How Elsbeth M. Collins Managed Stage Disasters—and What We Can Learn

The first time I cried at work, I was sitting in a booth at the back of a thousand-seat vaudeville house in downtown Los Angeles, and a would-be-Dame was driving the wrong way down Ninth Street.

This was the late 1980s, before cell phones, before GPS, before the gentrification of South Park. I had been “promoted” to production stage manager of an enormous benefit a month before the show—the previous PSM having withdrawn, quit, or fled, depending on whom you ask—and I was about as qualified for the job as a person who has watched someone else swim is qualified to lifeguard. On the night of the sound checks, in my infinite green wisdom, I scheduled the performers’ microphone checks in chronological order rather than in order of theatrical gravitas. Which meant that Glynis Johns, one of the great ladies of the musical theater, did not get to her mic until eleven at night and did not leave the theater until midnight, at which point she pointed her Mercedes toward the freeway, took a wrong turn, and beached the car on a median divider.

The next morning brought two phone calls. The first was from her agent, who happened also to be my husband’s agent. The second was from Miss Johns herself, who blamed me—correctly, I might add—for the poor directions. The director and I took both calls together in that booth, and when we hung up, we looked at each other and burst into tears.

I have spent more than thirty years learning what to do at moments like that one. What follows is most of what I know.

A disaster is just a problem that arrived early

People outside the theater imagine that a stage manager’s nightmare is the dropped line or the missed light cue. Those happen, and they matter, but they are rarely the true catastrophes. The real ones arrive uninvited and out of sequence: the lead loses her voice during previews; the actor doesn’t show and doesn’t call; the set piece that is supposed to roll downstage and crash into a tree simply refuses to move while six hundred people wait in the dark.

That last one happened to me at the Pasadena Playhouse, on a show called Camping with Henry and Tom. The play was meant to begin with a vintage Model-T careening downstage, banging into a tree, and disgorging Henry Ford, Warren Harding, and Thomas Edison in a cloud of theatrical smoke. I made the standard invited-dress disclaimer over the god mic—we may have to stop the show, ladies and gentlemen—and called the top. Nothing. The car would not budge. We tried again. Still nothing. So I leaned into the god mic and said, “Well, I think this is going rather well, don’t you?”

Big laugh. The next attempt worked, and the dress rehearsal proceeded.

I tell that story not because the joke was clever but because of what it reveals about the temperament you need when things break. The temptation in a crisis is to vanish into panic or to perform your own distress for the room. The discipline is to stay visible, stay light, and keep everyone breathing while you solve the thing. An audience can forgive almost any technical failure if the people running the show appear unbothered by it. Calm is contagious. So, unfortunately, is fear.

An audience can forgive almost any technical failure if the people running the show appear unbothered by it. Calm is contagious. So, unfortunately, is fear.

The unglamorous secret: most disasters were preventable an hour earlier

Hindsight is the stage manager’s cruelest companion, because it almost always reveals that the emergency began as a small, ignorable thing we chose to ignore. The wrong-way Mercedes was not really a driving accident; it was a scheduling error I had made the day before, dressed up as bad luck. When I look back honestly at the genuine messes of my career, very few were acts of God. Most were the predictable harvest of a corner I had cut, a question I had failed to ask, or an assumption I had let stand.

This is why I have always believed that crisis management is mostly preproduction wearing a disguise. The stage manager’s craft is built on a sequence I came to apply to my entire life, eventually even to buying a mobility scooter for my late husband: research the situation for what the needs really are; make a plan, anticipating the awkward questions before they ask themselves; then execute, training and rehearsing the plan until it runs without you. A disaster is what you get when you skip a step and pretend the gap won’t matter.

The corollary is uncomfortable but freeing. If most catastrophes are the late arrival of an early oversight, then most of them are within our power to prevent—which means the calm I described above is not a personality trait you either have or lack. It is the dividend of preparation. I have never once felt my heart in my mouth because I was too ready.

When you cannot prevent it, improvise—and know the difference between brave and reckless

Of course, some disasters cannot be forestalled. The lead actress arrives at the theater unable to speak.

This happened during previews of The Lion in Winter. Carole Cook, playing Eleanor of Aquitaine, had lost her voice but was willing to go on; the theater carried no understudies. The choices were to cancel and send six hundred people home, or to find something outside the box. With Carole’s rather astonishing consent, I set a music stand on the apron downstage right, and I read Eleanor’s lines aloud while Carole acted the part in silence. I had listened to her speak those lines for five weeks; I knew where she breathed. My assistant called the show. Not a single patron asked for a refund.

I want to be honest about that night, because there is a lesson hiding inside the applause. It worked. It was also, by any sober professional standard, poorly thought out and not at all best practice. I would not recommend it as a course of action. I cite it only as proof that the box has an outside, and that there are nights when the audience’s experience matters more than the rulebook.

The art is in telling the two apart. Reading Eleanor’s lines served the show and harmed no one. Lulling yourself into thinking a problem is handled when you have not walked it through step by step—that is where recklessness lives. I learned this on The Gospel at Colonus, when I watched an actor coach a last-minute replacement so confidently that I relaxed, went about my pre-show tasks, and entirely failed to realize that our only remaining usher was now also playing the Pastor—which meant no one was left to kidnap the two women in the Ismene quartet. They had to summon me to the dressing room to point this out. My less-than-dignified reply was, “Crap. I’ll be right back.” We solved it in the hallway in about two minutes, but the near-miss taught me the rule I now repeat to every young manager: confidence is not a plan. Think it through. Then think it through again.

Confidence is not a plan. Think it through. Then think it through again.

The crew that fixes the crisis is the crew you built before it

There is one more thing about disasters that the war stories tend to obscure, because war stories love a lone hero. The truth is that I have almost never solved a real crisis alone. The benefit that began with the wrong-way Mercedes became, over five years, the place I learned to produce—and what got us through every one of those nights was a company of people who refused to indulge negativity, who brought a flexibility of thinking that left no room for it.

I saw the same thing decades later in a jewel-box nineteenth-century theater in Dubrovnik, where a projection dowser failed an hour before our final dress. I did not fix it. I watched, fascinated, as the house technicians climbed a ladder with our video engineer, removed the broken part, and fabricated a smaller paddle out of black wrap to take its place. When it worked, the whole room rejoiced, and those Croatian technicians were the stars of the week. I had never met them before that load-in. But the conditions for that rescue—the trust, the shared stake in the outcome, the assumption that we were all in the same boat—were built in the ordinary days beforehand, in how we spoke to one another over dinner and during the slow stretches of tech.

This is the part business books about crisis tend to miss. The decisive resource in an emergency is rarely a procedure. It is the quality of the relationships you established when nothing was on fire. Micromanage your people, exclude them from the larger goals, and they will withdraw exactly when you need their collective minds and hearts the most. Treat them as full collaborators, and they will hand you solutions you could never have engineered alone.

What the curtain teaches

I less frequently call shows for a living these days, but I have come to think that the booth was the best classroom I will ever have. It taught me that fear, uncertainty, and a lack of confidence are the great crushers of resolve, and that the way to defang a feeling is to name it and then act—anger, embarrassment, worry, fear, relief, and yes, fear again, all of it just water passing through. It taught me that catastrophes are the greatest teachers of all, provided you are willing to be humiliated by them first. And it taught me that the show, against all odds, goes on—not because disasters spare us, but because preparation, composure, candor, and a well-built company are usually enough to carry a thing across the finish line, even when half of it is held together with black wrap and nerve.

Final Thought

I have had my heart in my mouth more times than I can count, and I have learned to keep working anyway. That is the whole of what I know about managing a disaster: prepare so thoroughly that most never arrive, stay calm enough to think when one does, tell the truth about what is broken, and trust the people standing next to you in the dark. A catastrophe does not measure whether you are good at your job. It measures only whether you were ready to be humiliated, to improvise, and to begin again—because the curtain rises regardless, and the work of a lifetime is simply making yourself ready to meet it.

Sources

1. stage manager — https://www.berklee.edu/careers/roles/stage-manager
2. Pasadena Playhouse — https://www.pasadenaplayhouse.org/about/
3. Camping with Henry and Tom — https://www.concordtheatricals.com/p/8785/camping-with-henry-and-tom
4. Henry Ford — https://www.britannica.com/money/Henry-Ford
5. Warren Harding — https://www.britannica.com/biography/Warren-G-Harding
6. Thomas Edison — https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Edison
7. god mic — https://www.tdf.org/on-stage/tdf-stages/watch-what-is-a-god-mic-what-is-subtext/
8. contagious — https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-me-in-we/202003/dynamics-of-emotional-contagion
9. crisis management — https://www.everbridge.com/blog/what-is-crisis-management/
10. forestalled — https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/forestalled
11. understudies — https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/understudy
12. Dubrovnik — https://www.britannica.com/place/Dubrovnik
13. dowser — https://www.citytheatrical.com/products/electronics/other-electronic/projector-dowser
14. Micromanage — https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/micromanage
15. full collaborators — https://dictionary.apa.org/employee-engagement

resolve — https://dictionary.apa.org/resilience