including fittings, etc. You would have to triple check for accuracy, because if you got it wrong and didn’t realize it, you had to hope when you called the actor that they were either near the phone or had an answering machine they checked before they left for the theater, or re-record and hope no one heard the first recording, or just go ahead and call everyone one-by-one.
- It was the actor’s responsibility to call the hotline for their calls; woe to you again if an actor fell asleep before checking in for their call, which happened BTW because sometimes the whole process would take until midnight or later depending on the rehearsal schedule and how much waiting around for the schedule was required. Sometimes you’d get those delightful actors that would get pissed when the hotline wasn’t updated as soon as they got home, so they would complain that “it takes too long to check the hotline and I need my sleep!” Always a treat to hear that the next day.
- Sometimes as soon as the actor heard their call they would hang up without listening to the rest of the message, like what time their fittings were. These were usually the actors who wouldn’t read the day’s schedule either, so you’d have to corral them or hunt them down inside the building. Remember, no cellphones.
- Email was a gift from sweet six pound baby jebus, but even the idea of communicating via email address took a while to catch on because not everyone could afford their own computer and/or the internet. Not only were personal computers expensive (you could get around this if there was a public library near you with computers or an internet cafe - yes, this was a thing), you had to pay a ridiculous amount of money for dial-up and internet usage. Ask someone older about AOL discs and watch them cringe.
In short, when someone acts as if I should spoon feed them their schedule via text or individual phone calls because “I don’t check my email,” I remember my early career technology struggles and firmly say, “No.”
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