Notes from the Stage Manager's Box (4 page)

One of the reasons for the Festival of One Act Plays was that staging two shows a
year for an amateur company is expensive and the C
lub were looking at ways to economise so that it could continue to offer
at least one high quality show a season
.
The Festival requires minimal
financial out
lay
by the Club itself as a lot o
f the props and costumes are
provided
by each competing company. This leaves a bit more in the budget each year for the big Broadway shows.

The other
reason was
to promote the existence of the Club
and
by raising awareness
increase membership.

The last show before my appearance in The Real Inspector Hound was South Pacific. It is a staple of all amateur theatrical
and light operatic
companies. Along with
Oklahoma
, Carousel and Calamity Jane it is guaranteed to attract large audiences, usually sell outs because they know and love the songs. And full houses mean money in the coffers which helps to continue survival.

The production team for South Pacific ran into one major hurdle. An absence of men. There were plenty of ladies in the Bank who were keen on washing that man
right
out of their hair but not many men willing to be so washed.

In a last throw of the dice the team approached the Bank’s Rugby Club. I understand that it was a reasonably good response and eventually they had enough men to field a
full
complement of
marooned
sailors.

Having done the one show most of the male chorus were never seen again. There were four of them that stayed on because they enjoyed themselves so much. They weren’t very young, they weren’t particularly handsome and struggled to hold a note but they were enthusiastic.

In 1980 I met Peter Harris, Goff Miles, Frank Needham and the unforgettable Roy Follett. To say they were members
of the Rugby Club is quite true
. They
just
weren’t active
playing
members; a few years previously they may have been just fit enough to turn out for the Veterans side but now they were purely there for the social side of things.
Or the beer.
They have an import
ant part to play in this chapter
.

The Club tried to put on two productions a year, in
Spring time and in November. Dates were very much reliant on spare slots available at the theatres we were able to hire. It must have been well into March or April that Trevor Gash approached me again on his bended knee and asked if I would help out on Call Me Madam.

I asked on what basis and he said he needed a couple of stage hands to help out. Paul Greaves had already agreed. By now I knew that Trevor was an active and enthusiastic member of the Theatre Club and as well as being a good committee member was Stage Manager.

I was single, no
ties and it seemed like it might prove an
interesting experience. Paul was married but like me he enjoyed the odd convivial half of beer after work and liked to talk a lot about football so we signed up for the week.

At this stage I began to
understand how amdram
works.

When an amateur company hires a the
atre is it for all intensive purposes
theirs to do as they wish for the duration of the hire period. In practice this is not quite true. The Theatre Manager will provide a set of House Rules which any hire company is expected to abide by.

Included in the hire is the time and expertise of the Resident Stage Manager, his crew, the Lighting Crew and any specialist that the theatre has on its books and can offer.

Once the rehearsals are completed and the opening night begins the man or woman in charge is the Stage Manager. They will have been at every rehearsal and should understand how the director intends the production to develop, what is expected of cast and crew and liaise with the permanent theatre staff.

You do not upset the Resident Stage Manager. All
the ones I have worked with would do everything that they could
to help the company; all them have gone out their way to help make the production successful.

But this was a long time away and I began as a novice stage hand. Trevor Gash was the Stage Manager and what he wanted, he expected to get.

There is more activity in the back stage and technical work that goes towards making a play or musical a success
than many audiences appreciate
. The audience is aware of scene changes, lighting effects and sound e
ffects but have little knowledge
of how all this happens. It is the greatest compliment to the back stage crew if the aud
ience see all
these technical
changes as believable and
completely
s
eamless without the fist clue as to how they happen

The first instruction Paul and myself got was to wear black
clothing
and soft shoes. This lessens the possibility of crew being seen by the audience if they happen to stray onto the stage area when
they are not meant to be there and to move about as silently as possible.

The next thing we learned was how to set up the scenery. Scenic backdrops and curtains can be ‘flown in’ by attaching them to a sp
are
batten, a
steel pole that stretches
from one side of the stage to another. Each
batten
has a number and many of them are permanent as they hold different parts of the lighting rig. Depending on how each scene is to be lit the spotlights are moved around and a balance
has to
struck between them a
nd the bits of scenery that
have to be dropped into place on the st
age on a scene change
.

Most scenery comes in a pack which you can hire from specialist companies. As we were doing Call Me Madam you would hire that set; it will look like every other stage production of Call Me Madam that an amateur company has done but hopefully the audience would only see our own.

The scenery comes as ‘flats’. They are about ten to twelve foot high with a painted canvas stretched over a wooden frame made of ‘two by two’ timber and a cross piece to give some extra strength. They don’t weig
h
very much; they can be carried by one person and if dropped will
flop to the floor without
any sound. To set up a scene you might need six or seven of these
flats
interspersed with doors or windows for cast to enter and exit.

The flats are secured
to the floor
with heavy s
teel weights placed over a
piece of folding ‘two by two’ wooden strip. Then the ensemble is held together by rope thrown and tied between each flat.

This is the skilled bit. You just flick the rope
attached to one flat
upwards and over a steel hook on the top of the
next
flat and secure it around another hook nearer the floor. It sounds so simple but
for a complete theatrical novice
it usually
takes hours of practice. It is easier to unhook but between each scene all the flats have to be unhooked, taken away
(struck – as in striking a scene)
and replaced by those needed for the next scene.

Sometimes you can set up one scene behind another whilst the action is continuing but silence is of the essence and also speed.
Two minutes may not seem very long but in theatre it is an eternity and plenty of time to
set up a row of flats; with
plenty of practice.
This is why the stage crew get
allocated a lot of
time on
‘
setting up day
’
and one rehearsal is
also
set aside for a technical.
That is the theory anyway, as future chapters will illustrate.

Displaying my usual musical theatre ignorance I had never heard of Call Me Madam. The music was written by I
rving Berlin and the musical
a vehicle for Ethel Merman. If follows the adventures of an American Ambassador to the mythical European country of Lichtenburg where she
and the diplomatic population find that she
is totally out of step with the culture of the country. After a few romantic misadventures she is recalled to the
United States
.

The part of the Ambassador was played by the very lovely Iris Adele Paddock.
When Roy
Follett and myself were
looking at photos for
the centenary
brochure
we
found
a selection taken of an
attracti
ve young lady who had played many of the famous musical
leads
during the 1950’s
.
It was a pleasant surprise to realise that these were of Iris
.
Almost forty years later she was still a beautiful woman. She was excellent company and was usually to be found sharing a glass of port in the gr
een room
with Messrs Follett, Miles and
Needham
; from out of where the sound of laughter c
ould always
be heard.

Not only could Iris sing,
she had that thing called ‘stage presence’. The part
of the Ambassador
was made for her. At some moment during the musical one of her staff forgets to address her in the correct manner. She stamps her foot and tells the minion to ‘call me Madam!’

Apart from that
I cannot recall a
single musical number other than
a song about an ocarina which is a sort of Lichtenburg mouth organ.

The Club had hired the We
stminster Theatre
in
Palace Street
near Victoria Station. It had a large auditorium, a big stage area and a generous bar and dining area on the top floor. It is no longer there as it had to be demolished after a fire in June 2002 which destroyed most of the building.

It had one strange disadvantage as a theatre. I understood at the time that it was owned by the Temperance Society but actually the
Westminst
er Memorial Trust
bought it as a memorial
to
Moral Re-Armament
. In any event it did not sell any alcoholic beverages on the premises. This is not good news for thirsty thespians.

Instead the five minute bell to warn theatre goers that the curtain was about to rise was rung in the pub next door.
Which is where Paul Greaves, myself and the resident stage crew often found ourselves.
Not just in between Acts but whenever there was a long enough piece of action to be able to down a swift half.

The resident stage crew sounds like an impressive team but it consisted of just two members of staff, which is why companies that hire the theatre have to find extra stage hands from its own membership, especially if there is a lot of scene changes and furniture to be moved. Of which Call Me Madam had one or two major
scene changes and a lot of fur
niture
.

The resident crew can make scene changes, especially the erecting and striking of flats seem very simple. As did Art Garfunkel and Bill Oddie. This was not their real names and I don’t think they were ever mentioned. One was tall and thin with a lot of fuzzy hair which made him a suitable partner for Paul Simon and the other shorter, less hair and slightly more fatter who could easily have had a career in the Goodies.

Paul and myself learned basic stagecraft quite quickly and the week passed without much incident until
the final night, Saturday. Some
times the cues for lighting, sound and curtains are given by the Stage Manager, sometimes it is delegated to the Assistant Stage Manager but in any event the Stage Manager
’
s Box has radio links to the lighting box and hopefully the musical director.