Many of you reading this have - hopefully at least once in your life - been to the theatre, whether it was to see a play, musical, concert, dance performance, or what have you. If all went well you probably enjoyed yourself, and if it went extremely well you probably left questioning how you have lived your life up to that moment without it. Theatrical performances can do that to you, that’s why people love going to shows so much. It is also why performers and tech crews love putting shows on.
When you leave the theatre after a show, as an audience member, you are most likely thinking about what you saw and what you heard. You are focused on how it appeared to you, rather than how other people made it possible in the first place. That’s why a lot of people come away from shows and focus on the work of the performers rather than the work that went on backstage. As an actress, I can say that yes, the performers are working extremely hard to make the performance the best it can be, but I can also say that their work does not define the entire piece. It’s the work that goes on backstage that fills out the show and makes it unforgettable.
Behind the scenes, a lot of work gets put in to make the magic that you see onstage. Someone spend days on lighting, weeks on sound and months on the set. Costumes were collected, rented and sometimes built by hand. From the very beginning of the rehearsal process tons of people are working on every aspect of the show, nailing down every detail, to make it the beautiful picture that the audience sees onstage. What you see in two hours when you go to the theatre took many weeks (sometimes months) to create.
When you have the privilege of being involved in a production, you get to watch the magic unfold in front of you, and even be a part of it. In a recent production of a Shakespeare play that I was in we used a lot of little tricks to simulate magic onstage. One of my favorites was at the very beginning. The narrator would have a fake candle (you know one of the plastic ones with the battery powered flame?) and a cover over her thumb that lit up when she held her thumb and pointer finger together. Basically, she would reach into the candle and pinch her fingers together like she was picking up the flame, and the tip of her thumb would glow red. To the actors and the crew backstage, we saw essentially the mechanics of the moment, but the audience always gasped or laughed. They were seeing magic. Even if they logically knew that she wasn’t picking up the flame (and hopefully they did know), they were still amazed at how the moment was created.
Being able to view and understand theatre this way is one of the most enjoyable and fulfilling things you can do. The people backstage think and work so hard to perfect the tiniest things, so that the production as a whole is beautiful, powerful, so that it stuns the audience. Creating the magic is magic within itself.
