5 things a run asks of stage and broadway actors

A play is made twice. Once in a rehearsal room over several weeks, where it is taken apart and put back together by people who will argue about every line. Then again every night, in front of people who never saw the first version and never will.

This page is about the second making: what a stage run asks of stage and Broadway actors, from the rehearsal room to the weekly wage. Five things, in order — the rehearsal period, the instrument, the eight-show week, where authority sits after opening, and the money. Broadway, the commercial end of the stage, runs the same five under a union contract.

What to take away

1. What a rehearsal period is made of

The phases arrive in a predictable order, and each one wants something different from you.

The table. The company reads the play sitting down, usually for days. The point is to agree what the play is about before anyone stands up. Questions are welcome here and resented later.

Blocking. Positions, entrances, crosses and exits are set and written into the stage manager's book. It feels mechanical and it is. Your job is to write it down and reproduce it, because the lighting will be designed around where you said you would stand.

Working the scenes. The long middle. Sections are run, stopped, discussed and run again. This is where the acting choices get made, and where a director's notes are most specific.

Run-throughs. The play is done end to end, badly at first. The purpose is to find out where the energy sags and how long the thing actually is.

Technical rehearsals. Days of standing on a mark while a lighting cue is adjusted by a fraction. Cue to cue, then full runs with sound and set. The acting is not the point and nobody wants it. Patience is the skill being tested.

Dress and previews. Costumes, then an audience. Previews are performances that are still being changed. A scene you played one way on Tuesday may be cut on Wednesday. Opening night is the point at which the production is frozen and the director leaves.

2. The instrument is the body

Nothing is repaired in an edit. If your voice does not reach the last row, it did not reach it. If your energy drops in act two, the audience watched it drop.

Two things sit at the center of the job that screen work can treat as optional. The first is the voice.

Sustain a level that fills a room, or carries through a microphone that still needs supported sound behind it, for two or three hours, then do it again tomorrow. Warm-ups, rest between shows, and knowing when to mark a rehearsal instead of giving it full voice are not indulgences. They are how a run survives.

The second is that the audience is a live variable. A laugh comes or it does not, and if it comes you hold for it, and the length of that hold changes the rhythm of the next line.

A quiet house and a loud one get a different show whether you intend it or not. Learning to feel the room without playing to it is a large part of what separates experienced stage performers from screen performers doing their first play.

3. Eight times a week

The hard part is not the opening. It is the two hundredth performance.

After opening, the director is gone, and the stage manager maintains the show. That show must match the rehearsed version night after night, and the stage manager gives notes when it drifts.

Drift is natural: a laugh gets milked a little longer, a pause grows, or an improvement occurs to you. Each change seems harmless alone, but over a run they alter the play, and the stage manager's job is to stop that.

Matinee days, illness, a cover going on in another role, a replacement joining mid-run: all of these change what is around you while your own performance is expected to stay put. The screen performer's problem of continuity across shooting days, set out on the page about how a film performance is assembled, has an equivalent here, stretched across months, and on Broadway stretched across an open-ended run.

4. Where the authority sits

Knowing which of these to go to saves everybody time and marks you as someone who has done this before.

5. The money, briefly

A stage contract pays a weekly wage from the producing company for the length of your engagement. The performers who do that work are the ones in our stage and Broadway actors listing.

Minimums for union productions in the United States are set and published by Actors' Equity Association, the union that represents stage actors and stage managers. The rate depends on the contract and the theatre: a Broadway production plays under the union's production contract, not the small-theatre agreements, and the union publishes the current minimum weekly rates in its own agreements. Look there rather than at what someone told you.

Beyond that the model is the one that holds everywhere in this business: the money comes from the job to you, and representation is paid from it afterwards. A fee to audition, a fee to be "presented to industry", or a fee to join a list of available performers is a separate transaction and not this one.

Common questions

Is stage acting just bigger than screen acting?

Not bigger, carried differently. Voice and body do work on stage that the camera's proximity does on screen. Moving between them is an adjustment made on purpose, and people who assume it happens naturally tend to be too small on stage and too large on camera.

What actually changes during previews?

Anything. Cuts, reordered scenes, a new ending to an act, blocking that stops working once a set is real. Treat every preview as a rehearsal with witnesses.

What if my voice goes during a run?

Tell the stage manager before the half, not after. Companies have a procedure for exactly this, and the whole point of an understudy is that somebody has already rehearsed your part. Pushing through on a damaged voice is the one choice that makes it worse. For anything beyond a tired voice, see a clinician rather than a forum.

Do I need to sing and dance?

Only for work that asks for it. A play and a musical are different hiring markets with different audition notices. The notice tells you which room you are walking into; read it before you prepare.