SITUATIONAL AWARENESS AND HOW STAGE MANAGERS CONTRIBUTE THE SUCCESS OF A SHOW

Hello, this is Les Goldberg, and welcome to The Road Ahead. The Road Ahead podcast is dedicated to the future of the live events business, bringing together industry experts. Hello, production world. This is Les Goldberg and The Road Ahead. Today I have three amazing guests. I have Roger Bull, who is a stage manager, DBA, Noble Event Services. I have Miles Capper, a stage manager, DBA, Show Architects. And I have Cheryl Poulson, a stage manager and co-founder of the Event Training Academy. Everyone, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thank you. Today's show is dedicated to the concept of situational awareness from the perspective of the show caller. And I'll use the term stage manager. Both terms are applicable in this scenario. And today is a unique week in my life. We are celebrating our 40th anniversary of LMG. And when I started it, I was a high school kid just graduating. I was 17 years old and LMG and the ETP family has turned into become an international big company with hundreds of employees. And I'm very proud of it. And I am very proud that I'm able to say I've worked with all of the people on this podcast on over many years doing many cool shows. And today we're going to talk about situational awareness. And I'm going to throw the first question to Miles. Miles, can you explain the role of a stage manager and how vital this role is to delivering a live show? I mean, without the stage manager, the show can very easily fall off the rails. Wow. Well, essentially, I mean, I see it as I'm the translator between how things have been planned and produced, and then making those things happen on stage. That's probably the most simple answer I can give, because I sure want Roger and Cheryl to weigh in on it. I will say one thing, though, before you get to that point, and I think most of us would agree on this, the sooner you can pull your stage manager into the process, the less surprises you're going to have on site. Got it. Cheryl, same question. Can you explain the role of the stage manager and how vital this is to, you know, any live show? And I would actually go with the success of the show. You know, the stage manager seems to be driving the bus as far as what's going to happen. Well, that's exactly what I was going to say. It's pretty much the captain of the ship. That is that person that is guiding everything. You're taking all content, all technical, all presenters, all live audience things. You have to be the one that is in the moment, on guard, ready to go. You are in that zone. You just have to be ready for anything and guiding that ship through whatever comes. And in live events, anything can happen. You know, we've had Longhorn Steer on stage before. You all know the eagle who soars through and doesn't land where he's supposed to. All those kind of events happen. You have to make sure that show continues no matter what happens. So it's the person that guides that ship throughout everything. Captain of the ship. Cheryl is the captain of the ship. Roger, your thoughts. Can you describe the stage manager's role? Well, I agree with Cheryl. And actually, I would go with, I'm the conductor, because I was a music major. And so it's like, I have the score in front of me. And I will now say, I want more PowerPoint, I want less video, I want a little bit more lighting, I want so so I'm the conductor, and reading the score. And I have written that score with the author, the client, and the production crew. And I've been also backstage on some crews where there were no show directors or stage managers. And I've seen that go south. Yeah, because the graphics operator was calling the show because they knew what was next in the graphic world, but they didn't know what was coming up. And that's, that's why we have show directors and stage managers. I want you to know, if anyone's backstage trying to call the show, and they're not experiencing what the audience is feeling and seeing, it's not exactly the best plan. I'm just going to go with that right now. If anyone has that plan, that that's not a plan or a recipe for success. Let me shift the conversation back to Miles. Miles, if you were trying to explain to someone who didn't know what a show caller does, what would the skills that a person who maybe aspirationally someone's listening wants to do this role? What are the skills and attributes you think are necessary to be successful? Well, on the non-technical side, you have to know when to be quiet and not talk. Because listening is so much of it before you get on headsets and actually start calling cues. So yeah, listening and a fair amount of hopefully interpersonal experience interaction kind of thing really moves things along. On the technical side, and I'm going to just make a little bit of a left turn here. On the technical side, one of the big differences between traditional theater and corporate events is that you have to have an above average knowledge of lighting, video, and sound. You don't have to know how to EQ a room or run a switcher or program a lighting console. But you have to know some of the shortcuts in all those departments to cut to the chase to make things happen quicker. Got it. Cheryl, your thoughts. What are the elements of being successful? And I have to tell you, because you are the co-founder of the Event Training Academy, I am very interested in your perspective, because I think you train people for this kind of role. Am I correct? Yes. Yeah, that's exactly what we do. We take people who have a basis in theater and sort of help them transition into the corporate world and actually learn that there is another industry out there where all their skills apply. So following up on what Miles said, I feel like there's a set of soft skills, and then there's a set of hard skills is the way we like to talk to them. Hard being the technical, the knowledge of what all these pieces of equipment do, the vocabulary, all of these kind of things. So it's really a learned set of skills. The soft skills can be learned too, but a lot of them are more developed over time. It's how you deal with people, your interpersonal skills. Because again, in corporate now, you've taken your actors or your designers, your directors, and you've sort of transitioned them into CEOs and executives. So you're just kind of trading one for the other. Personalities are very important, but it's a higher stake now because there's a lot more money involved, there's a lot more pressure, and there's a one and done. So the other thing that I think is a huge skill we all need to have is that time management, coolness, pressure, manageability, I don't even know what you want to call that specifically, but you need to be able to deal with the stress and the pressure. So no one ever sweats a really good stage manager. There's no sweating. It's all cool as a cucumber. Everyone does it that way. On that note, Roger, your thoughts? Are you a cool cucumber? Is that part of this process? Yeah, that is what part of my job is, is to make sure that everyone is calm and that we can pull through anything that's thrown at us. And knowing the client expectations for the entire event is very key. And as long as you have that and agreeing with Miles and Cheryl that the knowing the technology because you have to know how many buttons someone has to to get what you have asked them to do to the screen. And you have to know, hey, if I'm going to go to a camera shot, it's going to need lighting. And so you're you need to know the technology around you. And you just come into the event and say hi, this is what I'm expecting. You do that during the tech and the queue to queue and things like that. And then you can keep people calm through the event. I think your voice keeps people calm. It's so cool that I think I think that the tone of the tone of the voice of a show caller is something that could really express calm or urgency or can change, you know, I had a tech last week say that it was a week of listening to a movie trailer. Well, that's probably a compliment. I think that's awesome. I thought it was cool. Okay, my next question is to Miles. And Miles, we want to talk about, do you and Cheryl and Roger all have unique styles and how you do your job? I really want to understand what your thoughts are on this. I try to make it as conversational as possible. The idea of trying to act like pre-revolutionary France, I think went out the window a long time ago. You know, I'm not here to make friends. You know, I'm not here to give out my cards, just execute the cue when I call it and we'll get along just fine. I think those days are kind of over. Everybody, of course, has their own style, not only in terms of how they call the show, but also in terms of how they write it. David Peel, who's probably the grandfather of contemporary production stage management, along with Laird Parent and John Fennessy, you know, David said to me once, if you give 100 stage managers the same script, no two books will look the same in terms of cueing. Yet the show should look exactly the same, no matter who calls it. And that really stuck with me because yeah, there's a lot. There's always several ways to do the same thing. And that is top of mind, especially on this topic of situational awareness. So Miles, before I move on to Cheryl, I just want to how would you describe your style? Conversational, I'm not big on talk on headsets. But I, you know, I think, I think Roger's voice nailed it. You try to keep it as what's the, you try to keep it casual, yet, it's like, guys, stand by. And as soon as you say stand by, you know, it's like, okay, something's gonna happen in the next minute. Let's let's let's pay attention. Got it. Cheryl, well, how would you describe your style and your thoughts? Casual, for sure. Fun, use a lot of humor. And I have been known to drop the occasional obscenity. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. So COE, when somebody or COH, when somebody says COH, meaning client on headset, it's usually because I'm there. And it's a warning to try and clean up my mouth sometimes, because it's, it's just a part of your style. And sometimes being a woman, and when I started in this business, being a younger woman, honestly, I'd be on these huge shows in Vegas with 50 guys on calm. And you are trying before you've really gotten your assertive voice, you drop an F bomb once in a while. And not for nothing, there's a little bit of respect that shown like, okay, she can throw down. All right, I'm gonna listen. So it has worked honestly, to my advantage in the past. That's many years ago, I am trying to be better. But people do know me for the occasional obscenity. Hey, you know what? It's your style. I can't make it my style. And I'm also that Roger, what's your style? Well, it's definitely not that. And I think it's more just to the point. It's like Miles said, conversational, casual, and calm. Hey, you know what? The you know, if you're on a boat, your boat is always calm. It's there's there are the rocking ocean is if Rogers on headset where everything's calm. That's great. I'm gonna I'm gonna move on to my next question. My next question is, to Miles is, can you share a story where maybe something unplanned happened, and things fell off the rails and kind of as the stage manager, how did you handle it? And how did you keep the crew and the plan together, so to speak? We only have 20 minutes. We do. That's right. Wow. Well, okay, I'll just I'll just met many, many, many things come to mind. But that's one story. It's a maybe 60 seconds. One quick story. 99% of everything I can think of is something that happened because of after a cue was called something happened. And here's a perfect example. There is a group of folks that put on these talks that range from three minutes to 18 minutes. And for a few years, I was the stage manager for those events until they went to a broadcast model. And there was one little three minute bit that sounded cute on paper, a guy came on stage and started to give a very formal presentation. You know, ladies and gentlemen, I'm here to talk to you today about blah, blah, blah. And within 1015 seconds, things started to happen. beach balls started to come out of the middle of nowhere, people started to show up on stage. And this was all supposed to happen to a track and the audio never made it to the speakers. So it was three minutes of I thought total confusion. But because of the subject matter, I guess it kind of like still worked, but it was very, very, very awkward. But yeah, I can come up with more examples. But I so I guess I guess you just navigated through that moment. And we then the show kept going. Yeah, I mean, there are other things in the days of slide projectors, for those of you who remember that. And this has happened at least three times in in my stage management career, where the CEO or the VP of marketing doesn't know there's an opening module and he just comes up to the lectern and starts pounding on and says, Okay, let's get this meeting begin that started. And it's like nobody told him there was an opening module. Well, rehearsals, rehearsals have value. That's what I have to say. Cheryl, what are your thoughts on a situation? Where you were in where let's just say things fell off the rails and kind of had to deal with it. Well, I can tell you by being prepared and having your show flow in a certain format with item numbers is extremely helpful. I used to do a lot of events in Washington, D. C., which included congressmen and senators. So you would have a four hour session with anywhere from five to 15 politicians in line. Well, it all of a sudden, you know, a vote gets called on the hill. Everybody leaves. So what do you do? You say, All right, guys, we're going to jump from item 14 to 37. Everybody into 38 right now. And this is what we're going to go. And you've got your producer telling client you just have to make sure you're prepared. And I think that's a big thing. So that happened many times. And thank God for item numbers is what I got to tell you, because we just jump a huge chunk of the show. We'll get back to it when we get there. So that's kind of it. But because, you know, where you're going as the stage manager, you can manage that situation no matter what. I love the term no matter what means the stage manager is driving no matter what. And whatever pathway or direction they take, that is what the audience will experience. Mm hmm. Can I add to this? One of the reasons, too, when you go back to style, one of the things that everybody has their own style, which is authentic to them, which helps the crew trust you. And I think that's the biggest thing to get their trust throughout the rehearsals and all that, because once you get in that situation, no matter what, they're going to follow you like through the fire. They're going with you. And that's important. I'm getting my fire suit on. I'm going through fire with you. OK, but I'm doing it. Roger, your thoughts on something that fell off the rails. No matter what, the show must go on. Oh, I love that title. I think I might have heard of a book like that. Oh, yes. Excuse me. I wrote that. Yeah. Or a song or anything like that. And this just goes back to last week. I was doing a show and these were nine hour general sessions. And in these days, they are so rare. Normally, you have the hour and a half to two hour session. Then you rehearse the crap out of everything for the next six hours. Then you have a hour long general session at the end. These were nine hour general sessions for three days. And the rehearsals were just clicking through the slides and all that stuff. So our first presenter of the day had 25 minutes. She went 40. And the little customer moment that was supposed to be five minutes was 15. So now after the first two presenters were already over a half hour later. And so now it's like, OK, where are we going with and the client is right next to me going. And I said, OK, what we have to do is while the next speaker was talking, I said something has to give. We've got a break that has to be this long. You can take that away. We have breakouts. Even though there's a breakout in our general session, we can do that and lunch. And for Cheryl's point about cue numbers, I just said to the crew, throw your cue sheets away because everything we're doing now is going to be live until after lunch. And so I was going, OK, we have numbers for the videos or names of the videos. And we have things that we could do for presenters. And I said, we have to go to this presentation and then this customer moment. And the crew that I had was phenomenal. They were like, OK, here we go. And we had moved. You should have seen my cue sheet all written up. OK, two goes to eight and eight goes to six. And it was using the same thing, cue numbers. And we ended up being five over at five o'clock. Well, so I think Cheryl mentioned or I'm sure most time management as a great stage manager, you have to be a time management guru. Oh, yeah. And back in my radio days, it was back timing to the network. So you're playing, you're playing songs, you're doing stuff, you're making sure everything and right at the top of the hour, you have to hit the network. And so that comes into play a lot as a stage manager. All right. My next question is to Cheryl. Cheryl, have you ever experienced a situation where literally it was a show stopping moment where something failed and we had to stop the show, send the audience on a break? Have you ever had one of those what I would call train wrecks where something bad happened and something failed that was a critical failure? I don't know that I had a critical failure as far as within the show itself, but I did have an event where everything stopped. It was when the market crashed in 2000, 2008. And I was at an event hosted by a Fortune 5 CFO for other Fortune 500 CFOs. So all the major financial players for a lot of the major companies were together. So they had a breakfast that morning and were coming in for a session when, of course, everything fell apart. And everybody's on the phone, they're doing their stuff. So instead of going in with our scheduled meetings, we all gathered together and said, well, what do you want to do? And we just basically said, all right, everybody, here's the deal. We know you have stuff to deal with. I'm on the God, Mike saying this as I'm consulting with the main CFO. Anybody who wants to stay in here, we're going to have an open forum right now. We put all the chairs in a big circle for these, I think it was 120 people. And they just those who wanted to come in did. And then we said, we'll regroup after lunch. So we just changed the whole thing in a moment. But it was sort of like, OK, all right, Cheryl, announce this to everybody. All right, here we go, guys. This is what we're doing. So you just roll with it. You just have to be able to pick up a mic and roll with it. And that's what we did. I think what I'm hearing is that every circumstance is it's happening live and you just got to deal with those moments and make the best of some circumstances that you could not have a plan for. So you just work it out. Miles, have you had one of those stories where something didn't go exactly right? Does a dress rehearsal count? Sure. 9-11, we were in the middle of a dress rehearsal. And that like as soon as the last car drove on stage, it was like at that point, the CEO came on and said, OK, we're done. Too much is going on. We don't know what's going on in New York, really. But nobody could pay attention to the show at that point. The other example, which is far more lighter, was the brand new CFO was giving his first talk to the troops and he was a dog lover and total surprise to him. We brought in a golden retriever the night before and trained to the golden retriever to come out halfway through the guy's presentation, sit next to the lectern, offer his paw to shake his hand. And I'll be damned, it worked. What didn't work. Hey, Miles, you and I did a show where we had a camera on a pig. Walking in the Rose Theater, pointed the camera at the audience and we called it Ham Cam. We at the same show, we had a King Cobra, a live King Cobra, kiss the lens of our camera. And I thought the audience screamed. So, you know, I'm so glad you brought that up because I was thinking, oh, my God, from that show, I know there is something I can pull. But then this dog kind of took over. And the bottom line with that was the trainer blew the whistle from stage left and the dog was supposed to run to her afterwards. And it just turned into a total mess because the dog saw twelve hundred salespeople in the audience and decided to shake their hands too. Sometimes animals cannot exactly perform on. I think Cheryl made the eagle didn't show up or didn't fly. Let me run on to my next question. And this one of a start with Roger. Roger, what advice would you give anyone listening who wanted to do this job in their career? What would your advice be? Learn the technology and find a mentor. And I had no idea that Cheryl's company existed. But talk to Cheryl. Yes. Talk to Cheryl. That's what that's what I would do. But if you are in the industry, sit in the different seats on site, you know, know what's you know, know what's happening in each of the different seats. Take over a camera during a rehearsal. Sit next to the shader. Find out what the audio guy is doing. Why is that pink noise going in? You know, just sit in the different chairs and actually run with that. And so you'll find out what the technology is and going from TVL and those big old discs that we had. And now we have Maluma. And what's your terminology? What are you doing with the different stacks? And how are you doing your different timelines? Learn the technology. And then it's easy for you to go, OK, go to the last 10 seconds. And that used to not be able to do it with Maluma. But now it does because now there's they're learning. And so you will learn the technology along with the operators. Cheryl, could you share and you can read and promote your event training academy right now. Tell us what attributes you would tell to anyone who wanted to do this role. And also they can go to your website to learn how to become a stage manager. Right. Yeah. Event training academy dot com. Check it out. We're going to teach everything you need to know. Vocabulary skills, hard, soft time management documents, everything you need to become a stage manager and transfer from theater to corporate. It's all there. And I'm sorry on that note. I have to jump. Cheryl, thank you so much. We're going to ask the last question to Miles. The same thing. Thank you, Cheryl, for joining. Miles, your thought and anyone wanting to do this job, I would say the most I'm just going to tail off from Roger. Aside from aside from embracing the technology, you have to have the personality of be willing to change at any given moment during a show. Last week, I called the Arteos Awards, which is the Casting Society's big deal at the Beverly Hilton. An A-list director flew in from London and to give the big award of the night. And his it was hailing last Thursday in Beverly Hills. He was delayed a half hour. The executive producer for the show came up to me while the awards were happening. We have to move his award giving down to the last one of the evening so we can buy a half hour. And I kept my headsets open so the so the crew could hear me. I also stopped putting a clock on the acceptance speeches because I wanted to buy as much time as I could. And we had two, two five minute opportunities. That's how long it took to give an award out and do an acceptance speech to move his section to the very bottom, which meant graphics had to change and teleprompter had to change. And the time to do that was during the acceptance speeches, because that's when we weren't using either one of those. And it worked fine. But again, your crew is so important. And I could talk about that for an entire session. But anyways, that's how it happened. And you need to be ready to do that. Okay, so this is my final question. And my question is going to Roger, why do you love doing this? And what keeps you the fun of continuing to do it? The creative aspect of it, because every show is different, and working with the different clients and the different producers, and the different crews. But the creativity of the event keeps me going, because I love what I do. And I love making it happen for everybody. That's awesome. Miles, same question. Why do you continue to do this and love this gig? Damn you, Roger. When did you get my script? Yeah, that and you know, it's like, all the shows are the same. And all the shows are different. And after you get that email that says, Are you available? And then you call the producer. And you start learning more about the event. There's already things coming out of your, you know, out of your rabbit's hat that you know, you're going to need that, you know, you're going to ask for, you know, they say, Yeah, we're doing a show in Newport News in a tent at three o'clock in the afternoon on August 19. Are you bringing in an air conditioner for me? Because I know what the humidity is going to be like at Newport News on August 19. So it keeps you, it's a very stimulating line of work, because it does everything. Every show is different. And yet every show, it's like, Okay, what conventions do I pull to make this happen? Well, guys, I want to thank you all, Roger, Miles, and Cheryl, who just had to go. Y'all are amazing. I look forward to seeing you in ballrooms, convention centers, any event space. I know I'll be looking for you guys, you'll have the headsets on. And I know that for sure. And the word go will be something that you probably said a few times. And I also want to again, happy birthday to LMG on 40 years. And I look forward to the future. And guys, thank you so much. And this is Les Goldberg and The Road Ahead. Great job. Thank you. Thank you, Les.