Sweeney Todd - "Type Faster!!"

Last Thursday I attended a production meeting for Sweeney Todd. It was my job to take notes, or “keep the minutes,” as Perry called it, during the meeting. “Notes,” you ask, “like taking notes in class? Easy.” Not really.  In addition to taking clear, detailed, and near-verbatim notes, it is the stage manager's job to keep the time at these meetings, moving discussions along so that every concern of the hour can be addressed. I had first experienced a production meeting when I SMed a student-directed show last spring, so I wasn’t unfamiliar with keeping minutes. But Sweeney is a big production. A big production means lots of notes.

                A production meeting is scheduled periodically outside of rehearsal times and shop hours so that all production team members can get together and brainstorm ideas, update each other on the progress of their projects, and problem solve when they hit obstacles. It’s the only way to get the team communicating collectively at one place and one time. And Sweeney has so many designers and technicians – from the technical director to the scenic designer, from sound to props, from music to costumes and make-up, from lighting to special effects. On top of that, most of our designers are guests and cannot always be on campus. It’s hard to get 20 people in a room at once all the time (even if we Skype some of them in), so we hold production meetings weekly.

                At this particular meeting, Perry opened the hour with discussion about costumes and make-up. Our make-up designer (Mary Elizabeth, a fellow Hope student) said that she still needed headshots of some of the cast members. I typed that up – easy note! Our faculty costume shop manager, Darlene, mentioned that she was still missing some fittings from actors – easy note! Curt and our orchestra director brought up that the members of orchestra needed to be costumed (the pit is going to be onstage with the cast!), and Darlene responded by saying that she, therefore, needed the musicians’ measurements – two easy notes!  When the costume designers didn’t have anything else to add, Perry moved the meeting along.

We touched on lighting, sound, and fog effects – and all the while, I was able to keep up with notes fine, casually sipping my coffee. But then we reached the primary topic of the day’s discussion: scenic. Paul, our faculty technical director, had just begun building the larger units of the set and needed to talk to the scenic designer about some safety and mechanical concerns before continuing construction. It was a pretty typical subject for production meetings. The only hitch was that our scenic designer – one of our many guests – was not able to attend this week’s meeting, due to a busy schedule. That’s where stage management stepped in. I prepared myself to take extra-diligent notes so that they would be perfectly clear for our designer to read later. What I wasn’t prepared for was the vast amount of questions that Paul actually had.

He had questions for the scenic designer about whether it was necessary to construct a stair unit with metal, or if wood could be used instead. He had questions about adding a railing to said staircase for safety purposes. He had questions about the visibility and masking of another set piece that represented an insane asylum. He had questions about painting the large platform of Judge Turpin’s home before assembling it onstage. He had questions about the size and weight of the oven door with regards to safety (after all, an actor had to be thrown inside the oven!). And the list goes on…

So Paul fired away, one question after another. It took all my concentration (my coffee untouched) to clack away at my keyboard, trying to keep up while making logical transcriptions from the discussion I was hearing to the Word page on my computer. Our props master (Andrea, another fellow Hope student) was sitting next to me and she kept poking fun at me, whispering, “Type faster!!” as I tried to type out notes that were understandable in the English language. When Paul finally flipped through his notebook and had nothing left to add, I scanned my own document, correcting the many grammatical mistakes I had made as my fingers frantically flew across the keyboard (I don’t type as gracefully as Joseph Byrd plays the piano, that’s for sure!).

As I corrected a word that didn’t contain any vowels, Perry looked up at me and asked, “Did you get all that?”

I laughed half-heartedly and said, “I think so.”

I asked Paul to clarify a couple of things I was confused about to be sure my notes were correct, and by then the hour was coming to a close. Perry ended the meeting by finalizing the schedule for the next few meetings and rehearsals (as is usual at production meetings). I triple-checked that my notes were clear. Then I emailed the document to Perry to quadruple-check before sending it out to the rest of the production team.

Despite the frantic Speed Racer-paced transcription, this production meeting was exciting. Ever since I attended my first production meeting, I’ve always liked them. In these meetings, I really get to see collaboration at work: a representative from each facet of the production coming together in one room to bounce their brilliant ideas off of each other. It’s another reason why I love stage managing so much. I get to be a part of it all. I get to listen and observe these masters at their craft. It’s true that I may not always be working on shows that are rehearsal-heavy productions (if I want to stage manage Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, that certainly won’t be the case), and production meetings may become scarce. But I’ll enjoy them while I have them because they taught to appreciate every single facet of theatre. Through these meetings, I am coming to understand more about the theatre world as a whole – just how much of a unit, a team, the theatre has to be.