The Thirty Nine Steps - Part VI - Tech Rehearsal

(The 39 Steps, directed by Sean Daniels, opens October 26 at Geva Theatre (previews October 22))

Lights, music, action!  Then stop.  Then the actors stand around while the crew adjusts light cues or the angle of a doorway or the location of various props.  Finally – rehearsal is in the main stage, with costumes (I hardly recognized the actors!), sets, props, mikes (mikes? More about that later…).  The actors have their lines down and it’s time for the unsung heroes of theatre to get busy making sure the spots are in the right place, the sets don’t interfere with closing the curtain, the doorbell rings (wait – we need a doorbell!), and so on. 

This is where it all comes together, and adjustments are made (like installing a doorbell, or discarding a bit of a costume that interferes with the action).  Watching it take 20 minutes to get through a 1-minute scene, I tried to calculate the staggering amount of effort that goes into producing a mere 2 hours of ephemeral entertainment.  Thousands of man-hours, counting the time of not just the actors and director, but also stage managers, set designers and builders, costume and prop shop, lighting and sound crew, and many others who work literally behind the scenes.  And for many of them (as with, perhaps, many of us in other careers?), if they do their job right, you won’t even notice.  Only if a spot ends up on empty space next to an actor, or music plays too early and drowns out an actor’s lines, will the audience be aware of the people behind the curtain pulling the strings.

In addition to attending to details like making sure a rotating doorway clears the hanging lights, Sean and the stage managers were also diligently wandering around the orchestra and balcony to make sure that even ‘the cheap seats’ had good visibility for certain scenes where sets might impede a view of the action. Sitting in this particular rehearsal reminded me that theatre is truly a labor of love.  There’s an incredible amount of technical expertise required to stage a show, in addition to the obvious talents required by the actors and director, and what there is to show for it is fleeting.