Broadway Stage Manager Career Insights

If it's a big show like say hello Dolly, which I did, it's the sets are mammoth and huge and very complex.
You have to figure out how you're gonna get from one scene to another, and and it be it becomes it can be incredibly complicated.
Hi, I'm Ravozeri, and welcome to How Much Can I Make.
I am a curious journalist, fascinated by what people do for a living, what their jobs are really like, and how much they can earn.
Join me as we dive into stories behind careers, uncovering insights and details, which I hope you'll find as intriguing as I do.
So let's get started.
Today we are with Billy, who has a very sexy job.
He's a stage manager.
Why are you laughing?
It is, it sounds like very sexy.
Thanks for by the way, willing to share your experience with us.
That's fantastic.
Of course.
Let's start by learning how did you get into stage management?
How I got into it non-professionally was I did theater in high school.
I was attracted to it.
Um, from seventh grade when I was in a production of the sound of music and played one of the kids, I was hooked.
In high school, in order to be in the productions, we had to work backstage.
We had to work on Saturdays, we had something called work parties, and we would work on sets, costumes, props, putting the show together, mainly building the sets.
And in that process of doing that, and then being on stage, I developed this awareness of not only what it was like to be a performer, but what it took to create the stage and the lights and the props and the costumes and wigs and everything that it took behind the scenes.
So was your dream to be a performer?
Yes, yes.
That was my dream to be a performer and to be a star on Broadway or um a rock star.
I wasn't picky, I just wanted to be a star.
And uh so I went to school uh uh for music for one semester, and then I switched to theater because I was a singer too, and uh in university settings, and uh in the first one was a state university and the second one was a private university.
Part of your requirement on when you're a performer is to work backstage and to work in the shops and learn how to not only build shows but run shows, run lights, run follow spots, run carpentry cues on the deck.
You you learn all that in university settings.
Sometimes it's very divided.
In my case, the school I went to, which was State University of New York at Fredonia, everybody did everything, just like my high school.
So it was just kind of like a carryover.
And I would get on crews of shows and I was performing in shows.
But the thing that even always when I was performing, I was always aware of that it wasn't just me up there with the audience and my fellow actors, that there was a whole infrastructure backstage that was kind of allowing us to be there and for the show to be effective.
And then I went to New York, I was waiting tables, doing kind of theater as a hobby.
But I was in a lot of productions, they just didn't really pay me anything.
And at a certain You were in production as a performer or as a stage manager?
As a performer.
And at a certain point, I started to get a little frustrated with the life of an actor.
You're only as good as your last audition.
You can be fabulous in a show and everybody can love you.
You can walk into an audition and they may love you, and then they'll say, Yeah, but you're just not right for this show.
And I just got sick of hearing that.
So I was taking acting classes.
They were doing some readings, and the director needed uh uh a stage manager for it, and basically what he needed was to schedule people's availabilities around their work schedules.
I did that uh for a couple shows, and he was very impressed with my ability to do that.
It to schedule.
What does a stage manager actually do?
Well, what doesn't the stage manager do is probably a shorter answer.
Uh but basically you're running the show.
You're making sure the rehearsals happen as scheduled, that the director and the actors have what they need in the rehearsal to rehearse meeting.
Do they have a floor plan of the set?
Do they have props that they can handle?
Do if do they have costume pieces that they may need?
If they need a sword, you gotta have a sword there.
If they need a cup of tea, you gotta in the scene, you gotta make sure all that's there so they can rehearse in a bare bones fashion.
If it's a musical and they need a piano and drums, you gotta make sure they're there.
If you need to make sure the rooms are ready and available for these rehearsals to happen.
And then once the rehearsals happen, you keep them on schedule, you call the breaks, you make schedules for every day.
And you not only rehearse in the room with the production, with the actors and the director, you're also talking to the designers, saying, I need to have a costume fitting for this person, for this role.
When are they rehearsing tomorrow?
I only have this window of time to use, I need to do shoe fittings, I need to do wig measurements, I need to do wig fittings, any other kinds of things that may pull them out of the room.
So the stage manager is scheduling all that stuff.
And then making sure that the production is proceeding on schedule so that you can get to the first performance.
And before you get to the first performance, you move from a rehearsal studio, typically, onto the stage of the theater with a crew that doesn't, hasn't been in rehearsal, most of them, and you start to put the cast on stage in their costumes, going scene by scene, working with the lighting designer and the sound designer to light the show, do the sound cues, get the set on and off.
If it's a big show, like say Hello Dolly, which I did, it's the sets are mammoth and huge and very complex.
You have to figure out how you're gonna get from one scene to another, and and it can be incredibly complicated.
Who is overseeing you?
You're working mainly as the right-hand person to the director.
Directors relying on you to make sure that the rehearsals can happen and and things stay on schedule.
If it's a musical, then there's also a musical director who's teaching them music, and then they have to learn all that.
And and then if there's a musical, there's usually a choreographer.
So you've got to be rehearsing all these things in an eight-hour day in, like, say, three different rooms, and all things going separately and then coming together, and things can go wrong.
And if you're the stage manager and you're watching the show and the sets are moving the way they're supposed to, but the lights are doing something crazy, then the lighting electrician has to figure out what's going on, and the stage manager has to say, okay, we need to stop because the set's not moving right, or the lights aren't moving right, or the sound is not working, or the mics have gone dead.
You know, so somebody has to be at the helm to sort of make sure that that the show continues, and if it can't continue, you know, you get on an announcement to the audience and say, ladies and gentlemen, due to a technical issue, we have to interrupt the performance, which has happened to me many times.
Really?
Yeah, of course.
And uh it's it's it's very there's a lot of complicated, a lot of moving parts.
Sometimes the moving parts are on people's bodies.
I mean, I've had I've had actors get seriously injured during a performance, and you have to either stop or get them off stage, get an understudy in their costumes, and send them back out.
The hope is you can do it without stopping the show.
But sometimes that's that's a big element.
So while the show goes on, you have to be on all the time.
Look at the city.
You have to be watching the show.
If you're calling the cues of a show, you have to watch it like a hawk.
If it's a musical like Hello Dolly, which has, you know, 30 plus people on stage, you're watching everything.
It if it's a play like, say, Art, which I did, there's only three actors.
And it the lights don't change much and the sets don't change much.
But you still have to watch in case, you know, the lights start blinking or an actor messes up a line, or an actor like starts to get sick and walks off the stage.
So you have to be present.
Somebody has to be calling the shots to make sure the show happens.
If you have a theater of 1,200 people and something is going wrong, and there isn't the feeling that someone is in charge and telling you what to do, it would be chaos.
I've had people have heart attacks in the audience during a performance.
What did you do?
And you have to you hear something going on, you say to your assistant, what's going on, and that the EMS are coming, and then you say, ladies and gentlemen, due to a medical emergency, we need to interrupt the performance.
Cast, please come off the stage, but we ask you to please stay in your seats and we'll resume the show as soon as we can.
But in the perfect world, the lights go down, the actors come out, the curtain goes up, all the cues happen in the right order, everybody says their lines, and the audience gives a standing ovation.
And that happens, you know, most times 90% of the time, probably more.
So it's a very stressful job.
It can be very stressful, and it can also be incredibly monotonous.
Because if some of the shows I've been on ran for hundreds of performances, year and a half, um uh, you know.
And you have to be there every day.
And you have to be there every day, or you have to have trained somebody to be in your be there in your place and to take vacations and stuff like that.
But a team of a stage management team, be that two people, it's usually two people, sometimes three or four, but there has to be a full stage management team at every performance.
Tell me some shows you worked on.
Hello, Dolly, which I mentioned, the original productions of Love, Valor, Compassion, which one of Tony for Best Play, Masterclass, which wanted Tony for Best Play, Art, which wanted Tony for Best Play, Take Me Out, Revival of Glengarry, Glenn Ross with Lev Schreiber and Alan Alda.
I did a revival of You from the Bridge with Scarlett Johansson.
I did uh the first Broadway production of Three Days of Rain with Julia Roberts, Paul Rod, and Bradley Cooper.
Oh my god, you did a lot.
How many years have you been in the business?
I worked on Broadway for 30 years and I worked off Broadway before that.
How much money can you make as a stage manager?
1988.
I think I was making$292 a month.
A month?
A week.
$292 a week.
So you started as a$299.
Oh, I started less than that.
Well, I don't know what it is now because I but I don't, but you are going to be making peanuts.
Peanuts.
I it it varies so much from venue to venue.
I mean, sometimes it'll be like someone will call me and say, I'm looking for stage manager to to rehearse and do the show for four weeks downtown, and I have a thousand dollars.
And if you love it, you'll do a thousand dollars for the whole thing.
For the whole thing.
Yeah, and the rehearsals.
Or you can somebody may be getting six hundred dollars a week or eight hundred or a thousand if they're good.
But if you're up to the level of working as a production stage manager on Broadway, the union minimum contract is four thousand dollars a week.
So you you can easily if you if you're on a hit show like Book of Mormon or Wicked or Hamilton or uh you're you know, you you're you're pulling in uh 200k a year, plus you're getting money put into your pension, you're getting health insurance, and you're getting money, dedicated money from the producer to go into your 401k.
So it's a sweet deal.
And you know, I worked on Broadway for 30 years and retired with a with a rather substantial pension.
You have to be artistically ambitious to get to to a point where you're gonna be making the 200k a year because that's Broadway, and that's you it's if you're not ambitious, you're you're just not gonna make it in any field uh on Broadway because there aren't that many people that make a living on Broadway.
So if somebody wanna start and they have no theater experience, but they love the theater, how can they start?
I don't know how you really love the theater if you have no theater experience.
Um you may um you may love seeing theater and you may love the idea of watching a play, but if you have no theater experience and you love theater, you need to get yourself backstage on a show somehow to either at a community theater in your college, um, or you know, by sort of making contacts somehow to see what it's actually like.
Because the idea of the thing of sitting in a theater and watching it and being backstage and doing it are are two very, very different things.
So volunteer, intern, uh yeah, get in your high school drama club.
If college has a theater department, volunteer.
They're gonna they're gonna want you, anybody they're gonna always want extra hands to do all kinds of sort of painting or sewing or just you know, making coffee for people backstage.
You know, just just get in the soup of of a the production of a show somehow.
Because there's community theaters everywhere for regional theater, they take more professionals, right?
They wouldn't take a beginner.
You could, if there's a regional theater in your town, just say you wanna, you know, say you wanna volunteer, say you wanna, you know.
I think if you have no theater experience, you're gonna have to volunteer.
Right.
You know, you're not this isn't something you're gonna, you know, make any money at.
What would you say are the most important skills for somebody who wants to become a to be a stage manager?
A stage manager.
You have to love theater.
You have you have to love theater, you have to not be afraid to get your hands dirty, you have to love the process of putting things together, putting a show together, working with a lot of people to um because it's very collaborative theater by definition.
You have to be willing and able to collaborate.
And if you're the stage manager, you gotta be, you gotta check your ego.
Because you're gonna be dealing with a lot of people with egos because they're the ones that are out there on the high wire act.
Acting for a living, or even as even as a pastime, is a very, very vulnerable place to go.
So you have to be because you're you're going out into the dark, you know, you're going in into the light in front of a room full of strangers in the dark, hoping that they like you.
And uh, it's just on a personal level, that's tough.
You're there to support the other artists in the room.
Did it ever happen to you that you were starstruck?
Yeah, I I was struck.
I was starstruck all the time when I first started.
I was working with John Patrick Shanley, who had run who had won an Oscar from Moonstruck, and I was completely starstruck by him.
And he was just the writer and the director.
Um, and then I, you know, I was very starstruck by Dolly Parton, except she puts you right at ease immediately.
I would be starstruck with Dolly Parton.
Well, she's immediately you're put at ease.
But that's the thing, is like in my job, I'm you're starstruck when you see their name that you're gonna be working with.
And it's like, oh my god, I'm working with Julia Roberts.
Oh my, what is this guy?
I mean, this was when you know, she was she was a big star.
Or I'm gonna be working with Scarlett Johansson, you're gonna be working with Bradley Cooper, you know, I'm gonna be working with Lori Metcalf, you know.
I mean, and that but my sort of outreach to them is two or three weeks before rehearsals start, and I send an email and I go, hey, I'm Billy, and you know, this is one, this is the script, this is the schedule, this is how we're gonna roll.
On, you know, if is there anything you need in the room when you're rehearsing?
So my dialogue has already started them generally weeks before I meet them.
So by the time I meet them, it'll be like, hey, Lori, I'm Billy.
Oh, Billy, oh yes, thank you for all your emails and stuff.
So you're sort of comrades and and and you they know that you're running the room.
Did you collect signatures of those famous people on playbills?
No.
No, not professionally.
I mean, I have I have posters from shows that are signed by people, some of them very personally, some of them just signed.
So, yeah, in that sense, I uh yeah, I've collected signatures, but I don't ask for their autographs.
Uh what would you say is the biggest challenge of the job?
If you're going into this as a career, the biggest challenge is the schedule.
I would for me, you are you are going to do eight shows a week, you're gonna work six days a week, you're going to and you're going to be on call 24-7.
Wow.
You if you can walk out of that theater on a Saturday afternoon and think, ha one more Saturday night and my week's over, and get a call that somebody fell and they're in the hospital, and you've got to have an understudy ready for that evening's performance, and you've got you've got a couple hours to make sure that person can slot into the show and do the performance.
Or you get a call on your day off is Monday, and you get a call Monday at four in the afternoon saying, you know all that rain rain we had?
The theater's flooded, the costumes are soaked, we don't know what we're gonna do.
So it's it's a big again, it's very organizational, it's a big game of it's a chessboard.
Yeah.
So what would you say is the biggest reward of the job?
The biggest reward is when you retire and you have a big pension.
No, that I I I've had a lot of everyone has issues with unions, but I am very, very grateful to the union that they kept that pension.
So beside the reward of the money, what else would you say?
Oh, the the reward of it is is is watching things come together, to watch all the elements come into place and be a part of that.
Because you see everything.
There is no department that you're not involved with.
So you you feel like you're a part of you're in the middle of if it's a successful show, you're in the middle of having created something great.
And the the best thing is it's like for an actor, is you hear that audience respond and laugh and applaud and stand up at the end, or or or you know, you hear the show's name called at the Tony Awards, and you you know, I mean, all of those all of those moments are really, really rewarding.
Did you work on the flop?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
What was that like?
I don't want to say, I don't want to embarrass Yeah, I worked on some shows that ran that must have been depressing now a couple weeks.
Yeah, it's sad.
It's sad.
Worked on a lot of flops.
Um I got I got lucky on Broadway.
Uh most of the things I worked on were ran for a while.
Now Tony Winners, but they ran for a while.
Uh some of them don't.
And you know, you may find yourself working for a couple of years on a show that you thought was maybe gonna run for a couple of years and it runs for three months, you know.
So what happens in between shows as far as income?
Unemployment?
You can get unemployment, which isn't much.
Uh, you know, I certainly use that to to bridge the gap.
You save while you're working, okay.
Um, and hopefully run your life in such a way that you can you can do that.
There's a lot of job insecurity in this profession.
It's like freelancing?
Yeah, it is totally freelance.
And you you you you go from union contract to union contract once you get it established.
But when I started, I didn't know.
I I had to also continue to do restaurant work between stage management gigs, or sometimes during stage management gigs, because they didn't they didn't pay enough for me to kind of pay my rent and eat and pay my bills.
There are gaps where you're not working and you gotta do something.
And now the two retirement.
Do you miss it?
No.
Do you still go to the theater?
There are people I go to the theater a lot.
Um I I actually it has sort of re sort of ignited my love of theater because I I I read about something and I go, Oh, I think I'll go, as opposed to reading about something and thinking, oh, I wish I could go, but I I I have to work, you know.
So it's there's a freedom in being retired.
And and I do and I do love theater and love seeing it and have loved working on it.
And and I think that that's a requirement.
I have I have a friend who stage manage together a lot, and uh she said, when you work in theater, if you don't get that little sense of thrill when you walk into the theater or you walk through the stage door, you're in the wrong business because there's so much about it that's difficult and hard, and it's a hard profession to survive in and to thrive in, and there's a lot, there's not that many jobs.
So you really have to love it because you gotta put up with a lot of downtime, a lot of times when you're not working, working for little money, working ridiculous hours, even if you're not like sort of physically there, you know.
You're you're still on call, your phone calls, your emails, your your paperwork, you're doing stuff hours after you leave the theater.
If you love theater and you're a workaholic, it's the place for you, it's the job for you.
You you meet a lot of different people, you you work on a show for maybe six months, and then there's a new b batch of people, and it and it doesn't get boring in that sense.
Is there a difference in pay?
I would assume there is between Broadway and uh smaller production.
Sure.
Even though you have a union behind you.
Yes, there's whole there's all all different kinds of contracts based on where you work, you know.
The the pinnacle is Broadway.
That the that's the only job where you're gonna make four thousand a week.
Okay the pr the production stage where the lead stage manager on a Broadway musical is gonna make it on a play, it's less.
If you're the first assistant stage manager, it's less.
If you're in a regional theater, it's less.
If you're in a regional theater on Broadway, like Manhattan Theater Club, Lincoln Center, Roundabout, Second Stage, it's less.
If you're working off Broadway, it's less.
It's considered considerably.
When you say less, what would that be?
Like uh a thousand dollars.
I don't really I don't want to speak to that because at the moment I don't know the different contracts, but it can be significantly less, like a quarter of the salary.
If you go on a musical tour, Broadway show that is on tour, do you make the same amount that you would make on Broadway?
It depends on what contract the union has negotiated with the producers.
It can be less, it can be more.
On tour, you you get per diem.
So uh depending on how you handle your living expenses on the road, you can you can make nice money.
You can you can make really nice money.
And and the thing about a tour is typically it's booked.
So when you sign that job, sign that contract, you know you're working for 18 months.
I mean, did you ever go on a tour?
Mm-hmm.
I was on one tour that I toured for I think it was a year and a half.
It wasn't particularly long.
Did you like it?
I liked things about it.
I liked the show.
It was hair.
So and I liked the show, and I liked hearing the music, and I liked I like being around the energy of that show.
Um, it was ki it was fun and it was a show that I'd been listening to since high school.
And there's something about it that's great.
There's something about it.
If you like if you're liking the people you're working with, it's it's a blast.
It's a great place to for partying because you, you know, you because you go out every night.
You're in a hotel and you you like me for a drink at the bar, and you know, it's fun.
Well, it sounds like a real fun job, you know.
You meet stars, you in the theater all the time.
I mean, it's fantastic.
You would you say you loved your life in on Brooklyn?
Oh, I did.
I loved it.
I I a lot of times I got to sleep late.
I didn't have to be to work till 6 30 at night.
You know, I it's yeah, and and the thing that I miss most about it and that I love most about it is the people that I met and the people that I worked with.
And not just the not the not just the stars.
I mean just there's just a great great families that spring up around a show and and and you're involved with uh, you know, a lot of really interesting people having their lives and doing this thing together.
You're part of a team.
And I always love that.
Well, thank you so much for doing it.
That was so interesting.
Oh good, great.
Thanks a million.
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