Don't Delete Someone Else's Fear

Marisol Ochoa is a composite, a fictional stage manager assembled from the real conventions of a profession that has been refining its delegation protocols since gaslights and trapdoors. The operas she references are real. The mistakes she describes have all happened, to someone. Her prompt book, which she will not let you touch, follows every convention of the trade.

In the middle of a 2,400-seat house somewhere in the upper Midwest, Marisol Ochoa is sitting in Row J with a binder the thickness of a municipal tax code open across her knees. She is here for an advance, the coordination visit a touring production makes to a receiving venue before the trucks arrive, and she has two hours before the local technical director shows up to walk the stage. The work lights are on. The auditorium holds the particular emptiness of a room built for two thousand people and currently holding two.

The binder is a prompt book for a touring production of Puccini's Tosca. It contains the full orchestral score annotated in pencil with blocking, cue numbers, warnings, and margin notes accumulated across fourteen cities. Some of the notes are hers. Some belong to the stage manager who called the production before her, initialed and dated. One note, in handwriting she doesn't recognize, is in capital letters.

Ochoa started in regional theater in the early nineties. She moved into opera because she could read a score, a prerequisite that is, in her telling, non-negotiable and surprisingly rare.¹ She has spent the last two decades splitting time between opera houses and national tours, which means she has spent two decades rebuilding the same production in unfamiliar rooms with crews she's never met, working from a document that must carry everything those crews need to know.

She speaks about her work with precision and occasional impatience.

You're here two days before the trucks arrive. What are you actually doing?

Marisol: Negotiating reality. The technical rider says what we need: power, rigging points, wing space, dock access. The venue's tech pack says what they have.² My job right now is to find everywhere those two documents disagree and resolve it before a hundred people show up Monday morning expecting to build a show.

I'm checking whether their fly system can handle our drops, whether the loading dock fits a fifty-three-foot trailer, whether the local fire marshal has the paperwork they need, which has to be in two weeks before we arrive.³ But the real work is the stuff that doesn't fit on a spec sheet. How does their crew chief like to run load-in? Do they have a follow-spot operator who's called opera before, or am I training someone at seven in the morning?

A good advance means show day is boring. That is literally the goal. Boring.⁴

Tell me about that binder.

Marisol: This is the production bible. The full score, all blocking, every cue I call, marked against specific bars in the music. Not page numbers, not timestamps. Bars.⁵ Contact sheets for every department. Emergency procedures. Show reports from every city we've played.

And it is written so that someone who has never seen this production can open it, find my last marked cue, and call the show tonight.⁶

Is that hypothetical?

Marisol: I've had food poisoning in Cincinnati. It is not hypothetical.

I write my cues as if a moderately experienced stranger is going to use them.⁷ That person doesn't need a transcript of everything I said on headset last night. They need to know where we are in the score, what's coming, and what I've flagged. The book holds the continuity. Not me.

That's a humbling thing to accept, by the way. You spend years developing judgment and instinct, and then your professional obligation is to make yourself replaceable by Tuesday. But that's the discipline. The show doesn't care about your ego.

Walk me through what actually happens when you call a cue.

Marisol: Three stages. Warning, standby, go.⁸

Warning is early, maybe a minute out. "Warning, LX 24." The board operator responds, which tells me they're on headset, they're conscious, they know something is coming. At that point they can still be doing other things. Adjusting a lamp, checking a note, whatever.

Standby is different. Standby changes the room. When I call "Standby LX 24," the headset goes quiet. Nobody talks between a standby and a go unless something is actually on fire.⁹ A warning is information. Standby is a commitment. Your hand is on the fader. You have stopped doing everything else you were doing on this earth. Your body changes. You're leaning forward.

People think of standby as a kind of heads-up. It's a state change. The person receiving it has entered a different mode of readiness. Other departments may be sequencing off that readiness. The whole system tightens.

And then "go." Which, here's the thing that surprises people, the word "go" is essentially radioactive on headset. You never say it in casual conversation. If you want to say "let's go get dinner after the show," you say "let's head to dinner" or you spell it out. People call it "the G word."¹⁰ Because if someone is standing by and they hear "go," they execute. That is what the word means. It means now.

Word order matters too. I say "LX 24... go." Go comes last. If I said "Go, LX 24," the operator fires before knowing which cue. The syntax is always: load, then trigger. Always.

There's a note in your book in capital letters. I can see it from here.

Marisol: NEVER TAKE THIS CUE EARLY.

(She tilts the binder so I can read it, then tilts it back.)

It's on the fly cue in Act Three, the backdrop that comes in during Tosca's jump from the parapet. The timing between that fly piece descending and the performer reaching the crash mat is... consequential.

I don't know who wrote it. The handwriting isn't my predecessor's. Might be two stage managers back. And here's the thing: the scenery it refers to has been replaced. We re-rigged that drop in Seattle four cities ago. The counterweight system in the original staging was apparently less predictable than what we're running now.

So the question becomes: do I erase it?

(She looks at the note for a moment.)

Not casually. Maybe not ever, unless I do the work. Because that note isn't a suggestion. It isn't an alarm going off; an alarm fires when something goes wrong. This is closer to inherited judgment. Someone who came before me decided that this moment in the score requires extra caution, and they wanted that caution to outlive them.

If I decide the warning is genuinely obsolete, here's what I do. I investigate the original condition. I talk to the TD about the new rigging. I rehearse the sequence without the constraint, under controlled conditions, with safety measures in place. And then, then, if I remove it, I write in the margin why it was there and why I took it out. Dated. Initialed. In pencil, like everything else.¹¹

After thirty-one years, what do people most get wrong about your job?

Marisol: That I'm improvising. Every decision in this book was made in rehearsal. What I'm doing in performance is executing a plan, but executing it against a live orchestra that plays the same score at a slightly different tempo every night, with performers who are human beings having human nights, in a building I may have walked into for the first time forty-eight hours ago.

Footnotes

1. The Ohio University guide to opera stage management states directly: "If you do not read music, tell your director and don't attempt to fake it." https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/ws/send_file/send?accession=akron1428349593&disposition=inline ↩

2. The advance process requires reconciling the production's technical rider with the venue's tech pack: stage dimensions, rigging capability, power specifications, and labor rules. https://advancewithme.com/guides/how-to-advance-a-show ↩

3. Local fire departments typically require documentation at least two weeks before the performance date. https://www.theefficienthustle.com/blog/2020/5/11/advancing ↩

4. "Every issue caught in the advance is one that doesn't blow up at 8am on show day." https://www.daysheets.com/glossary/advancing ↩

5. In opera, cues are marked against specific musical beats or notes in the score, not simply against spoken text. https://www.adctheatre.com/media/4736/07a-sm-guide-stage.pdf ↩

6. "The prompt book is kept in such a manner that in the case of an emergency anyone could pick up the book and run the show." https://www.theatrefolk.com/blog/how-to-prepare-a-stage-managers-prompt-book ↩

7. One teaching guide instructs stage managers to "write your cues into your prompt book as if you are expecting someone else who is a moderately experienced stage manager to call the show." https://lhstheatredept.weebly.com/uploads/1/1/9/0/119047293/marking-and-calling-cues__1_.pdf ↩

8. The core calling structure in theater consists of three distinct phases — warning, standby, and go — each with different operational meanings and obligations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_(theatrical) ↩

9. "Don't talk between a standby and a go unless there is an emergency." https://www.adctheatre.com/media/4736/07a-sm-guide-stage.pdf ↩

10. The word "go" is so operationally charged that many stage managers and crew members substitute "the G word" in ordinary headset conversation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_(theatrical) ↩

11. Prompt book annotations are made in pencil so they can be erased and updated as the production evolves; in multi-SM productions, annotations carry dates and initials. https://theatrecrafts.com/pages/home/topics/stage-management/the-prompt-book/ ↩